Page 522 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
comment on the variety of languages spoken by the allies of the Trojans, and near the end (2.867) the poet mentions in particular the 'barbarity' (i.e., non- Greekness) of the speech of the Carians. But nowhere in the Iliad does a Greek warrior have any difficulty communicating with a Trojan (or Lycian or Carian, for that matter), nor are interpreters ever needed or mentioned. (The first Greek to mention them [ca. 430 BC] is Herodotus, 2.154,4.24.) In the Odyssey, Odysseus sails all around the known world, and never meets anyone who speaks a language other than Greek (including Polyphemus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, and the Sirens). True, several words used by the gods are mentioned as distinct from human (i.e., Greek) words, but the difference is scarcely enough even to make divine speech a special dialect of Greek.
In the sixth book of the Iliad (6.119-236) Diomedes has a confrontation with the Lycian King Glaucus in which the latter traces his ancestry back to Beller- ophon, a Greek from Argos who came to Lycia with some sort of message ('Kill the bearer' written in Linear B, perhaps) to the king. But the king, instead of killing him, puts him through a number of tests and then gives him his daughter's hand. This passage (6.169) is the only possible reference to writing in Homer, and even it is not unambiguous. Yet it cannot be doubted that some Greeks, namely those on Cyprus, could write at the time of Homer, since in Classical times (seventh to fourth centuries BC) they wrote in a syllabaryclosely related to Linear B,which was used by Greeks in Crete, Pylos, Mycenae, and Thebes(atleast)aroundthethirteenthcenturyBC.It cannot be doubted that some form of this syllabary was used continuously in the intervening centuries, though no specimens from those centuries survive, and hence there must have been teachers and schools throughout the period, apparently teaching both syl- labary and alphabet by the fourth century BC.
The signs of the Cypriote syllabary are by no means all identical to corresponding signs of Linear B; 10 of them are, and another 20 are easily derived. Linear B was mainly written on wet clay (making curves easy); Cypriote on stones or metal (yielding a preference for straight lines), but, in addition, Cyprus dropped the separate set of d syllables (da, de, di, do, du), fusing them with /, but distinguished / syllables from r syllables. The first of these changes has occurred in other syllabaries (e.g., Cherokee, some Southeast Asian) and some alphabets, at least as an option (e.g., Gregg shorthand). It is not true that if a language once acquires a phonemically accurate script it never later drops any distinctions. But this particular case, in which voiced, voiceless, and aspirated stops are written alike, is very common in independently developed syllabaries all over the world: evidently the grouping of all labial stops is an easy piece of phono- logical analysis, and the Mycenaean and Cypriote Greeks certainly made it. The Semitic alphabet as
adopted by the Greeks implies a grouping of voiced stops in the alphabetic order (B,G, D) and also the nasals (M, N).
But the remarkable contribution of the Greeks, apparently unique in the history of writing systems, was the obligatory writing of vowels as letters of the same size and type as those used for consonants. This does not come naturally; syllabaries do. In the Greek alphabet the only grouping or nonwriting of a dis- tinction appears in the case of vowel length, normally unmarked in Linear B, the Cypriote syllabary, most Greek alphabets, Italian alphabets, and their descend- ants. The Greeks did eventually have two long vowel characters (eta and omega) opposed to two short ones (epsilon and omicron), but vowel length was just as contrastive for A, I, U (alpha, iota, upsilon). No doubt the whole development was, in part, a fluke, but no other independent system did the same things. One other distinctive feature, which was not at first com- pletely indicated by the Greek alphabet, was aspir- ation in stops, but chi and phi were soon provided.
As noted above, there is good reason to believe that schools existed in Mycenaean times, and that they continued right through into Classical times, with two possible modifications. It is likely that Linear B was used and maintained by a special class of scribes, and that the schools were scribal schools. And some authors hint that the Dorians were illiterate for a few centuries, though it is known that there were lyric poets in Sparta by 675BCor so (Terpander). But cer- tainly almost everywhere in the Greek world, by around700BCtherewereschoolsforboys,andquite often also schools for girls (Sappho ran one such school), in which the students spent much of the day from the age of 6 or 7 years to 16 or 17. Thucydides mentions (7.29) a school in a smallish town (Myca- lessus) in Euboea, 'The largest one there.' The town must, then, have had at least three or four such schools, but it is hard to guess how many students there were, though the context does indicate that school started early in the morning, something that is also known from Aeschines (Against Timarchus 8- 12), who cites a law of Solon forbidding (in essence) schools to open before sunrise or close after sunset. Summer vacation is not mentioned, but seems likely.
What the teachers and pupils did during a decade of schooling is not known. A year might conceivably be spent on elementary reading and writing; there is evidence of syllable sequences like ar, bar, gar, dar, er, ber, ger, der, etc., and beta, alpha, ba, beta, epsilon, be,beta,5ta,be,etc.(seeCallias'Grammatical Tragedy cited in Athenaeus 7.276A, 10.448B, 10.453C), but it seems unlikely that this went on 10 hours a day for more than a year. After the elementary lessons, all the evidence is that they read, studied, copied, memorized, recited, and sang (or chanted) the works of poets, principally lyric and epic, but also iambic and elegiac. Here it must be noted that none of these poets wrote
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