Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

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Ziz
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Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Ziz »

All my attempts at being able to read and translate Classical Greek and Latin texts have up until now been frustrated by the pervasive scrambling found in all of the "good" works of Classical literature. Stupidly, I didn't realize that really the only reason why Ancient Greek and Latin are so difficult (for me) is because in many cases the constituents are smashed to bits and the pieces removed from one another by several words. (I think I should've noticed this when I was reading the Septuagint and the Vulgate and finding them both very easy to decipher, probably because the original Hebrew does not have scrambling nearly as severe). For instance, Cicero writes...

De qua cum tam variae sint doctissimorum hominum tamque discrepantes sententiae, which *should* naturally be something like Cum doctissimorum hominum sententiae de qua tam variae tamque discrepantes sint, if I'm not totally mistaken. All in all, it means something like, "as the opinions of the most educated men on this matter are so varied and so discordant..."

For anybody who might know, how can anybody mentally reconstruct these sentences fast enough to understand a scrambled sentence spoken or read in real time? Is it just a matter of painstaking and repetitive practice, or is it simply easier to do when you speak a language as synthetic as Ancient Greek or Latin? Can speakers of synthetic languages really mentally hold onto all these broken pieces of sentences and effortlessly put them together correctly? Or is it that literature like this is simply meant to take a long time to read?

Travis B.
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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Travis B. »

Ziz wrote:(I think I should've noticed this when I was reading the Septuagint and the Vulgate and finding them both very easy to decipher, probably because the original Hebrew does not have scrambling nearly as severe).
The NT is not translated from Hebrew (or for that matter Aramaic) to Latin in the Vulgate but rather from Greek to Latin.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

Ziz
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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Ziz »

Coming from a Jewish family, I haven't been very interested in reading the NT, so I've stuck to the OT of the Vulgate, which Jerome indeed translated from Hebrew. I dunno what the NT looks like in its original Greek, but if anybody can argue that it was originally written in Aramaic, I doubt it has very much of a Classical Greek feel to it.

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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Travis B. »

Ziz wrote:Coming from a Jewish family, I haven't been very interested in reading the NT, so I've stuck to the OT of the Vulgate, which Jerome indeed translated from Hebrew. I dunno what the NT looks like in its original Greek, but if anybody can argue that it was originally written in Aramaic, I doubt it has very much of a Classical Greek feel to it.
Peshitta primacy, i.e. the NT was originally written in Aramaic, is quite discredited as a doctrine, despite there being a few adherents left.

One thing to remember here is that you are comparing non-religious texts with religious scriptures; there are likely different motivations in each case as to how one is to write. There is probably less motivation to engage in verbal gymnastics when writing or translating scriptures, since the goal likely is to write down text as faithfully to one's religion as possible rather than to show off how complicated one can write, than there is when writing secular texts.
Dibotahamdn duthma jallni agaynni ra hgitn lakrhmi.
Amuhawr jalla vowa vta hlakrhi hdm duthmi xaja.
Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro. Irdro.

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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Ser »

Ziz wrote:Coming from a Jewish family, I haven't been very interested in reading the NT, so I've stuck to the OT of the Vulgate, which Jerome indeed translated from Hebrew.
Wikipedia, in its article on Jerome, says that "many scholars" believe he translated it from Origen's Hexapla instead, rather than from a Hebrew-language text. Dunno about that. They give some article from the Theologische Realenzyklopädie journal as a citation for that.
Ziz wrote:De qua cum tam variae sint doctissimorum hominum tamque discrepantes sententiae, which *should* naturally be something like Cum doctissimorum hominum sententiae de qua tam variae tamque discrepantes sint, if I'm not totally mistaken. All in all, it means something like, "as the opinions of the most educated men on this matter are so varied and so discordant..."
Your corrected word order is wrong: when you use a relative pronoun to begin a sentence in this way, it must go at the beginning (De qua cum doctissimorum hominum...). The rest of your rescrambling would be fine.
For anybody who might know, how can anybody mentally reconstruct these sentences fast enough to understand a scrambled sentence spoken or read in real time? Is it just a matter of painstaking and repetitive practice, or is it simply easier to do when you speak a language as synthetic as Ancient Greek or Latin? Can speakers of synthetic languages really mentally hold onto all these broken pieces of sentences and effortlessly put them together correctly?
We can look at some natlangs alive that exhibit a degree of hyperbaton and phrase discontinuity (even if it's not at the level of Classical Latin). Olga Spevak, in her book Constituent Order in Classical Latin Prose (2010), says the following about Polish (and Russian in the footnote).
    • Discontinuity of noun or prepositional phrases in Polish is not just a literary device but also occurs in everyday speech.23 Discontinuity does not represent a norm, and speakers exhibit variability in the production and the acceptance of discontinuous phrases. In other words, discontinuity is an optional device that occurs in contrastive contexts, for example (Siewierska 1984: 57 and 63):
        • (34) Piękny Markowi kupili obraz.
          beautiful-ACC to Mark they bought painting-ACC
          ‘Thy bought Mark a beautiful painting.

          (35) Do mojego włamali się mieszkania.
          into my they broke REFL flat
          ‘They broke into my flat. / My flat was broken into.’


      Discontinuity tends to occur in short clauses such as (34) and (35). Discontinuous elements are placed in initial and fial position, i. e. they occupy the positions of Topic and Focus. [...] There are several restrictions on discontinuity in Polish (Siewierska 1984: 62 ff), including: discontinuous noun phrases contain typically just one modifier; the noun and the modifier can only be separated by the verb (and not, for example, in (34) by the indirect object Markowi alone). Furthermore, only one instance of discontinuity per sentence is allowed.

      --------------------

      23. See also Gasparov (1978) on hyperbaton in Russian impromptu speech.

      [...]

      Bibliographic References

      Gasparov, Boris M. 1978. Ustnaja reč’ kak semiotičeskij ob’jekt [Spoken language as a semiotic object]. In Semantika nominacii i semiotika ustnoj reči [Semantics of nouns and semiotics of spoken language], Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis 442, 63–112, Tartu.
      [...]
      Siewierska, Anna. 1984. Phrasal discontinuity in Polish. Australian Journal of Linguistics 4(1):
      57–71.
      Siewierska, Anna. 1988. Word Order Rules, London: Croom Helm.
In my personal worthless opinion, I think that yes, they understood them with a degree of ease in spite of the syntactical discontinuity, at most at the third try probably?
Or is it that literature like this is simply meant to take a long time to read?
This is probably true too, though. Cicero did belong to a group of people who liked the bombastic "Asiatic style" and its avoidance of plain language. (Then again, Caesar's writings were apparently considered an example of plain straightforward language, and he's no stranger to hyperbaton and discontinuity either...)

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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Salmoneus »

Forgive me, but I'm mildly amused that the example given is only very slightly more discontinuous than English!
On this, so varied are the opinions of the most educated men, and so discordant
It's harder to split the opinions and the men, but still quite feasible:
On this, so varied are the opinions, and so discordant, of the most educated men
Flipping 'opinions' and 'men' is much trickier, but could be done in a very literary style
On this, among the most educated men so varied and discordant are the opinions (can be done with 'of', but is a lot more natural and clear with 'among')

You could even write:
On this, so varied among the most educated men, and discordant, are the opinions

Sure, it would be very literary indeed, but then Cicero was pretty literary himself!
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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by zompist »

At the opposite end from the literary, colloquial English also has ways to be almost as fragmented— shoehorning in nuances and afterthoughts.

About that... people's opinions are so varied— educated people I mean— and contradictory.

Opinions differ so much, even the most educated people's, and so vehemently.

The Polish examples are really interesting, and I wonder how much topic and comment help explain where, in practice, constituents will end up. I don't know how a Latin reader would take it, but to me Cicero seems to be summing up his position first ("Opinions are varied"), then adding clarifications and expansions, and finally dropping in whatever was missing syntactically (sententiae).

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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Ser »

Salmoneus wrote:Forgive me, but I'm mildly amused that the example given is only very slightly more discontinuous than English!
[...]
Sure, it would be very literary indeed, but then Cicero was pretty literary himself!
zompist wrote:At the opposite end from the literary, colloquial English also has ways to be almost as fragmented— shoehorning in nuances and afterthoughts.
Nice observations. For a long time I've actually been suspecting a good part of discontinuous phrases in the literature are actually due to nuances thrown in in the middle of the sentence as well as afterthoughts at the end.
zompist wrote:The Polish examples are really interesting, and I wonder how much topic and comment help explain where, in practice, constituents will end up. I don't know how a Latin reader would take it, but to me Cicero seems to be summing up his position first ("Opinions are varied"), then adding clarifications and expansions, and finally dropping in whatever was missing syntactically (sententiae).
Actually, Spevak in her above-mentioned book analyzes phrase discontinuity pretty much along those lines. She includes three prose samples (one from Sallust, two from Cicero) and does a similar analysis sentence by sentence.

For example, for the first sentence of the Sallust sample:
    • 1. Sallust, The Conspiracy of Catiline (55.1–6)

      Text:
      1Postquam, ut dixi, senatus in Catonis sententiam discessit, consul optumum factu ratus noctem, quae instabat, antecapere, ne quid eo spatio novaretur, tresviros, quae supplicium postulabat, parare iubet. [...]

      Translation:
      1After the Senate (as I have said) had divided in favour of Cato’s proposal, the consul, deeming that the best thing to do was to forestall the impending night to prevent any revolutionary move during the course of it, ordered the triumvirs to prepare what the punishment demanded. [...]

      Analysis:
      [...]
      The section starts with a reminder of the situation, formulated in a temporal clause (postquam... discessit) that represents the temporal setting of the whole complex sentence. The author repeats whose proposal was accepted by the Senate: Cato’s. Catonis in the prepositional phrase (in Catonis sententiam) stands before its head noun because it is contextually given information (see Cat. 53.1). Consul is Discourse Topic of this (and the following) sentence and comes immediately after the temporal clause. The consul acts on the Senate’s decision (iconicity). The section optumum... novaretur expresses the motivation of the consul’s action; it is a new piece of information but not the most important one. Optumum stands fist in its participial domain (optumum... antecapere) because it is emphatic; it is followed by the supine factu that it governs. The most informative part of this participial clause is noctem (followed by its relative clause) antecapere; a final clause (ne quid... novaretur) explains why. Then comes the most informative part of the sentence, represented by the pragmatic unit tresviros2... parare iubet. The object clause depending on parare precedes its governing verb iubet. The information is complex here, and the sentence answers the question ‘what does the consul do?’

      -----

      2. Tresviros capitales are meant, minor magistrates who had charge of prisons and executions

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Re: Scrambling/Hyperbaton in Classical Languages

Post by Copperknickers »

Ziz wrote:All my attempts at being able to read and translate Classical Greek and Latin texts have up until now been frustrated by the pervasive scrambling found in all of the "good" works of Classical literature. Stupidly, I didn't realize that really the only reason why Ancient Greek and Latin are so difficult (for me) is because in many cases the constituents are smashed to bits and the pieces removed from one another by several words. (I think I should've noticed this when I was reading the Septuagint and the Vulgate and finding them both very easy to decipher, probably because the original Hebrew does not have scrambling nearly as severe). For instance, Cicero writes...

For anybody who might know, how can anybody mentally reconstruct these sentences fast enough to understand a scrambled sentence spoken or read in real time? Is it just a matter of painstaking and repetitive practice, or is it simply easier to do when you speak a language as synthetic as Ancient Greek or Latin? Can speakers of synthetic languages really mentally hold onto all these broken pieces of sentences and effortlessly put them together correctly? Or is it that literature like this is simply meant to take a long time to read?
As has been documented above, inflected languages often have small 'scrambled' sentences as a part of normal discourse, because word order is simply freer when it does not have a major grammatical role. As such, it is utilised as a tool, usually for emphasis. For example 'nunquam a me discessit', 'a me nunquam discessit', 'discessit ille nunquam a me'. All of these mean 'he never left my side', but they all have different meanings, which would be conveyed in English by rhythm and stress: 'He NEVER left me (for one second!)', 'He never left MY side (I can't speak for anyone else), 'HE never left my side (unlike certain others I could mention). Native speakers would be well used to words appearing in inverted order in normal discourse (as well as in the texts they would learn in school, right back to the Greek poets) and so they would definitely have a much easier time of it than we do. Not to mention that Latin and Greek have SOV word order so they are used to waiting until the end of the sentence to put the action together. Look at a German sentence like 'Wenn der Schnee in diesem Winter auf sich warten lässt, ist das im Tschuggen Grand Hotel kein Problem' and you can see how you can get used to storing a lot of information in sequence before it is linked into a meaningful sentence in languages where such sentences are possible.

I think coming from an English perspective, we put an over emphasis on word order: you say that your example 'should be' XYZ in order, but in reality there's no need why it 'should be' anything in an inflected language. I've been studying Latin for nearly 10 years now and I think I've reached a point where I no longer need to unscramble all the words into a natural sounding word order, it sounds perfectly meaningful in its original word order when you have internalised the signals given to you by the word endings. Remember also native speakers had a lot of extra clues to help them, namely inherent knowledge of gender without having to look it up, as well as accent and vowel length in speech, making a lot of tricky bits much clearer. Add to that the fact that even English has the ability to produce scrambled sentences in literary pieces, and you can see that there is no one secret to understanding periodic style, it's just something that comes from deep familiarity with the language.

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