[HN Gopher] Greeks in Ancient Central Asia: The Ionians (2019)
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Greeks in Ancient Central Asia: The Ionians (2019)
Author : benbreen
Score : 57 points
Date : 2022-06-22 15:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)
| 1sembiyan wrote:
| One little known Greek artifact in India is the Heliodorous
| pillar in central India:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliodorus_pillar
|
| Erected around 113 BC by an ambassador of one of the Indo-Greek
| kings and dedicated to the god Vasudeva-Krishna.
| tgflynn wrote:
| What I found surprising from this article is the implication that
| Alexander the Great and the kingdoms that arose from his empire
| were considered Ionian. I thought that Ionian referred
| specifically to people of Greek culture who lived in Western
| Anatolia and some of the nearby islands, rather than something
| like every Greek speaker in the Hellenistic age.
| routerl wrote:
| _To Asians_ , the Greeks were all called Ionian, likely because
| that was the oldest term associated with people from the far
| west.
|
| The article touches on this, but when Chinese explorers arrived
| in Bactria (roughly modern Afghanistan), they were expecting to
| run into "ioanians", due to earlier texts that had described
| these people (Da Wan - Da Yuan, meaning "great ioanians").
|
| This is the early history of the silk road, and also the first
| appearance of Buddhism in the West[0], which must have been
| absolutely fascinating to Stoics.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism
| lephty wrote:
| I think Arabic, Persian and Indian civilizations of the time
| referred to all Greeks as Unani or Yunani (Ionian).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Wouldn't this contact have been a fact already before
| Stoicism was a thing, given Alexander was the pupil of
| Aristotle, and Zeno of Citium is about a generation later
| than Aristotle.
|
| I seem to remember anecdotes of the greek expedition bringing
| Cynics along, who seemed to really see eye to eye with the
| hindu "gymnosophists".
| tgflynn wrote:
| I find the question of possible influences of Buddhism and
| perhaps other Indian traditions on Classical Greek,
| Hellenistic and maybe even early Christian thought to be a
| fascinating subject, but as far as I know only the sparsest
| documented evidence of such influences exists.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > To Asians, the Greeks were all called Ionian
|
| Not picking nits, just an interesting fact. At that time,
| Asia was the name of the province on the eastern shore of the
| Aegean, where the Ionian Greeks were also located, so in a
| sense the sentence is absolutely true.
|
| However the name "Ionian" still survives to this day
| throughout (modern-day) Asia: from the old Greek "Mikra Asia"
| in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) all the way to India, Greeks
| are "Ionians": "Yunani".
|
| Ah, and I just remembered another curious little thing:
|
| The western island complex of Greece (you know, Corfu-Zante-
| woohoo! etc., plus Odysseus' Ithaca, whichever among the
| candidates it may be) are also called "Ionian", but
| traditionally were inhabited by Doric, rather than Ionian,
| Greeks.
| tgflynn wrote:
| You'd think though that the people who actually lived in
| Bactria and had direct contact with the Greeks would have
| called them by names closer to those they used for
| themselves.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| Nah I think nationality would be almost implicitly obvious
| (e.g. due to clothing), the relationships would be much
| more on a personal level, first name basis and such, or the
| historically appropriate equivalent of, well, "habibi" or
| "buddy".
|
| But I'd expect that two interacting merchants would
| definitely know of each other's names, as semi-contractual
| epistles of orders and corresponding shipping invoices were
| very much a thing (actually already since Sumer).
|
| Not to mention that when you met someone back then, from
| what I understand, the idea would be that you would update
| each other on the stuff you knew about the world at large,
| sort of like a Fidonet where you got to walk to the next
| node: the time you spend with each other is precious, and
| ends up constructing a global grid of relationships and
| information.
|
| It's mindblowing to consider these past ages, and how all
| those people who just went on with the business of living
| and learning even without GPS or Wikipedia, and did pretty
| well regardless.
| wahern wrote:
| > It's mindblowing to consider these past ages, and how
| all those people who just went on with the business of
| living and learning even without GPS or Wikipedia, and
| did pretty well regardless.
|
| They definitely had GPS back then, which has just barely
| survived into the 21st century:
| https://www.mongolianexperiment.com/mongolia/navigating-
| by-m...
| illuminerdy wrote:
| Ionians. I remember them from TNG.
| space_ghost wrote:
| In an episode that also involved linguistic investigation by
| Mr. Data, if memory serves. :D
| nescioquid wrote:
| I've been really curious how linguists reconstruct ancient
| pronunciation for Chinese languages. In reading W. Sidney Allen's
| books on ancient Greek and Latin pronunciation, there is a good
| deal of evidence from transliterations between Greek and Latin
| and common misspellings or spelling variants, but one has the
| luxury here of a phonological writing system.
|
| Allen also cites ancient sources (mainly grammarians) who discuss
| pronunciation, so this is probably also a source used in
| reconstructing ancient pronunciations of Chinese languages? Or is
| the work based mainly in analyzing predictable linguistic change
| over time and projecting back in time?
| routerl wrote:
| I'm far from an expert on this, but I do know that many
| classical Chinese texts also had very well defined structures,
| including rhyming patterns. These are often very good sources
| for figuring out, vaguely, how an ancient word would be
| pronounced. It's certainly a powerful tool for discerning
| between multiple candidate pronunciations.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Here's the short, idealized answer:
|
| By the Sui/Tang Dynasty transition we have "rhyme books"
| (essentially phonological dictionaries) that detail every tone
| and phoneme for every character through successive dynasties,
| both through a variety of diagrams and categorizations, but
| also through a method called Fanqie (where every character's
| pronunciation is represented by two characters which separately
| represent the original character's initial sound and final
| sound).
|
| While this yields all the phonemes of the language, we don't
| have their phonetic realizations from that alone (i.e. we know
| how many distinct sounds we have and their relationships to
| each other, but we don't know the precise, actual sounds quite
| yet). To find those, we use the usual other tools at the
| disposal of historical linguists which include:
|
| + Finding foreign loan words or transliterations and using the
| foreign language's pronunciation. A particularly fruitful
| source from this time period is Buddhist translations, which
| incorporate many words from Sanskrit. + Comparative
| reconstruction based on current Chinese varieties. + Analyzing
| what speakers themselves say about the phonetic realizations of
| the language.
|
| By tracing this back to our first extant rhyme dictionary,
| called the Qieyun, with the attendant phonological system
| sometimes abbreviated as QYS for the Qieyun System, we arrive
| at what we call Middle Chinese (which is a concept that is
| fraught with danger as I detail later).
|
| Although we still have some rather noticeable holes in our
| knowledge of the phonetic realizations of this system (the
| biggest is that we aren't certain of the exact phonetic
| realizations of three of the four tones of the QYS), we have on
| the whole a pretty solid understanding of the sounds of the
| language up to this period.
|
| Going even earlier (i.e. Old Chinese) quickly becomes much more
| fraught with uncertainty without the aid of rhyme dictionaries.
| We are forced to rely much more on rhyming we observe in poetry
| as well as theoretical internal reconstruction based on our
| much more stable reconstruction of the QYS. By looking
| extensively at ancient poetry collections such as the Shijing
| and Chuci we can back out some system of phonological
| categories. As such these earlier reconstructions are far more
| contentious and uncertain.
|
| The messier answer:
|
| Middle Chinese (or Middle Sinitic as Mair calls it) was taken
| seriously as a language that people actually spoke and as the
| ancestor of Chinese varieties by the early Sinologist Bernhard
| Karlgren. This has led to terms such as "Early Middle Chinese"
| and "Late Middle Chinese" and trying to date those etc. This
| has changed significantly in the last 40-50 years. Modern
| Sinologists who study the evolution of the language basically
| refute every clause of what I just said. In particular,
|
| + Middle Chinese does not represent a language anyone actually
| spoke. It's an abstract system of phonological categories that
| represents a compromise among different varieties spoken at the
| time, resulting in more phonemes than any real human actually
| used in normal life. + As such terms such as "Early Middle
| Chinese" or "Late Middle Chinese" are linguistically
| incoherent, since there was never an organic language to evolve
| in the first place. + The traditional genetic, tree model of
| language families (with e.g. different descendant languages
| evolving from a single ancestor) is not a useful model for the
| evolution of Chinese, especially in the last two millennia. As
| such the whole enterprise of trying to find a most recent
| common ancestor for varieties of Chinese (or even subsets such
| as all varieties minus Min or all varieties minus Min and Wu)
| is methodologically suspect. + To the extent that you still try
| to find the most recent common ancestor for even non-Min/non-Wu
| languages, you are likely to arrive at a time period that far
| predates the QYS, and hence the word "Middle" no longer seems
| like an accurate chronological descriptor.
|
| A new crop of terms has shown up to try to displace Middle
| Chinese and focus on trying to reconstruct a real language
| people actually spoke (e.g. "Medieval Chinese"), but even that
| is still quite messy.
|
| The story of Old Chinese is even more contentious and is
| completely fractured in the academic community. Some
| Sinologists have staked their entire careers on a coherent
| notion of "Old Chinese" and its reconstruction. Other
| Sinologists dismiss the entire enterprise as unworkable, apart
| from potentially much more isolated and restricted subsystems.
| It's all very controversial.
| nescioquid wrote:
| I'm sincerely grateful for this embarrassment of riches you
| took the time to share -- thank you! Very happy you replied!
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