language

Audible Punctuation: Performative Pause in Homeric Prosody

Audible Punctuation focuses on the pause in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, both as a compositional feature and as a performative aspect of delivery, arguing for the possibilities and limits of expressing phrases in performance. Ronald Blankenborg’s analysis of metrical, rhythmical, syntactical, and phonological phrasing shows that the text of the Homeric epic allows for different… Read more

The meaning of Homeric εὔχομαι through its formulas

Eukhomai had been glossed traditionally as “pray, long for, wish for; vow, promise; boast, brag, vaunt; profess, declare.” Muellner’s approach is to make a systematic analysis of the constraints in which this word is used in Homeric texts—grammatical, stylistic, and contextual—and to compare them, keeping in mind the framework of traditional… Read more

Language and Meter

[This essay is an online second edition of an original printed version that appeared as Chapter 25 in A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (ed. E. J. Bakker; Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World 2010) 370-387. In this online second edition, the original page-numbers of the first edition will… Read more

Indo-European Language and Society

Translated from the French by Elizabeth Palmer, this online edition has been revised and updated by Jeremy Lin, Jacqueline Lewandowski, and Vergil Parson. “This work belongs in a bountiful tradition. Less than a decade after Devoto’s Origini indeuropee, Benveniste, leaving aside most apparatus but ever so supremely in control of… Read more

“Mixed Aorists” in Homeric Greek

“The Homeric poems provide some of the easiest reading in Greek literature, as well as some of the most rewarding, and so we are introduced to them at an early stage in our study of the language. But when we learn more, we discover that Homeric Greek is not so… Read more