Considering the importance of higher education for the development of all scientific disciplines, especially in the context of the higher education reform known as the “Bologna Reform”, it is surprising that there are no studies addressing classical philology in relation to higher education, and that this topic is generally not of interest to classical philologists. This paper analyzes the extent to which the fundamental elements of the reform influence the development of competencies in classical philologists, and thus classical philology as a whole, through two indicators: the level of regulation of the profession (using as an example the document Subject Benchmark Statement: Classics and Ancient History (including Byzantine Studies and Modern Greek)), and the method of monitoring the learning outcomes achievement (using as an example Latin Language and Roman Literature - undergraduate double-major study programme at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Mostar). The core documents of the Bologna Reform are the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), whose elements serve as prerequisites for regulating professions, and the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), which, among other things, define quality standards for higher education institutions and their study programmes across the entire European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Since the emphasis is placed on the competencies of future professionals – classical philologists, i.e., current students of classical philology – this analysis draws from the ESG only those standards that are related to student assessment and the monitoring of the defined learning outcomes achievement. Keywords: competencies of classical philologists, Bologna Reform, assessment standards, learning outcomes, Subject Benchmark Statement, University of Mostar
This article argues that classical philology can play a vital role in debates about the importance of philology now and configures a genealogy that may contribute to the quest for alternative philologies. Building on Werner Hamacher's definition of philology as “love of the non sequitur ,” I turn to founding texts of Western classical philology by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Friedrich August Wolf, and August Böckh in order to interrogate their identification with modern classicism and historicism. Examining the science of philology as Altertumswissenschaft , I focus on a language of ambiguity and undecidability with regard to philology's classical object (Greek and Roman pasts) and the discourse of philological science that constructs it. This is grasped as the relation between a transcendental temporality that enunciated classical antiquity's wholeness and a kind of perturbation of time that destabilized philology's alignment with classicism and historicism. For Winckelmann, Wolf, and Böckh, the philologist's task required a conceptual and temporal leap toward the past that signaled the absence of philology's grounding. In this sense, it differed from evocations of a seamless movement across a unified horizon of time linking antiquity and modernity. This was conveyed by stressing the past's mutilation, absence, and accidental expression as the vanishing ground on which philology could build its classical vision. By configuring these notions as the self‐hollowing basis of its knowledge, classical philology came to be divided by a paradoxical appeal to sequential time and the non sequitur. Tensions produced in this context bring classical philology to the center of debates that seek to interrogate modern historical intelligibility and time. Far from perpetuating ideas of irreversible and linear time, classical philology claims to engage with an absent past, and as such, it disrupts sequential temporalities by desiring something that is always beyond presence or reach and therefore always available for times to come and for future emancipation from regimes of present time.
Prepositions are indeclinable words with limited lexical meaning that cannot stand alone but can govern one or more cases. In Modern Greek, which has four cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, and vocative), prepositions are commonly used to express a variety of relations (such as location, time, direction, etc.). Specifically, certain prepositions in this language can be followed simultaneously by the accusative and genitive cases. The aim of this paper is to investigate how a group of students of Modern Greek as L2 at the Department of Modern Greek Studies, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, perceive the use of prepositions that syntactically correspond to the accusative and the genitive and change their meaning depending on the case they are used with. A non-experimental quantitative survey with multiple-choice, closed-ended questions was conducted. Respondents were asked to form prepositional phrases with prepositions that can be followed by both genitive and accusative (epί, ypό, apό, pros, metά, and catά) by choosing nouns in one of the above cases. This paper aims to identify the semantic and syntactic components that may be problematic for learners of Modern Greek as L2 in the use of prepositions and prepositional phrases, as well as to suggest strategies for more efficient acquisition and use of this word class in Modern Greek.
The study of ancient Greek has faced significant challenges, from its perceived lack of practicality to the apparent obsolescence of Classical Philology. The teaching of Greek has evolved due to historical and political developments in countries where it was taught. Currently, the value of ancient Greek in educational curricula is under debate, threatening its future. Despite its limited contemporary applications, ancient Greek remains essential for scholars of Classical Philology, history, and Eastern European studies. We propose exploring alternative methods to approach the language, such as those by Moschopulos, utilizing texts of various categories and purposes, and reflecting on historical teaching methods. By moving away from current positivist stances, we can revitalize the study of this language and offer new perspectives.
Recent advances in NLP have led to the creation of powerful language models for many languages including Ancient Greek and Latin. While prior work on Classical languages unanimously uses BERT, in this work we create four language models for Ancient Greek that vary along two dimensions to study their versatility for tasks of interest for Classical languages: we explore (i) encoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures using RoBERTa and T5 as strong model types, and create for each of them (ii) a monolingual Ancient Greek and a multilingual instance that includes Latin and English. We evaluate all models on morphological and syntactic tasks, including lemmatization, which demonstrates the added value of T5’s decoding abilities. We further define two probing tasks to investigate the knowledge acquired by models pre-trained on Classical texts. Our experiments provide the first benchmarking analysis of existing models of Ancient Greek. Results show that our models provide significant improvements over the SoTA. The systematic analysis of model types can inform future research in designing language models for Classical languages, including the development of novel generative tasks. We make all our models available as community resources, along with a large curated pre-training corpus for Ancient Greek, to support the creation of a larger, comparable model zoo for Classical Philology.
The article discusses a possible relationship between the Proto-Germanic term for ‘shoulder’ (ON. herðr f., Far. herðar f. pl.; Elfd. erde f.; OHG. harti, herti f., MHG. herte f. [θ] > Lac. σ [s]. The Laconian word κορσίς goes back to the Doric appellative *κορθίς, which presumably derives from the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱerdh- ‘to fart, blow to, break wind’, secondarily ‘to stink, smell’ (cf. Ved. śárdhate ‘s/he breaks wind downwards’; Lat. cerda f. ‘dung’ attested in mūscerdae f. pl. ‘mouse droppings’, ovicerda f. ‘sheep dung’ etc.). The Laconian derivative has reliable semantic equivalents in other Indo-European languages (e.g. Skt. śr̥dhū- f. ‘the anus, rump’, śr̥dhu- m. ‘id.’). The Proto-Germanic term *hardīz (gen. sg. *hardjōz) ‘shoulder’ has no convincing etymology. Its juxtaposition with the Laconian word κορσίς ( ‘a stinking part of the body’ > ‘armpit’ > ‘shoulder’ must have taken place already in the Proto-Germanic epoch.
Abstract:In the course of his discussion of the role of slavery in the domestic economy of the ancient Greek city, Aristotle makes the claim that "the slave is a kind of animate piece of property" (Pol. 1253b32). This article reexamines Aristotle's choice of language through the lens of the Black radical philology of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe. In particular, it uses Sharpe's concept of the orthography of the wake as a practice of dysgraphia to pose questions of Aristotle's embrace of the idea of a human being as property. Rather than taking Aristotle's formulation as a normative expression of the concept of slavery as property in Greek law, this approach analyzes Aristotle's use of metaphor and vacillation to buttress an ideological fiction. This dialogue between antiquity and American modernity gains additional significance from the fact that Aristotle's linguistic choices in Book 1 of the Politics bear comparison with the strained grammar of American slave codes, critiqued by Hortense Spillers, as they attempted to normalize the counter-intuitive idea of human beings as property. As other scholars have observed, the potential analogies between Aristotle's theory of slavery in Politics 1 and ideologies of slave-owning in the American South were not lost on pro-slavery advocates, who condoned and adopted Aristotle's metaphors.
Recent developments in Transformer language models now allow users to predict the probability of different sentences and to predict missing words more accurately than before. This new information and perspective can be used to form judgments on novel textual emendations and to further quantify existing historical editorial judgments. We examine the importance of analyzing an author’s corpus, and the impact of the Good-Turing theory of frequency estimation when predicting missing words. We will also outline some of the limits of what Transformer language models can do, and how to practically evaluate them.
Philology. Linguistics, Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature
The paper deals with the semantic category of temporal irreality, based on the phraseological units (PUs) of the Modern Greek language. The phraseology as an anthropocentric linguistics sphere uses the phenomena of the surrounding world, including temporality, which are perceived through the prism of the national linguistic picture of the world. The linguistic model of perception and reproduction of unreality is expressed in grammatical and semantic categories. Structural PUs’ components form specific images of the linguistic picture of the world of the native speaker of the Modern Greek language, associated with extra-linguistic and linguistic factors. The author uses the continuous sampling method and analyzes various components related to different cultural codes. As a result the systematic nature of syntactic models of PUs reveals a certain typology of the methods of their formation. The article is intended for specialists in the field of studying and teaching the Greek language and can be used in comparative and typological studies of the Balkan studies.
The article concerns the influence of humanist scholarship on sixteenth-century etymological practices, testified in the Neo-Latin reference works and special treatises on linguistics and history. Being an important part of historical research, which relied mostly on Greek and Latin literary sources, etymology could not but adopt some important principles and instruments of contemporary philological work, notably on the source criticism. The foremost rule was to study the sources in their original language, form, and eliminate any corrupted data as well as any information not attested in written sources. This presumed that every text had its own written history, which tended to be a gradual deterioration of its state, represented in the manuscript tradition that was subject to scribal errors and misinterpretations. This view on the textual history was strikingly consonant with that on the history of languages, which was treated by the humanists as permanent corruption and inevitable degeneration from the noble and perfect state of their ancient ancestors. In an effort to restore the original text, philology used emendation as a cure for scribal abuse and textual losses; likewise, language historians had their own tool, namely etymology, to reconstruct and explain the original form of words (including the nomenclature of various sciences). The intersection of both procedures is taken into account in the article and it demonstrates how textual conjectures, manuscript collation, and graphical interpretation of misreadings were employed by the sixteenth-century scholars to corroborate their etymological speculations, which established themselves as one of the ways of the reception and criticism of classical scholarly heritage.