Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word PDF
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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 specification in order to ensure its continuing availability Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-924506-1 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
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