Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word

525 Pages·2002·2.585 MB·

by  J.N. Adams, Mark Janse, Simon Swain

Title Pages
Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language
Contact and the Written Text
J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain
Print publication date: 2002
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245062
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245062.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Bilingualism in Ancient Society (p.ii)
(p.iii) Bilingualism in Ancient Society
(p.iv) This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard
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Title Pages
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Page 2 of 2
Acknowledgements
Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language
Contact and the Written Text
J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain
Print publication date: 2002
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245062
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245062.001.0001
(p.v) Acknowledgements
IT is a pleasure to acknowledge the help of John Penney, Geoff Horrocks,
Nicholas Sims-Williams, Hilary O’Shea, John Waś, and the staff of the Press, and
especially the great generosity of the University of Reading.
J. N. A.
M. J.
S. C. R. S. (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Notes on Contributors
Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language
Contact and the Written Text
J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain
Print publication date: 2002
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245062
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245062.001.0001
(p.ix) Notes on Contributors
JAMES ADAMS is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His
extensive publications on Latin and its history include The Latin Sexual
Vocabulary (1982), Pelagonius and Latin Veterinary Terminology in the Roman
Empire (1995), and Bilingualism and the Latin Language (forthcoming, 2002).
FRÉDÉRIQUE BIVILLE is Professor of Latin Linguistics at the Université Lumiér
—Lyon 2. She researches on all aspects of Latin and her books include Les
Emprunts du latin au grec (2 vols.; 1990–5).
CLAUDE BRIXHE is Emeritus Professor at the University of Nancy 2. He is well
known for his work on ancient Greek, and his books include Essai sur le grec
anatolien au début de notre ère (2nd edn. 1987) and Phonétique et phonologie
du grec ancien, vol. i (1996).
PHILIP BURTON is Senior Research Fellow in Theology at the University of
Birmingham and Lecturer in Greek and Humanity at the University of St
Andrews, His research interests centre on Greek and Latin linguistics, Latin
Christianity, and Christian Latinity. He has recently published The Old Latin
Gospels (2000) and a translation of the Confessions of Augustine (2001).
PENELOPE FEWSTER trained as a Roman historian and papyrologist at
Cambridge and was formerly lecturer in ancient history at Keele. She is
currently preparing a book on religion in Roman Egypt.
PIERRE FLOBERT is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris-Sor-bonne. He
has published widely on the history of the Latin language in late antique and
medieval France, and his books include Les Verbes déponents latins des origincs
à Charlemagne (1975), La Vie ancienne de Saint Samson de Dol (1997), and an
edition of Le Grand Gaffiot: Dictionnaire latin—français (2000).
Page 1 of 3
Notes on Contributors
MARK JANSE is the editor of Bibliographie linguistique, The Hague, Associate
Professor of Greek and General Linguistics at the University of Ghent, and a
Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. He has published extensively
on all aspects and ages of the Greek language, and his recent publications
include edited volumes 011 Productivity and Creativity: Studies in General and
Descriptive Linguistics in Honor of E. M. Uhlenbeck (1998), Modern Greek
Dialects and Linguistic Theory (2001), (p.x) and Language Death and Language
Maintenance: Theoretical, Historical and Descriptive Approaches (2002).
DAVID LANGSLOW is Professor of Classics at the University of Manchester and
Emeritus Fellow of Wolf son College, Oxford. His recent publications centre on
technical, especially medical, Latin, and include Medical Latin in the Roman
Empire (2000).
MARTTI LEIWO is a lecturer in the Department of Classics, University of
Helsinki. He is currently a Senior Researcher in the Finnish Academy’s project
on ‘Interactivity between the Greek and Roman World’. His many publications
include Neapolitana: Language and Population in Graeco-Roman Naples (1994).
ZEEV RUBIN is Professor of Ancient History at Tel Aviv University. His current
interests focus on Sasanid Iran and relations between the Sasanians and the
later Roman Empire. Recent publications include major studies of Khusro
Anushirwan in Averil Cameron (ed.), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Sear East,
iii (1995), and of the Sasanid monarchy in CAH xiv (2000).
IAN RUTHERFORD is Professor of Greek at the Department of Classics,
University of Reading. He has published widely in the areas of literary
papyrology and Greek religion, and is the author of Canons of Style in the
Antonine Age (1998) and Pindar’s Paeans (2000).
SIMON SWAIN is Professor of Classics at the University of Warwick. His
publications on the Greek culture of the Roman Empire include Hellenism and
Empire (1996) and Dio Chrysostom (2000).
DAVID TAYLOR is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theology, University of
Birmingham. His major research interests are Syriac and Aramaic, the late
antique Near East, eastern patristics, and the eastern Church, Recent books
include The Syriac Versions of the De Spiritu Sancto by Basil of Caesarea (1999)
and an edited volume of Studies in the Early Text of the Gospels and Acts (1999).
KEES VERSTEEGH is Professor of Arabic and Islam at the University of
Nijmegen. His numerous publications include Arabic Grammar and Qur’anic
Exegesis in Early Islam (1993), The Arabic Language (1997), and The Arabic
Linguistic ‘Tradition (1997).
Page 2 of 3
Introduction
Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language
Contact and the Written Text
J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain
Print publication date: 2002
Print ISBN-13: 9780199245062
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2010
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245062.001.0001
Introduction
J. N. ADAMS
SIMON SWAIN
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199245062.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
Language contact intruded into virtually every aspect of life in ancient societies,
including high literature, law, medicine, magic, religion, provincial
administration, army, and trade. This book focuses on sociolinguistic issues, such
as the nature and motivation of code-switching. The languages which come up in
this volume are numerous. Apart from Greek and Latin, there are Lycian,
Phrygian, Gothic, Hebrew, Turkish, Old Persian, Middle Persian, Parthian,
Arabic, Gaulish, Etrusean, Venetic, Middle English. Sumerian Eme-sal, Demotic
and Coptic in Egypt, and Aramaic and its dialects, including Palmyrene and
Syriac. This book examines the particular problems posed by the assessment of
written texts as specimens of bilingual performance. Another important theme
recurring in this volume is the relationship between language and cultural/
political systems.
Keywords:   language contact, ancient societies, sociolinguistics, Greek, Latin, politics, culture, code-
switching
Page 1 of 23
Introduction
IN recent years there have appeared several collections of essays dealing with
aspects of bilingualism in the ancient world,1 as well as numerous papers,2 and
several specialist books.3 Work on a variety of apparently unrelated subjects is
also beginning to show an awareness of the ramifications of bilingualism,4 The
increasing interest among classicists in the subject is hardly surprising, given
the explosion of work on bilingualism in general since the early 1980s. This book
springs from a conference held at the University of Reading in 1998, The
participants were a group of scholars with diverse interests and different
approaches to bilingualism, and included historians and students of literature as
well as philologists. They were given no brief other than to deal with the
material they knew best under the general heading of ‘bilingualism’. The
assumption of the organizers was that a miscellaneous group of papers by
experts in a variety of languages would be bound to throw up an interesting
diversity of material from which recurrent themes might readily be extracted.
The evidence relating to bilingualism in antiquity is immense, and the subject is
underexploited. Language contact intruded into virtually every aspect of ancient
life: e.g. high literature, the law, medicine, magic, religion, provincial
administration, the army, and (p.2) trade. An obvious question which students
of antiquity have tended to ask is of the type, ‘Who spoke what where at a
particular period?’ Sociolinguists by contrast examine the day-to-day language
use and language choice of bilinguals with in theory infinitely variable degrees
of competence in two or more languages. In no sense is the present work
intended as a survey of the languages and the extent of bilingualism across the
Mediterranean world. Some discussion of the question described above as
‘obvious’ is to be found in this volume (see e.g. Brixhe, Taylor), but on the whole
it would be more accurate to say that the focus is rather on sociolinguistic
issues. Language choice, for example, is often bound up with the identity which
a person is seeking to project on a particular occasion, and ‘identity’ will come
up from time to time (see e.g. Adams, Swain, Taylor), Another issue in
sociolinguistics today concerns the nature and motivation of code-switching,5
which may be defined for our purposes as the practice of using two or more
languages in the same utterance. It is worthwhile to quote the definition of code-
switching adopted by Milroy and Muysken, as a means of highlighting a central
concern of this volume: code-switching, they say, is ‘the alternative use by
bilinguals of two or more languages in the same conversation’.6 Whereas
linguists dealing with bilingualism in the modern world almost invariably devote
their attention to speech,7 students of antiquity have only written texts (some of
them of high formality) to go on, and the issues raised by a written text which is
either explicitly or implicitly bilingual8 may be rather different from those raised
by informal language use in everyday conversation. Writing is by its very nature
more contrived than informal speech, and a good deal of thought may lie behind
the production of the text. Is it legitimate, for example, to treat code-switching
in a text as comparable to code-switching in a conversation?
Page 2 of 23
Introduction
The languages which come up in this volume are numerous. Apart from Greek
and Latin, there are Lycian, Phrygian, Gothic, (p.3) Hebrew, Turkish, Old
Persian, Middle Persian, Parthian, Arabic, Gaulish, Etruscan, Venetic, Middle
English, Sumerian Eme-sal, Demotic and Coptic in Egypt, and Aramaic and its
dialects, including Palmyrene and Syriac. No attempt has been made to achieve
total coverage of the ancient world, which would be a formidabletask, but we
have sought to look beyond Greek and Latin in contact with each other.
1. Bilingualism and Written Texts vs. Bilingualism in Speech
In what follows we take up some of the themes which recur in the volume. First
and foremost is the issue referred to above, namely the particular problems
posed by the assessment of written texts as specimens of bilingual performance.
A bilingual text, or a text with a bilingual background of some sort (e.g. a
translation), cannot necessarily be taken at face value as an indication of the
writer’s bilingual competence or of the state of one or both of the languages in
contact. To put it another way, a mixed-language text (or text with interference)
cannot be assessed purely in linguistic terms. As Taylor remarks, ‘Non-linguistic
issues, such as political, social, cultural, and religious factors, must not be
forgotten’ (below, pp. 299–300). This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in
the hybrid, heavily Graecized variety of Syriac which turns up in the sixth to
eighth centuries in translations of Greek texts. This hybrid does not reflect a
state of the (Syriac) language at the time, but is to be seen as a translation
technique ‘motivated not by a sense of cultural inferiority but by the need to
produce authoritative texts in Syriac that could be relied upon when engaged in
debate. It is thus no great surprise that the first Syriac translations to be
produced in this way are biblical and theological writings, and secondly
philosophical texts. In all of these cases, particularly in an era of fierce
christological controversy, ‘it was essential for the Syrians… that they had
access to texts which would accurately reflect the Greek originals being
employed by their opponents’ (Taylor, below, p. 330; our italics). The
interference in the translation is thus deliberate, adopted as a strategy for
evoking the original text lying behind the translation. Here is a striking
difference between bilingual interference as it appears in a written text and that
which might be (p.4) heard in speech. Interference in speech (and indeed often
that in writing as well) is usually not intentional (reflecting as it does the
dominant influence of the speaker’s first language (L ) on his L ). If the speaker
1 2
is conscious of it, he may be all too aware that his competence in L is
2
insufficient to allow him to find the idioms or morphology appropriate to that
language. It is virtually inconceivable that a fluent bilingual speaker would
deliberately admit interference in one of his languages from the other, except
under very special circumstances, as for example if he were engaging in mimicry
or attempting to be funny.
Page 3 of 23
Introduction
It emerges from the volume that the type of translation with deliberate
interference is not uncommon in written texts. Langslow indeed gives the
phenomenon a name, ‘alloglottography’, a coinage of Gershevitch, which is
defined thus: ‘the use of one language (call it L ) to represent an utterance in
1
another language (L ), in the Old Persian case in such a way that the original
2
utterance in L can be accurately and unambiguously recovered from the
2
document in L ’ (below, p. 44). Burton remarks that ‘Semantic and syntactic
1
extension (especially the former) is particularly likely to occur in biblical
translations, as translators are under special obligation to reproduce as much as
they can of the structures of the original in the target language’ (below, p. 410).
He is alluding to the same translation techniques as those discussed by Taylor.
Rutherford for his part suggests that correspondences of word order and
filiation between the two versions of Greek-Lycian bilingual texts may sometimes
be due to a conscious effort to maintain symmetry between the versions, even if
that meant departing from syntactic or ordering norms in one of them. This
symmetry is much the same phenomenon as alloglottography: a transparent
connection is sought between the versions. Thus in the Greek–Lycian epitaph TL
117 the elements come in exactly the same order in the two versions, with for
example two cases of υἱóς corresponding exactly in placement to that of tideimi.
The Xanthos trilingual begins with an ἐπεí clause in the Greek, whereas in most
decrees in Greek ‘specifications of time are expresed with a genitive absolute’.
This clause corresponds to an êke clause in the Lycian, and the structure of the
two clauses is otherwise the same:
Page 4 of 23
Introduction
êke: Trm˜misñ : χssaθrapazate : Pigesere : Katamlah : tideimi
ἐπεì Λνκíας ξαδράπης ἐγένετο ∏ιξώδαρος ‘Eκατóμνω ὑóς
Page 5 of 23