8/23/2023 0 Comments Thalia muse achilleionThe poet Homer begins his Iliad by addressing his Muse: “Sing I pray you the wrath of Achilles, the wrath that ravages, the wrath that placed on the Achaeans ten thousand afflictions.” Suppose we render these sentiments into prose and translate them into abstract terms they would then run somewhat as follows: “My poem’s subject is the wrath of Achilles which had disruptive effects and these caused deep distress for the Achaeans.”Ī series of acts signalled in the original by appropriate transitive verbs and performed by agents on personal objects is replaced by abstractions connected to each other by verbs indicating fixed relationships between them. This at bottom is a mistake, the nature of which can be clarified by giving an example of what the abstractive process in language involves, as opposed to Homeric idiom. If one uses such terms as “concept” or “abstraction” to indicate the end result of the transformation, one has to clear up some basic confusions in the use of these terms.Ĭritics and commentators are fond of calling attention to the presence of what they call abstractions or abstract ideas in Homer. Or again we discern the invention of a conceptual language superimposed upon a non-conceptual or alternatively a creation of the abstract to replace the concrete, the invention of an abstract version of what had previously been experienced sensually and directly as a series of events or actions. What precisely was its nature? Its complexity can be summed up variously as on the one hand, a shift from poetry to prose as the medium of preserved communication or again as a shift in literary style from narrative towards exposition or again as the creation of a new literate syntax of definition which could be superimposed upon the oral syntax that described action. The transformational effect made itself felt slowly in the course of 350 years. It preserves its content not through memorization but by placing it in a visual artifact, the alphabet, where, the content can survive as long as the artifact and its copies survive also. The later form, the Aristotelean one, existed and still exists as a literate instrument designed primarily for readers. This memorized form was not the vernacular of casual conversation but an artificially managed language with special rules for memorization, one of which was rhythm. The earlier form came into existence as an instrument for the preservation of oral speech through memorization. Yet the degree of transformation can be conveniently measured by comparing Homer at the upper end of the time-span with the language of Aristotle at the lower end. The Greek of the Hellenistic age is recognizably close kin to the Greek of Homer. The transformation, however, did not substitute one language for another. had a transformational effect upon the behavior of the Greek language, upon the kind of things that could be said in the language and the things that could be thought as it was used. The use of this invention in the course of 300 to 400 years after 700 B.C. About that time they invented a writing system conveniently described as an “alphabet,” the Greek word for it. Up until about 700 years before Christ the Greek peoples were non-literate. The Alphabetic Mind: A Gift of Greece to the Modern World
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