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17
Sara Kaczko
Topics in Greek and Homeric Personal Pronouns
This paper deals with several questions concerning the dual forms of the personal pronouns of Indo-European languages and chiefly of ancient Greek.
At first, I will examine the origin of the Greek pronouns of the 1st (nwi, nw, nwin) and mainly 2nd, 3rd person dual (afwi, afw, afwin and 09ms, c^row), whose etymon is still unclear and discussed: a major problem is represented by the obscure 09- in the dual pronoun of the 2nd as well as of the 3rd person, dual and plural (it is well known that the plural of the 3rd personal pronoun is a Greek innovation).
The Greek personal pronouns are as follows:
Homeric forms (Chantraine 1958: 265-7):
1st person 2nd person 3rd person
Nom. Acc.1 nwi; nw (2 instances) ofwi; ofw (4 instances) 09ms (enclitic)
Gen. Dat. VWiV sfwin C9mi£v (enclitic)
We have notice (variae lectiones and debates between ancient scholars) of forms like nwe as Acc. 1st pers. du., afwe as Acc. 2nd pers. du., afwi as Acc. 3nd pers. du.
Attic forms:
1st person 2nd person
Nom. Acc. nw of w
Gen. Dat. nwn of wn
Other forms: 1st person. nwe Cor. (9 D.); Antim. 28 Stoll (according to Ap. Dysc. 86 Schn.)
The Greek Acc. dual of 1st person are paralleled by Acc. skt. nau (also Gen., Dat.), avest. na, OCS na (encl., also Dat.). It is widely accepted that Greek replaced the original Nom. 1st pers. du. OCS ve, lit. ve-(du) (Nom., Acc.), vedic (RV) vam, avest. va, goth. wi-t (icel. vit, old engl. wit) < IE *ue- with *no- (*vm-) clearly based on the Acc. (cf. 1st pers. plur. Nom. hie!? : Acc. hma" < *nsme vs. Nom.
1 There are few instances of vroiv and oiproiv as Nom. Acc. 1st and 2nd person, etc., but they are surely late development (cf. e. g. Chantraine 1958: 266-7); on Gen. oqrov (or o^rov) see Wackernagel 1916: 150-1.
skt. vayam, goth. weis < ie. *uey, Acc. skt. asman, nas encl., goth. uns(is) < *nsme, nos encl.; and also lat. nos, vos, OCS vy, vasu, etc.).
Various theories about the personal pronouns of 2nd and 3rd person will be discussed. According to the "standard" theory (accepted for example by Chantraine 1961 and Rix 1976) the source of 09- in the dual forms afwi, sfw of the 2nd person is different from 09- in the dual and plural forms of the 3rd person. There is also the hypothesis that the Greek 2nd pers. duals in 09- are paralleled by pronominal forms in other IE languages (mainly Celt. chwi, Goth. izwis of 2nd pers. plur.).
Finally, I will examine a very different approach of Wackernagel 1887 and Willi (forthcoming), who trace the 09- forms of the dual personal pronoun to *-bho, an IE adjective meaning "both" (cfr. amfw, ambo, bai). Willi: *s mobile + *-bhoHj (afw) "both" > "you both"; "they both" > "you", "they" (du. and plur.). 09s < *sbhHi -0 grade of *sbhoHj - was an original dual form, used as plural in dialects which have lost the dual (as Ionic); 09s- became the stem on which the plural forms are based, as shown by Myc. pe-i, Ion. 09^^, 096 rov, etc. (091 < *09s- + -91).
Difficulties of this reconstruction:
a) the relative chronology of the phonological change * u- > 0 before /o/; if pe-i represents 09501,, Dat. 3rd plur. derived from dual pronouns in 09- in Mycenaean dialect, it follows that already in Mycenean times was lost on the basis of * u- > 0 before /o/. However we cannot be sure that this development had already occurred in Mycenaean times: cf. wo-ka (po%a < * uegh), wo-do-we (popSopev connected with ppoSov), wo-ze (< *u/g-jo), while instances of * u- > 0 before /o/ are not certain: o-ro-me-no (< opaw) can be explained by the stems alternation *swer-,*ser-, *wer-, o-no, o-na point towards to onlnhmi, not to wnh (< *wosna); o-o-pe-ro-si is paralleled by ^09^:001 in Mantinea (V B.C.), but by 09^ev in Tegea (cf. Lejeune 1972; nowadays most scholars agree that p- in p09^£K00i is hypercorrect, cf. Dubois 1986).
b) In my opinion, 3rd plur. personal pronouns in 09- < 091V.
The second part of the paper deals with the Greek dual forms of personal pronouns in the Homeric poems. Some artificial usages there will be discussed (e.g. those of vwiv and 09W1V as the Nom./Acc. of the 1st and 2nd pers. dual) as well as the interpretation of vw and 09W as dialect elements within the complex question of the phases of Homeric diction. In fact, one of the aims of this paper is to
explain the 1st and 2nd dual vw and 09W in the Homeric poems in a way different from the approach of e.g. Chantraine 1958 and Wa-thelet 1981, which are, in my opinion, still unsatisfactory. In the same context, I will examine how the ancient scholars dealt with these problems. In this perspective the information provided by Alexandrian scholars is very useful: their theories were clearly based on principles very different from ours, but all the same their opinions and the material they provide can prove extremely useful to modern scholars interested in the reconstruction of the original forms.
The 1st and 2nd dual personal pronouns in the Homeric text:
There are 2 instances (E 219, o 475) of vw in the Homeric poems, one (E 219) metrically guaranteed; 4 of 09W (A 574, A 782, N 47, O 146), 2 (A 574, N 47) metrically guaranteed.
The interpretation of vw and 09W as dialect elements in the Homeric text:
Sommer 1912 = Nom. vwi: Acc. vw; Nom. Acc. 09W are "altionische Formen", Acc. vwi and Nom., Acc. o^wi are Aeolic.
Chantraine 1958 = vw is parallel with goth. na, o^w is an atticism.
Wathelet 1981 = neither vw nor o^w are proved to be Attic forms in Homer; vw is an archaism, while o^w can be ascribed to another dialect: "Autres traits réputes attiques sont garantis par le metre [...]. Ces traits semblent donc constituer des atticismes authentiques. On doit toutefois se montrer prudent. Ces traits sont ou bien des archa-ismes conservés (c'est le cas de vw et de §uv) et ils ne sont pas propes à l'attique, mais pour lesquelles l'ignorance où nous sommes quant à leur emploi dans d'autres dialectes nous empêche de rien conclure (c'est le cas de o^w)" (Wathelet 1981: 831).
Why what is true for o^w should not also be true for vw? We cannot exclude that vw as well as o^w were employed in other dialects (less well attested than Attic).
Not all scholars agree that vw is an archaic form: e. g. Wackernagel 1916 and Cowgill 1965 (see also now Katz 1998) thought that the archaic form of 1st person dual was vwe (attested in Homer only as v. l.) and that vw is an Attic innovation (Cowgill 1965; Katz 1998 vw < contraction of vwe). Even if vw is ancient, it does not follow that v w is an archaism in Homer; in other words, it is not obvious that an archaic Greek form (retained in a given dialect) is archaic also in Homer: this form may have entered the e p i c d i c -tion in a recent phase.
In my view, this is the case of vw. Cf. Wackernagel 1916: if vw were an ancient form, it should have been used more frequently to
have the couple vwi : vw with two different and useful metrical shapes; but we have only two instances of vw (one metrically guaranteed).
I intend to discuss two main problems:
a) We cannot be sure that vw and 09W were exclusively Attic forms.
b) status of the Attic forms vw and 09W in the Homeric text.
In the last 30 years many scholars have convincingly proposed that Central Greece was responsible for some recent linguistic features in Homer like " short" Dat. plur. -oiç, -aiç, -hç, forms without compensatory lenghtening as ^evoç, ^ovroôeiç instead of ^eiv-, ^ouv-< *^evp-, *^ovp- and among these, significatively, some pronominal forms like ù^oç, à^oç, tel v.
I will argue that vw and o^w are recent elements in the epic language, but I would be cautious in ascribing this forms only to the Attic dialect, moreover I would not speak in terms of interpolations: in my opinion vw and o^w have entered the Homeric text in the final phases of the epic diction.
References
Cassio 1998 = A. C. Cassio, La cultura euboica e lo sviluppo dell'epica greca, in M. Bats - B. d'Agostino (curr.), Euboica. L'Eubea e la pre-senza euboica in Calcidica e in Occidente. Atti del convegno Internazi-onale di Napoli 13-16 novembre 1996, Napoli, 11-22. Chantraine 1958 = P. Chantraine, Grammaire homérique I, Paris. Chantraine 19612 = P. Chantraine, Morphologie historique du grec, Paris . Katz 1998 = J. T. Katz, Topics in Indo-European Personal Pronouns, Harvard Diss.
Lejeune 1972 = M. Lejeune, Phonétique historique du mycénien et du grec ancien, Paris.
Rix 1976 = H. Rix, Historische Grammatik des Griechischen, Darmstadt. Schmidt 1978 = G. Schmidt, Stammbildung und Flexion der indogermanischen Personalpronomina, Wiesbaden. Schwyzer 1939 = E. Schwyzer, Griechische Grammatik, I, München. Wackernagel 1887 = J. Wackernagel, Miscellen zur griechischen Grammatik, "KZ" 28, 109-45. Wackernagel 1916 = J. Wackernagel, Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu Homer, Göttingen.
Wathelet 1981 = P. Wathelet, La langue homérique et le rayonnement littéraire de l'Eubée, "Antiquité Classique" 50, 819-833. Willi (forthcoming) = A. Willi, Griechisch atpi(v), atps, acpw zwischen Etymologie und Philologie.
