Day: January 26, 2016

Billy Kerr’s answer to Why is the word “all” spelled this way instead of “aal”? is right, but lemme add a bit to it.

While English spelling looks pretty random, there is a predictability to it if you assume that it used to make sense in Middle English. So through a particular vowel change in Middle English, a before l tends to be pronounced as /ɑː/ or /ɔː/, depending on dialect. walk, call, paltry, etc. And the presence of the l is a cue to us that the a will do that. (Unless we know the word isn’t English, of course, as in palimony or banal.)

Now. You speak a version of English that has enough distance from standard English, both in terms of national identity and language structure, that it might as well be a separate language. Which means you get to spell it differently than English. And in that language, the l after a drops off. How do you spell all now?

I speak, of course, of Scots.

You could keep spelling it as all, and introduce a rule that l(l) after a is silent. It’s not like English hasn’t done things like that. But:

• It’s hard enough to get people to write and read in Scots to begin with; you don’t want to introduce more crazy spelling rules.
• Part of the point of a Scots spelling is that it looks different from English, to people who already know how to write in English. You show them <all>, they’ll just pronounce it as /ɑːlˠ/.

You could start with all, and then put in an apostrophe to indicate that the l has fallen off: a’ . Because the apostrophe means an l has fallen off, you know that the a’ will be pronounced as /ɑː/.

That’s what Robbie Burns did. The problem with that though, is that it takes Middle English as a starting point: you’re writing an apostrophe because there used to be a letter there in Middle English. And there still is a letter there in Modern English. Which means your spelling system is derived from English a little too obviously. No wonder that convention is now called the Apologetic apostrophe.

You could decide that the English spelling all can get stuffed,  and you’ll spell the word phonetically—using the closest spelling English orthography allows you. That gives you aw. Which I believe is the current Modern Scots recommendation, and is also what Scots was written like in its literary heyday.

OR: In between Robbie Burns and now, you could say that the Sassenach can be buggered, and you’ll invent a brand new spelling for a brand new language, that owes nothing to those Southern fiends, and that doesn’t expect you to know that an l used to be there. And if your new spelling looks a bit more Viking than English, so much the better.

Hence: aa.

And if you retrofit Scots spelling onto English all, you get aal.

Which I suspect is what OP is doing. I don’t see where else he’d have gotten <aa> from: <aa> is not otherwise used in English for anything.

Second hand answer, based more on what I’ve heard than what I’ve read.  Agreed with Dimitra Triantafyllidou in general, but it’d be good to hear from more classicists.

Homer is extremely far away from Attic in time and (to some extent) dialect. So in terms of vocabulary and grammar, it might as well be Phrygian if all you know is Attic. OTOH, if you know the vocabulary and grammar, I’m told that the syntax is child’s play.

The furthest away linguistically is Aeolic, and people don’t often bother to learn the dialect differences because Aeolic is so obscure. I did, so I actually find Aeolic easier than Epic.

Like Dimitra said, Xenophon has the reputation of being the easiest classical author, and Thucydides the hardest. I spend more time reading Byzantine learnèd texts, and unfortunately for me many of them chose to emulate Thucydides.

In the New Testament, Mark and John are very simple and modern linguistically. Paul OTOH is more learnèd, and can be convoluted. Then again, I have trouble understanding Paul in English as well.

Of the Byzantines, special mention goes out to the poetry of Theodore Metochites. It’s pretend Homeric, but he exaggerates all the Homeric idiosyncrasies he can: there’s not an <ο> he won’t try to spell as <ου>. I’m glad Michael Featherstone has made a career of translating his poems, coz I ain’t volunteering.

As the Googles will tell you, from Greek arkhetypon (ἀρχέτυπον):  arkhē, meaning start, beginning, and typos, stamp, impression (originally: a blow). Literally: an initial stamp, an initial impression.

And  the meaning the word had  was pretty close to “archetype” from the beginning: LSJ

Adjective: “first-moulded as a pattern or model, archetypal”, used by Philo  to refer to a seal, then “exemplary, ideal” by Soranus, to refer to a midwife.

Noun: “archetype, pattern, model”, used by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (contemporary of Philo); “a portrait [of Dido] as she really was” in the Anthologia Graeca.

So initially an archetype referred to the very first pressing  of a seal on something—which is as close to the ideal pattern of the seal as possible. The more you use the seal, the more it wears out, just like a 10th-generation photocopy. From there, it was a short leap to the notion of the archetype: the initial model of everything.

And if Philo is one of the first persons attested to have used the word, he’s already using the metaphorical extension in his Allegorical Interpretation, III:

Now, Bezaleel, being interpreted, means God in his shadow. But the shadow of God is his word, which he used like an instrument when he was making the world. And this shadow, and, as it were, model, is the archetype of other things.

ἑρμηνεύεται οὖν Βεσελεὴλ ἐν σκιᾷ θεοῦ· σκιὰ θεοῦ δὲ ὁ λόγος αὐτοῦ ἐστιν, ᾧ καθάπερ ὀργάνῳ προσχρησάμενος ἐκοσμοποίει. αὕτη δὲ ἡ σκιὰ καὶ τὸ ὡσανεὶ ἀπεικόνισμα ἑτέρων ἐστὶν ἀρχέτυπον

On this account you will find the tabernacle and all its furniture to have been made in the first instance by Moses, and again subsequently by Bezaleel. For Moses fashioned the archetypal forms, and Bezaleel made the imitations of them.

διὰ τοῦθ’ εὑρήσεις τὴν σκηνὴν καὶ τὰ σκεύη πάντα αὐτῆς πρότερον μὲν ὑπὸ Μωυσέως, αὖθις δ’ ὑπὸ | Βεσελεὴλ κατασκευαζόμενα· Μωυσῆς μὲν γὰρ τὰ ἀρχέτυπα τεχνιτεύει, Βεσελεὴλ δὲ τὰ τούτων μιμήματα·

Per Illocutionary act  and What is an illocutionary act? , it’s always been messy. One take is:

The illocutionary act is a speech act: something that the speaker does by speaking. It often expresses an intention that the world matches what the speaker says—that their assertions are accurate, their promises sincere, their commands obeyed. But it doesn’t guarantee that the intention is realised. Illocutionary acts are usually defined in categories.

The illocutionary force is how your speech act ends up changing the world. Your intention as a speaker is that the illocutionary force matches the illocutionary act; but if the act misfires, it might not.

Implicature is a kind of implied meaning. It’s a default assumption underlying what you are saying, though it can be cancelled out.

An illocutionary act is what kind of change in the world you are trying to realise through what you are saying. The implied meaning is not really part of it; it’s more about intent.

Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, University of Oxford , the online dictionary of all attested Ancient Greek names (which are overwhelmingly from inscriptions) has some materials on their publications list and announcements list, but nothing as methodical as what you have in the Wikipedia page you gave.

The most awesome Dr. W. PAPE’s Wörterbuch der griechischen Eigennamen is a dictionary of all  attested Ancient Greek names as of 1911, which means it is more on the literary side, and its has an introductory chapter on how names are formed, pp xvii-xxxii, including the elements names are formed from. Unfortunately, you have to be able to read German, and Fraktur at that. If you can read Greek though, you’ll understand what’s going on.

The Wikipedia page Ancient Greek personal name  does have an overview, though not a schema.