Gary's "best of" blog posts, appearing at Soho Press

A lot's been happening in the last few weeks.  The Marathon Conspiracy released, it's received a pile of very happy reviews, and I've returned from a trip to the US.

While in the US I was treated to the wonderful hospitality of my publisher, Soho Press.  In return I gave them some Vegemite.  This may seem a cruel exchange.

Here is me in the background, with Abby Koski, who is Publicist Extraordinaire at Soho, and Paul Oliver, Director of Marketing.

Abby snaffled the Vegemite afterwards, and she's still talking to me, so either she hasn't eaten it yet, or she actually likes the stuff.

As it happens, Soho runs their own, very active blog, which is rather unusual for a publisher.  It's not just book promotion; they run a series on how to write a publishable book (from Tim Hallinan) and all sorts of interesting stuff about publishing and language, such as Rachel Kowel's piece on translation.

So we agreed to put a "best of" collection from my blog on Soho's site.  I have 500+ blog posts written, I was amazed to discover when I checked.  Some of them have proven popular, often the ones I least expected.

Soho decided to kick it off with my article on the P.I.E family of languages.

The Strange Case of the Unlaconic Laconians

Spartans didn't call themselves Spartans.  Their own name for their nation was Lacedaemon.  (Or Lakedaimon, spelling being variant in these matters.)  A Spartan was a Lacedaemonian.  There were also the short forms Laconia and Laconian.  That's why Spartan shields had the letter lambda (Λ) painted on them.

I prefer to write Spartan rather than Lacedaemonian in my books, and I'm pretty sure you prefer to read Spartan.  But there's an interesting consequence of them being Laconian.

The Laconians had a reputaion for being men of few words.  That's the origin of our word laconic.  When we call someone laconic today, we're saying that they're as short-spoken as a Spartan.

The most famous laconic statement of all occurred at the Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans held for 3 days against an army of 100,000.  (No, I'm not exaggerating the Persian side.)  The Spartans were warned that the enemy was so numerous that their arrows would blot out the sun, to which one soldier named Dienekes replied this was good, because, "Then we will fight in the shade."

A similar situation arose when Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander) sent a message to Sparta suggesting they submit to him, because, "If I win a war against you, I will enslave you all."  Sparta sent back a single word reply:  If  

Philip decided to give Sparta a miss.

The Spartan characters who appear in Sacred Games are not laconic.  There are several reasons for this, first being that a book in which half the characters speak in mono-syllables is not exactly a positive.

The second reason is that laconic Laconians must be the exception if they wanted to run any form of society, and then there's the natural variation of personality.  Not all Italians gesticulate when they speak!

Surviving examples of laconic speech aren't everyday speech; they're all pithy statements designed to hammer home a point.    And that, I suspect, is the origin of the laconic Laconian: when they wanted to make a point clearly known, it was just a cultural thing that they did it with a short, powerful statement.

I very much doubt they were as dour as the laconic reputation suggests for this reason too:  that among the Greeks they were known as "crickets" as a nickname, because the Spartans were always ready for a song and a community dance.  That doesn't say laconic to me.

Gary's word of the day is: sudoriparous

While flipping through the dictionary on an unrelated quest, I came across this thing of beauty:

sudoriparous  secreting sweat; pertaining to the secretion of sweat or to the sweat glands

Needless to say, this is going into my next book.

"His nine millimetre Browning he kept in a holster beneath his sudoriparous armpit."


The floor is now open for the most gratuitous use of sudoriparous.

The grammar thug

Adverbs considered harmful

There was a minor local news item recently which quoted a complaint made to the Australian advertisement review board.  The actual complaint was very silly, but the language used bears a look:

"This advertisement is categorically incontrovertibly irrefutably unambiguously unequivocally indisputably indubitably undeniably unassailably and impregnably in breach. of 2(a) and (c) of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI) code."

This sentence scores points for vocabulary — perhaps I should say it certainly scores points — but I can't help feeling it tells us more about the person doing the whining than anything about the complaint.  Which is the problem with adverbs.  Though having said that I'm probably at the high end of adverb rates among published authors.

I'm still scratching my head about the impregnably.  Does this mean the rules breach can't be taken?  Or can't be made pregnant?

Semitic languages

The Indo-European family of languages stretched from India to Europe, as is obvious from the name.  Everything from Sanskrit to Latin, Persian, Greek, German, and their descendants are all closely related.

There was one instrusion of non-Indo-European into this vast geographical expanse, and that was the Semitic family of languages.  Today the best known Semitic languages are Arabic and Hebrew.  Back in the days of Nicolaos and Diotima, by far the most important Semitic language was Phoenician.  Beginning with The Ionia Sanction, Nico will start to hear Phoenician being spoken about the place as the hangs out around sea ports.  The Phoenicians were massively successful sea traders.

The Phoenician language had an immense influence on world history, not because of anything about the language per se, but because at some point, some Phoenician genius decided it would be cool to write down his language, so he came up with this alphabet:

  alph
  bet
  gaml
  delt
  he
  wau
  zai
  het
  tet
  yod
  kaf
  lamd
  mem
  nun
  semk
  ain
  pe
  sade
  qof
  rosh
  shin
  tau


Look familiar?

There's unicode support for Phoenician, believe it or not, but not even recent browsers support the extension so I was stuck and had to insert the letters as images from wikipedia.

As with all things involving the word Semitic, there's a lot of argument and politics involved, but it's apparent there must have been a Proto-Semitic language from which the others descended, just as there was a Proto-Indo-European language.  Proto-Semitic probably began in Africa, because Semitic is part of a much larger family called Afroasiatic.  The cognates (similar words) between the Afroasiatic languages are very much looser than the close connections between Indo-European languages, but still good enough to show family groups.  Semitic is the only part of the family found outside Africa.  The oldest recorded Semitic language, as far as I'm aware, is the Akkadian that was written in cuneiform on clay tablets.  The cuneiform was borrowed from Sumerian, which definitely was not Semitic (this is sort of like the LinearA/Linear B situation).  The closest living relative of Phoenician is Hebrew.  Arabic derived from a southern variant of the same family.

You too can decipher ancient texts

Thanks to The History Blog for pointing out a fascinating research project in which YOU get to decipher for-real ancient mysterious texts.  The Oxyrynchus Papyri were discovered by a couple of archaeologists, over a hundred years ago, in an ancient garbage tip.  The problem is, they're in a zillion tiny pieces.  And of course fragment shapes don't match precisely because papyrus has worn away and they don't necessarily have all the bits.  They need to identify the letters on all the fragments, so a computer can then speedily push bits back and forth until everything forms valid ancient Greek words.

So now Oxford University's enlisted the help of some astrophysicists, who are very good at sticking lots of tiny pictures together, to build a site where anyone can help them by identifying the letters on the fragments.  They need our help because computers are not conspicuously good at identifying handwritten ancient Greek.  People however are good at that sort of thing, even if they don't know a word of the language.

It's known for sure that there are some major lost works hidden in those fragments.  They've already pulled out parts of a lost play by Euripides.  

So here you go...see what you can discover at AncientLives.org

But if you come across any fragments that say Ἀτλαντὶς, just pass over them quietly, okay?

Proto-Indo-European

Children tend to look like their parents, and the same is true of languages.  Everyone knows, for example, that French, Italian and Spanish look a lot like Latin.

What is less well appreciated is that you can follow this logic back in time, for a long, long way.  Linguists have known for more than 200 years that there's a lot of similarity between Latin, Greek, German, and surprisingly...Sanskrit.  Languages geographically in-between, such as Farsi, are also related.  You can see it not only in similarity of words, but also grammar.

Words that are essentially the same between languages are called cognate.  The Deus of a Latin prayer is cognate with the Zeus of Greek.  Father in English, Vater in German, pater in Latin, patēr in Greek, pitar in Sanskrit are all the same word.  They're cognate.

Together they form a mega-family of languages that stretch from India to Europe, and therefore are known as the Indo-European family.

You can build an ancestral family tree for Indo-European by looking at how much each language has in common with the others, and making the reasonable assumption that anything two languages have in common must originate from their common ancestor.  Inevitably this must take you back to a single original ancestor, which is called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.

Here's a family tree, which I've linked to from the work of Jack Lynch at Rutgers:

This diagram is the best I've yet scene, because it cuts out the hundred or so extra, highly obscure, and utterly dead languages in the family.  You probably don't care about Early Proto-Tocharian.

People have reconstructed PIE by taking that which is common across the entirely family, and tracing the evolution of sounds and grammar backwards to take an educated guess at the original language.

PIE is thought to have originated somewhere in southern Russia or the Caucasus, probably in about 4,000BC, give or take a millennium.  The most popular theory is that the original speakers were a culture called the Kurgans.  Whoever the original speakers were, they migrated in waves across Europe and down through Asia.

It interests me that almost everywhere it went, PIE and its children dominated.  The natural assumption is conquest did the job--consider for example how Spanish and Portuguese came to be the standards in South America--but even in places where the arrival was peaceful, people mostly adopted the PIE structure.  The biggest failure probably is that language Tocharian I mentioned before.  It was an intrusion into China, but withered in the face of Chinese, the world's oldest known extant language.

There seems to be something about PIE that sits well with the human brain.  It appears to be a very good language for thinking about mathematics and physics.  If you exclude all the progress made by PIE speakers, which means everything achieved by Greek, Germanic, English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian speakers, then there's not a lot left.  That might perhaps be an issue of cultural domination rather than linguistic advantage, but even so it's remarkable.

PIE was highly inflected, and that might be part of its strength.  You can say an awful lot in a few words.  Linguists originally thought PIE must have been somewhat like Sanskrit, because grammatically it's one of the simpler members of the family, but they now know it's the other way round.  Sanskrit is one of the most advanced members because it's simpler.  PIE was grammatically complex.

The earliest recorded PIE language is in fact the proto-Greek of Linear B, decoded by Michael Ventris.

We can tell a lot about their life from the language.  For example, PIE has a word for horse.  But there's no word for wheel.  (How do we know that?  Because every PIE language has a cognate for the Latin equus, but the word for wheel is different everywhere.)

Several people have had a go at writing something in PIE.  The script must obviously be modern since this is long before writing was invented, but it's fascinating to look at anyway.  The most famous thing written in PIE is Schleicher's Fable.  It's been updated several times since he wrote it in 1868(!), and every time someone updates they go out of their way to make the script more confusing with more silly accents, so here's the original, in PIE and then in English:

Avis akvāsas ka

Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram ā bhugat.

The Sheep and the Horses

A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: "My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses". The horses said: "Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool". Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

A dictionary of Assyrian

Assyrian is a dead language. It was last spoken about 2,000 years ago, and you can't get much deader than that. But over the last ninety years (!) a dedicated group of scholars have been studying inscriptions and compiling the world's first ever dictionary of Assyrian. And now, at last, the dictionary has been finished.

You might not know a lot about the Assyrian family of languages, but you've probably seen a lot of it, because Assyrian is one of the major languages you're reading when you see cuneiform on a clay tablet. (Cuneiform was a remarkably successful writing system and quite a few languages were written in it.)

The title of the dictionary!

I've had recourse to the dictionary only once, when I was checking on the origin of apples. If Assyrian had a word for apple, then I knew I was safe placing them in Ionia in classical times.

Here, on the BBC, is Dr Irving Finkel giving his best shot at what Assyrian sounded like.

And here's the world's only dictionary of Assyrian!

Pronouncing Ancient Greek

It's much easier to pronounce Ancient Greek words than it looks at first. The funny alphabet is a bit off-putting, but really, once you've got the idea, it's straightforward.

The exact soundings as you would have heard them on the streets of Classical Athens have been lost. Greek is a living language which evolved! There are different theories about the ancient pronounciation and (surprise!) they don't entirely agree with each other. Fortunately, none of us are likely to fall through a time vortex into the ancient past, so if we stuff it up, no one who matters will ever know.

There were a zillion different dialects of Ancient Greek. If you lived back then, you could probably have spotted someone's city the moment they opened their mouths. We're going to ignore all the dialects but one: Attic -- the dialect of Athens. Attic Greek is the language of Pericles and Socrates and Nicolaos and Diotima and Plato and Euripides and Sophocles.

Attic Greek became the trading language of the Mediterranean. As it spread, it evolved rapidly, and became known as koine. The koine dialect is hugely important to this day, because it just happens to be the language in which the Bible was written. It's also the ancestor of Modern Greek.

The sound variations between dialects are real, but not big enough to worry someone who only wants to read Ancient Greek words in a book. So I'll ignore them all and give you a single sound system which works.

My Ancient Greek is very limited, by the way, and there are people reading this blog who are practically fluent. If you are one of those clever people I sincerely hope you'll correct any errors in comments. I'd like to learn something too! So with that caveat, here goes...

Α, α	a	father	alpha
Β, β	b	bob	beta
Γ, γ	g	got	gamma
Δ, δ	d	dad	delta
Ε, ε	e	get	epsilon
Ζ, ζ	z	adze	zeta
Η, η	ê	fête	eta
Θ, θ	th	thoth	theta
Ι, ι	i	hit or ski (take your choice)	iota
Κ, κ	k	kit kat	kappa
Λ, λ	l	let	lambda
Μ, μ	m	met	mu
Ν, ν	n	net	nu
Ξ, ξ	x	box	xi
Ο, ο	o	okay	omikron
Π, π	p	pop	pi
Ρ, ρ	r	rat	rho
Σ, σ, ς	s	sat	sigma
Τ, τ	t	sat	tau
Υ, υ	y	oops!	upsilon
Φ, φ	ph	phone	phi
Χ, χ	ch	khaki	chi
Ψ, ψ	ps	pssst!	psi
Ω, ω	ô	note or saw (take your choice)	omega

There were also these diphthongs (vowels which combined to form a single sound):

ai as in aisle
ei as in fate
oi as in oil (very important to me because it's used for plurals)
ay as in cow (recall the y transliteration makes an oo sound)
ey as in feud
oy as in soup

Notice there are two letters for the different o sounds, where we have one to handle both.

Also there are effectively three letters for our e & i sounds.

The ch of Greek is much like the ch of German. Which means try to say a k while clearing your throat. No sane English speaker wants to do this. You can get away with a kh.

The z, too, is like a German z, which is a tz or a dz sound. Take your pick.

There is no j sound at all. This means Janet is safe from me making her a character.

Loretta asked in the comments of a previous post how to pronounce Phaedo (the title of a book by Plato). That's a fantastic question, because it opens up a small can of worms. An awful lot of Greek stuff comes to us via the Romans. The Romans spoke Latin, obviously, but all educated Romans spoke Greek too. Koine, in fact. But they mangled Greek names just like the Greeks mangled Persian names. And many Greek texts come to us via Latin translations. Here is the name of Plato's book Phaedo, in Greek:

Φαίδων

Try your newly acquired transliteration skills on this word. Notice anything odd?

That's right, the Romans dropped the final n. The "correct" transliteration is Phaidon, and since the ai is a diphthong as per above, the "correct" pronounciation is

FIDE - OWN

The reality is, though, when you're reading a book you really should pronounce the funny words however you feel like. It's not like the historical Phaidon is going to sue you for mispronouncing his name, and it's far more important that you're comfortable. I put a character list at the start of my first book, in which I gave suggested pronounciations for the characters. I didn't even bother looking at my own transliteration chart when I wrote it; I just put in what I thought would be easiest for modern readers to say.

But! If you're looking for something that sounds "accurate". This chart will do the job.