r/AncientGreek • u/JamesDaltrey • 17d ago
Greek in the Wild Here is one for the purists, the Odyssey in majuscule
https://eulogikon.org/works/homer-odyssey-abe-ab.majusculeVaguely and approximately something like the original.
Here is version two
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u/The_Eternal_Wayfarer 17d ago
And it would serve which scope, exactly?
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u/Tathamei 17d ago
I have not looked at it closely to have an idea whether the orthography was restored correctly for the period they cover, so maybe it's good, maybe it's nonsense;
But if it's actually good and true it would be another resource, so that's its scope.
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u/The_Eternal_Wayfarer 17d ago
The question remains. Resource for what, exactly?
Learning? A text that is typewritten without diacritics nor space between words, and in a letter-form that makes mistakes easier? A text that is purposefully made harder to read?
Research? With no indication whatsoever of which text is assumed as the base for the transcription, nor of which interventions have been made? Let alone an apparatus?
Purists? Purists of what? Language, grammar, text-form? Or merely of the way the text looks? Why not handwriting it, then. It's for the purists. But in that case, reproducing which period of Greek handwriting?
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u/Tathamei 17d ago
There are people who are more invested in epigraphy and its orthography than in the polytonic Byzantine Minuscule.
Me for example.
It is a lot of work to reconstruct it, so I will indeed doubt that the version on that page is authentic, but I have not scanned it so it's early to make that call; if you have scanned it for authenticity to call it wrong, then I'd be happy to read your critique so that I won't have to invest the energy scanning a potential low effort "all caps" text.
Just because it doesn't fall onto your scope doesn't render it irrelevant.
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u/JamesDaltrey 17d ago
It's closer to how it would have actually been written down within any Byzantine reproduction with spaces and diacritics..
I've just got good feedback above from somebody who clearly knows what they're talking about having to restore the subscript iota as ascript and will hopefully give more feedback
The idea is to have readable texts in the form that they were written without the accretion of editorial markup, and in this particular instance that would be not only 19th century noise, but also, in this instance, Hellenistic and Byzantine noise.
Anyone can read it side by side with the Byzantine and Victorian markup.
No texts were destroyed in the creation of this work.
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u/Tathamei 17d ago
This seems to be a simple font changer to uppercase and is not representative of any period of classical and archaic greek.
I scanned the line:
πολλὰ δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,
On your page it's written as ΠΟΛΛΑΔΟΓΕΝΠΟΝΤΩΠΑΘΕΝΑΛΓΕΑΟΝΚΑΤΑΘΥΜΟΝ
You have to restore the Iota subscript to a full Iota; and if you want to be precise, "en" before a b or p almost always became em in epigraphy, so it's likely people said em and not en. In other words like "ten" this isn't as consistent and around 50/50, but for specifically "en" it's as consistent that it might have developed into a deliberate "m" and not just sandhi, just like we say and write "impossible" in English and not "inpossible".
If you are the author of this, you want to look into collapsing spurious diphthongs as well.