Herein, we come to the end of our discussion of the semantics of σκύβαλον and how it relates to English taboo words.
Ancient Greek
The following is an essay encompassing the analysis and data that we will be presenting in our paper on ἐκ and ἀπό at the Greek Prepositions Workshop at Tyndale house in Cambridge this coming Friday, June 30th. It is a compilation of the short pieces that we have posted over the past week.
We find a strong “experiential correlation” (Tyler and Evans 2003, 32) between actions and the consequences that result from those actions (i.e. cause and effect): Causes are understood to precede their consequences. If one event immediately precedes another, it is only natural to conceive of the former as the cause and the latter as the effect.
Temporal constructions shift the landmark and the trajector source expressions out of the physical plane and reconceptualize them as events. The trajector is an event conceived as moving away from the landmark viewed as a temporal reference point. Fundamental to temporal expressions with ἐκ and ἀπό are distance and separation, which are then applied to the temporal plane.
Partitive constructions with ἐκ and ἀπό fall into two general types: entity partitives and set partitives.
There is a lot of significant work on Ancient Greek that came out in the 19th century. Some of it was by native Greek speakers. The challenge is that during that period, the politics of language in Greece was a source of constant debate and argument. Many times the ancient language was used as a meant to prop up one’s understanding the modern one. I picked up this book last year and only recently started reading it. It has been an extremely helpful book and has given insight into the various forces that can have an effect on grammar writing, even when you are seeking to be as objective as possible.
And it’s a stern reminder: Even academic work is not done in a vacuum and it cannot escape the political climate in which it is produced.
Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766-1976 by Peter Mackridge
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Koine-Greek 