ancient languages Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Jordan Peterson Does Not Understand Ancient Languages

I have written before on this blog about Jordan B. Peterson, a professor emeritus of psychology from the University of Toronto who rose to fame in 2016 when he publicly spoke out in opposition to an act passed by the Parliament of Canada to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression.” Over the past seven years since then, he has attracted an enormous number of devoted followers as a self-help author and YouTube personality, appealing primarily to an audience of young, mostly white, straight, cisgender men from middle-class backgrounds who hold conservative political opinions. Peterson has used the platform he has built to publicly promote misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and occasionally even white supremacist ideas.

In a blog post I wrote back in April 2021, I discuss in detail how Peterson routinely tries to use ancient myths and the Bible to support his various noxious viewpoints, despite the fact that he has absolutely no understanding of the academic study of these subjects and his interpretations of them display a profound ignorance of the historical and cultural contexts from which they originate and how ancient audiences understood them. I would recommend that readers who have not already read that post from two years ago go back and read it before continuing with this one, since this post is something of an addendum to that one.

In this post, I want to discuss the troubling way in which Peterson often tries to support his positions by making wildly unsupported claims about ancient languages, mainly Hebrew and Ancient Greek, despite the fact that he has never studied either of these languages in his life and he does not know them or any real information about them.

What Is the Correct Plural Form of ‘Octopus’?

It is something of a platitude among native speakers of English to say that our language is a motley one. It is a West Germanic language that has taken in an enormous amount of vocabulary from non-Germanic languages, especially French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. These other languages have systems for the pluralization of nouns that differ from the predominant system in English and, in some cases, users of English have favored pluralizing nouns derived from other languages according to the morphological rules of the word’s language of origin. As a result of this and other factors, pluralizing nouns in English is sometimes a controversial subject.

One of the most controversial of all English nouns to pluralize is octopus, which ultimately derives from the Greek word ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), which is a compound of the Greek word ὀκτώ (oktṓ), meaning “eight,” and the noun πούς (poús), meaning “foot” or “leg.” English-speakers have tried to pluralize this noun in various ways, with the most popular plural forms being octopuses and octopi. But which plural for this word is the most pedantically correct? In this post, I will delve into the wonderful and exciting world of etymology to answer this question.

Does Classical Studies Really Make People Neurotic and Unhappy?

In March 2023, the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a German economics research institute, released a discussion paper (i.e., a preliminary paper that is released for the purpose of discussion without being formally published) written in English by a group of four Italian economists Giorgio Brunello, Piero Esposito, Lorenzo Rocco, and Sergio Scicchitano titled “Does Classical Studies Open Your Mind?” The study frames itself as a response to the popular defense of classical studies which claims that studying the classics improves a person’s self-discipline, their ability to work hard, and their openness to others.

Directly contrary to this argument, the paper claims, based on an analysis of data from surveys conducted in Italy, that there is no statistically significant difference in the rate of conscientiousness or openness in students who studied the classics compared to students who studied STEM. Instead, the study claims that studying the classics significantly causally increases the likelihood of a person being neurotic and unhappy. I have already seen people on Twitter sharing this paper uncritically and I have a feeling that, in the coming years, people will probably try to use the paper to argue that people shouldn’t study the classics or even that schools and universities should stop teaching them altogether. The paper, however, has some absolutely glaring methodological problems, which I would like to point out in this post.

Archaeologists Have Discovered the Oldest Known Writing in Basque

The overwhelming majority of all languages that are currently widely spoken in Europe, including nearly all the languages that are widely spoken specifically in western Europe, belong to the same language family: Indo-European. There is, however, one language that is spoken in one small region of western Europe that is not Indo-European: Basque, which is spoken in Basque Country, a small region in the western Pyrenees of northern Spain and southwestern France that is totally surrounded on all sides by predominantly-Indo-European-language-speaking lands.

The Basque language is highly unusual, not only because it is a non-Indo-European language spoken in the middle of western Europe, but also because it is a language isolate, meaning it is not related to any other known languages. In fact, it is the only language isolate that is currently natively spoken anywhere in Europe. Modern historical linguists agree that Basque is the only surviving language of a family that was once spoken more widely in the region before the arrival of Indo-European-language-speaking peoples and that has survived in the land where it is spoken today despite millennia of Indo-European-language-speaking peoples inhabiting the surrounding lands.

Despite this, until recently, very little direct evidence was known for the ancient language from which modern Basque is derived, which historical linguists refer to as “Proto-Basque.” Just recently, however, a team of archaeologists announced their discovery of what is now the oldest known writing in the Basque language, which dates to the early first century BCE.

The Baffling Ancient Unsolved Mystery of the Phaistos Disk

The Minoan civilization, which flourished on the Greek island of Krete in the southern Aegean Sea during the early Bronze Age, is one of the most fascinating cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world. It saw its earliest beginnings in the second half of the fourth millennium BCE and reached its cultural apogee from around 2000 BCE onward. It flourished for over half a millennium after that until the Mycenaean civilization of mainland Greece conquered it sometime around 1450 BCE. It is finally considered to have died out sometime around 1100 BCE, over six hundred years before the time of Socrates.

Sadly, almost the only time the general public ever pays any attention to the Minoan civilization is when they are indulging in all sorts of completely unfounded pseudohistorical speculations about it supposedly being the historical Atlantis. (As I discuss in this post I wrote back in March 2019, Atlantis is a fictional place that Plato completely made up, his story of Atlantis is primarily inspired by events that happened in the Greek world in his own time, and it almost certainly has nothing to do with the Minoan civilization.)

This is a real shame, since the Minoan civilization poses all kinds of very real unsolved ancient mysteries. Particularly mysterious are the scripts that the Minoans wrote in, all of which remain undeciphered and impossible for anyone alive today to read. The majority of surviving Minoan documents are written in two scripts: Kretan hieroglyphs, which the Minoans developed around 2100 BCE, and Linear A, which they developed a few centuries later, around 1800 BCE. They continued to use both scripts until around the middle of the fifteenth century BCE. It is a third undeciphered script, however, that has proven most alluring to the general public. This script is securely attested only in one place: a single clay disk known colloquially as the “Phaistos disk,” which has captivated both scholars and amateurs for over a century.

The Decline of Cursive Isn’t Historically as Big of a Deal as Most People Think

On 16 September 2022, Drew Gilpin Faust, a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. history who specializes in the Antebellum South and who served as the president of Harvard University from 2007 until 2018, published an essay in The Atlantic titled “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive,” in which she conveys her shock, consternation, and sorrow at having recently discovered that the majority of undergraduate students nowadays cannot read cursive and that, of those few who can read it, even fewer can write it. She expresses worry that, as a result of not being able to read cursive, students will not be able to read historical documents written in it and will be cut off from the historical past. This piece set off many conversations about cursive instruction in the U.S.

I am currently a twenty-three-year-old first-semester master’s student who just received my bachelor’s degree in May of this year, so I am very close in age to present-day undergraduates. Contrary to the sweeping declaration in the title of Faust’s article, I did receive full instruction in how to read and write cursive from third through fifth grades. Nonetheless, I think that the ongoing decline of cursive instruction in the U.S. is both less of a tragedy and less historically significant than many people (including Faust) are making it out to be. In this post, I intend to clear up a few popular misconceptions about the history of cursive writing.

Does the Word ‘Dinosaur’ Really Mean “Terrible Lizard”?

When I was growing up, I always read and was taught in school that the word dinosaur comes from Greek roots that mean “terrible lizard.” This is how the current revision of the article “dinosaur” on Wikipedia translates the word also. This translation is not strictly incorrect, but it is not necessarily the most accurate translation either.

The English biologist and paleontologist Richard Owen coined the word dinosaur at a meeting for the British Association for the Advancement of Science in the year 1841 by combining the Greek adjective δεινός (deinós), which is usually translated as “terrible,” with the noun σαύρα (saúra), which means “lizard” or “reptile.”

The meaning of the word σαύρα is more-or-less straightforward, but the word δεινός is a bit more complicated than the simple translation of “terrible” might lead a person to believe. In some contexts, “terrible” is an adequate translation, but, unlike the English word terrible, which has exclusively negative meanings, δεινός can also have positive meanings. As such, “formidable” is probably a better translation of the word in general.

Why Do We Call Certain Prejudices “Phobias”?

The English language has many words that describe different kinds of prejudices. Some names for specific prejudices end in the suffix -phobia, such as: xenophobia (hatred or prejudice against foreigners), Islamophobia (hatred or prejudice against Muslims), homophobia (hatred or prejudice against gay and bisexual people), lesbophobia (hatred or prejudice against lesbians specifically), biphobia (hatred or prejudice against bisexual people specifically), and transphobia (hatred or prejudice against transgender people).

The suffix -phobia comes from a Greek root meaning “fear” and, in English, it is most commonly used in words that describe extreme, irrational, abnormal, or obsessive fears. As a result of this, often, when one person accuses another person of having a -phobia prejudice, the accused person will object to the term by making some variant of the assertion: “I can’t be [insert -phobia prejudice word here] because I’m not afraid of foreigners/Muslims/gay people/lesbians/bi people/trans people.”

This objection is, of course, invariably either extremely ignorant or disingenuous; words like xenophobia, et alii refer primarily to prejudices or hatreds and do not primarily indicate literal fears. This, however, raises the interesting question: Why does our language have so many words for prejudices that end in -phobia? To answer this question, I will explore the history of how the suffix -phobia entered into the English language and how the words with this suffix we know today arose. Surprisingly, the earliest attested English word with this suffix did not indicate a literal fear, but rather an aversion to water in patients with rabies.

Did Ancient Poetry Rhyme in the Original Languages?

A lot of people who have never studied any ancient language have a tendency to assume that works of ancient poetry must rhyme in the original language. It’s fairly easy to see why some people might think this, since many old poems written in English rhyme and it’s easy for people to assume that this is how all poetry—or at least all “traditional” poetry—is just supposed to be. The reality, though, is that rhyming lines of the kind that most twenty-first-century western readers would recognize are virtually absent from ancient poetry altogether.

Poems in ancient languages operate on different rules from traditional modern English poetry. In this post, I will attempt to survey some of these rules for poetry in various ancient languages. Be forewarned that I am not a poetry specialist, of the various ancient languages I will be discussing Ancient Greek and Latin are the only ones I can personally read, and this post is by no means meant to be comprehensive. Nonetheless, I hope it will serve as a rough guide to help interested members of the general public to understand at least some forms of ancient poetry.

Did Archaeologists Really Discover a Hebrew Curse Tablet from Mount Ebal Bearing the Name YHWH?

At a press conference at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas, on 24 March 2022, Scott Stripling (the Director of Excavations for the Associates for Biblical Research, a fundamentalist Christian apologetics ministry), Pieter van der Veen (a professor of the Old Testament and Biblical archaeology at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz), and Gershon Galil (a professor of Biblical studies and ancient history at the University of Haifa) announced that they have (supposedly) discovered an inscription written in the Hebrew language using the Proto-Canaanite script inside of a 2 cm x 2 cm folded lead tablet that a team led by Stripling found in December 2019 while wet-sifting through the detritus of an earlier excavation that a team led by the late Israeli archaeologist Adam Zertal conducted at Mount Ebal near the Palestinian city of Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank from 1982 to 1986.

Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil claim that the inscription on the inside of the tablet is not visible to the naked eye and that they were only able to find it by examining thousands of tomographic scans made at the Czech Academy of Sciences. They claim that the inscription dates to between 1400 and 1200 BCE. They say that the text of the inscription reads as follows when translated into English: “Cursed, cursed, cursed – cursed by the God YHW. You will die cursed. Cursed you will surely die. Cursed by YHW – cursed, cursed, cursed.” Despite these claims, they still have not shown any of the scans they allegedly made, instead only showing photographs of the outside of the tablet and one drawing made by Galil of one supposed instance of the divine name.

If all the team’s claims are true, this would be the earliest known attestation of writing in the Hebrew language and the earliest known attestation of the divine name YHWH by hundreds of years. Naturally, dozens of news outlets have reported this supposed inscription as though it really were the most astounding discovery in Biblical archaeology of this century. There are, however, very good reasons to be very suspicious of Stripling, van der Veen, and Galil’s claims and it is highly irresponsible for news outlets to report these claims as though they were settled fact. The reasons I am about to highlight are already well known to scholars, but I thought I would share them here for members of the general public who may have read about the supposed Mount Ebal curse tablet in the news.