New book: Latin Loanwords in Ancient Greek: A Lexicon and Analysis

Professor Eleanor Dickey’s new book on Latin words in ancient Greek is being published by Cambridge University Press on June 15th. Colleagues interviewed her about this momentous (for her, at least) event and learned some surprising facts.

Q: How long is your book?

A: Over 700 pages.

Q: Goodness, why did you do a silly thing like that? You could have split it in thirds and gotten credit for three books!

A: You’re right, I admit it – but a dictionary isn’t easy to split up. Plus it’s not only a dictionary, but also a study of which words were borrowed and when and where and why. So when I thought about dividing it into multiple volumes, I had hideous visions of readers ending up with just one of those volumes and having the research questions but not the answers, or the answers without the questions. Or either without the references. When I was writing this book I spent a lot of time with a study of Latin loanwords published over a century ago by someone who split his work into two parts. He put the list of references in the first part, which has totally disappeared; as far as I can tell no scholar in my lifetime has ever found it. So no-one can understand what the abbreviations in the second part mean, and no-one can trace the sources. Therefore the second part is still cited, rather grudgingly, by people who would much prefer to cite its sources. I realise that this is one way to improve your citation index, but still I wouldn’t want anyone to feel about me the way people feel about that man. So I squeezed this book all into one massive volume to make sure that anyone who got hold of it would get the whole thing.

Q: Ah, I see. Your book is a service to scholarship, and that’s why it’s so big that no-one can afford to buy it – how much is it selling for, anyway?

A: I would prefer not to answer that question, if you don’t mind.

Q: Sorry. Maybe tell us some fun facts from your book?

A: The modern Greek word for ‘lettuce’ comes from the Latin word for ‘bitter’. Very appropriate, I think.

Q: Where does modern Greek come into it? I thought this was a book about ancient Greek?

A: It is about ancient Greek, but for each word borrowed, I look at how long that word survived, and about a quarter of the ancient Latin loanwords survive all the way into modern Greek. The modern Greek words for ‘sausage’ and ‘belt’ and ‘bird’ and ‘yellow’ are also from Latin.

Q: Good heavens, why were they borrowing words like that? Didn’t the Classical Greeks have words for those things?

A: Yes, they did, but those words got replaced by Latin borrowings, because during the Roman empire Greek speakers thought Latin was really cool as a way to express some kinds of ideas. Not everything, just certain things. Like today, for many English speakers, French has cachet for naming items of food and clothing, but not for football terminology. For the Greeks, Latin also had cachet for food and clothing, but not for boating or farming terminology. Most cultures seem to feel that foreign words are cool for food and clothing, in fact.

Q: Yes, like coq au vin and haute couture. What other topics caused the Greeks to reach for Latin words?

A: They loved borrowing words for titles of officials in the imperial bureaucracy; you just couldn’t be properly bureaucratic without a Latin title. This was a bit of a problem in late antiquity, when the Latin-speaking half of the empire basically disappeared and the Greek speakers who needed Latin titles were cut off from the Latin speakers who would normally produce them.

Q: But couldn’t they just go on using their old Latin titles?

A: Not always, because you know what bureaucratic types are like. They love reorganising things, and they want everyone to see that they’ve reorganised things, so they need to find new titles to make people notice.

Q: I see. So what did they do?

A: They made up their own Latin titles by putting together Latin words. For example, the Romans had a set of titles starting with a meaning ‘from’, like a secretis ‘from secrets’, that is, the person in charge of secrets. So the Greeks made the title a brevis ‘from letters’.

Q: How do you know they didn’t take that from the Romans? Even if we don’t have it in Latin, surely that could just be an accident of survival?

A: Brevis belongs to the third declension, and a takes the ablative, so a Roman could never say a brevis; it would have to be a brevibus.

Q: Oh yes, of course. I knew that. Er, what’s your favourite Latin loanword?

A: Aditeusantes, aorist participle of aditeuo, which means ‘having entered into an inheritance’.

Q: That looks awfully Greek; are you sure that’s a Latin loanword? What Latin word do you think it comes from?

A: It comes from adeo ‘enter’, but you’d never know that to look at it. The Greeks knew, though, because they wrote aditeusantes in Latin letters.

Q: Wow. Where can we find out more?

A: Try Cambridge University Press’s page for the book, or their blog post, which is a bit more serious than this one.

Postgraduate Colloquium 2023

On the 25th and 26th of May 2023, the Department of Classics at the University of Reading held its annual postgraduate colloquium. The colloquium is a chance for Masters and PhD students to share an aspect of their research with colleagues from the department in the form of a brief presentation. Students were able to present their research in a friendly and positive environment, with space for respectful and informative discussion. This year saw a fantastic mix of thought-provoking topics being presented from all corners of the classical world, triggering lots of interesting questions from the audience.

After the two day event, some of the students and staff from the department visited Park House for a well-earned celebratory drink. Here they are enjoying the sunshine!

Thank you to all of our staff and students from the department who took part in the colloquium, both those presenting and those sitting in the audience. We hope for an equally successful colloquium in 2024!

Remembering Prof. Em. Jane F. Gardner (1934-2023)

Reading’s Department of Classics held a memorial for the late Professor Emeritus Jane F. Gardner on April 26th. Jane was a landmark of the Department for many decades, not only because of the length of her employment (from 1963 to her retirement in 1999), but also because of her strong character and her utter commitment to the Reading Classics community on all its levels, from undergraduates to professors. Long after her retirement, Jane continued to come in to visit colleagues and attend research seminars, even when her declining mobility necessitated the use of a wheelchair. It was therefore wholly fitting that members of the Department – including those who have moved on to other posts, or retired – came together to celebrate her life, work, and many qualities.

The programme from the event (designed by Ure volunteer and graphic designer Matthew Knight), which can be found here, combined personal reminiscence with academic reflection, and covered the many facets of Jane’s long career: Roman historian, specialist in Roman law, Curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, and expert referee of book manuscripts for Cambridge University Press. It opened with a Latin encomium, written and beautifully read by our Professor Eleanor Dickey, a distinguished practitioner of spoken Latin. The text of the encomium is included in the programme; Jane would have much enjoyed its combination of deep respect and affectionate levity.

This combination marked the whole event, especially the drinks reception which followed the formal presentations, an opportunity for reminiscence and for people to swap their favourite Jane stories. I overheard many laughing accounts of her irascibility, but also even more numerous stories of her generosity – with her time and her expertise, directed into helping students, junior colleagues, and Classicists in other Universities who approached her for advice on Roman law.

The success of the gathering was greatly enhanced by the help of our student volunteers, Shona Carter-Griffiths, Jacinta Hunter and Daisy Roffe. Also essential to the smooth running of the whole memorial was doctoral researcher Edward Ross, who provided IT support and also arranged the music which played quietly at the start of the gathering and during the reception. It was Mozart, at Jane’s own request: ‘Not too frivolous … but not too gloomy either!’ was her not-entirely-helpful stipulation. Finally, it is important to note that the presentations were recorded by Daisy Roffe; once the recording has been edited and captioned, we will make it available for those unable to attend the event, or indeed wishing to relive it.

Finally, there was a third element to the event: the launch of a temporary exhibition on Jane’s life, in the Ure Museum (where it can still be viewed), whose creation was led by Assistant Curator Jayne Holly. Central to this exhibition was a number of pictures from Jane’s not unimportant collection of art, on temporary loan. These include works by Jenny Halstead and Terry Frost, reflecting Jane’s commitment not only to art (she was a longstanding Friend of the Royal Academy, and a great lover of galleries and exhibitions while her health allowed her to visit them), but also her interest in Reading’s life and culture. Many UoR academics live in Oxford or London, justifiably drawn to the proximity of first-rate libraries, but Jane settled in Lower Earley and stayed there until the day before she died. For this reason, we were especially glad that several of her neighbours were able to join us for the memorial.

Two months in Paris

When the Greek department of the Sorbonne University invited me to spend a term in Paris as visiting professor, my first instinct was to refuse. Owing to having been assaulted and insulted in equal measure there in my younger days I’d vowed never to set foot in France again – in fact I’d made that vow twice, having imprudently given France a second chance once before. But then again, can one really turn down an offer from the Sorbonne? The chance to teach some of the world’s top students, and to do it in French? Working with top scholars, using some of the world’s best libraries? So in the end I nervously accepted.

Stained glass panel in the Musée de Cluny

I needn’t have worried; perhaps France has changed, or maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten older and less attractive, but in two months there I was not attacked once. In fact, everyone was lovely to me (even the supervisor of the apartment building – previously I had never even heard of a nice super), and I had a great time. The library was amazing, and the students were terrific. A group of them worked together with me to make an edition and translation of an unpublished text: deciphering something that probably hadn’t been read in centuries, comparing the manuscripts to work out how they are related and which readings are more likely to be original, making an apparatus criticus, translating the text, tracking down quotations and historical references to figure out when and where it was first written, etc. Of course this process couldn’t be fully finished in two months, particularly as a sharp-eyed student found more manuscripts of our text just before I left Paris, but that means that we’re still working on it remotely, which is also fun. I can’t tell you quite what the text is, because we still don’t entirely know, but part of it consists of letters between a (probably fictional) fifteenth-century university student and his family. The family accuses the student of wasting time and money, and he assures them that he is studying very hard and never ever goes to parties, except for the ones that all the students attend …

I also gave lectures summarising my forthcoming book on Latin loanwords in ancient Greek. The book itself put a bit of a damper on my Paris visit, because the second proofs arrived while I was there. They were better than the first proofs, which had blighted my existence from September to January, but still problematic enough to put strict limits on the amount of sightseeing I could do during the four weeks for which I had them. However, when I managed to stop thinking about the problems in the proofs turning the book into French lectures was great fun. One lecture on which Latin words the Greeks chose to borrow and why, one on when and where they borrowed Latin words, one on what happened to the ancient loanwords in Byzantine and modern Greek, and one on what the evidence is for all this, how borrowing worked, and why the relationship between English and French is uncannily similar to that between Latin and Greek … I was in clover.

Nevertheless, in some respects teaching in Paris has given me an enhanced appreciation of Reading. Paris seems to be constantly full of demonstrations, protests, and occasionally riots; the main issue of contention while I was there was that people did not want the retirement age to be raised from 62 to 64, but there were also protests about many other issues, some completely beyond my comprehension. The French seem to take to the streets at the level of concern that would cause a British person to sign an online petition. And the Sorbonne is so afraid of being invaded and looted by protesters that every time there is the slightest danger, the whole university closes down and all classes are held on Zoom. One day when no big demonstrations were planned the Sorbonne nevertheless closed because there were about three students standing in front of one entrance to the main building and ‘blocking’ it with a little pile of wheelie bins and e-scooters. The door could have been unblocked in under 10 minutes by one not very strong individual, or we could just have used the other doors, but no – the whole university shut down, even departments in completely separate buildings. I found it very entertaining, though the amusement clearly wears off when one deals with this kind of thing on a regular basis.

Even when the university is open, teaching at the Sorbonne is not without difficulty. All classes are hybrid, but the IT is unreliable. You start off a class and then have to stop after 5 minutes because the online audience can’t see the slides, or because they can’t hear, or because the technician that you booked for an hour beforehand to solve these issues has finally showed up only after the start of the class. Then the technician takes a quarter of an hour of class time trying and failing to make the IT work, so not only do you have to abandon the online audience, but by the time he leaves everyone in the room has forgotten what happened in the first 5 minutes and you have to start over.

So despite how much fun Paris was, it’s also nice to be back here – and I am so glad that Reading decided against hybrid teaching!

L-R: Alessandro Garcea, Frederique Biville, Eleanor Dickey, Philomen Probert

Written by Professor Eleanor Dickey

Edward Gregory elected as RUSU president 2023/24

Congratulations to Classics student Edward Gregory, who has been elected as President in this year’s Reading University Students’ Union Leadership Elections. This is wonderful news, and we are excited to see Classics brought to the centre of University of Reading student community.

Congratulations also to Leah Logan and Nayib Fux Heras, who have been elected as Senior Reps for Humanities. We wish them all good luck in their roles!

The full announcement can be found here: https://www.rusu.co.uk/news/article/rusu/Leadership-Election-Results-202324/

 

Summer Term 2023 Reading Classics Research Seminars

We are pleased to announce the launch of our Reading Classics Seminar Series for Summer Term 2023, which will boost our Wednesday afternoons with constructive and stimulating lectures and discussions on various aspects of Classics research!

In this series of lectures, starting on 3 May, we welcome a diverse group of speakers from both the UK and abroad in our Departmental seminars. Our Spring seminar series will explore a variety of topics and periods of Classical studies. All seminars will be livestreamed on MS Teams; tune in every Wednesday at 4pm! Attendance is free and open to all! To attend please follow this link: bit.ly/3Lyq4R4! Below you can find a poster with all titles.

Full list of titles

3 May

Erica Bexley, Durham, Looking for Octavia: history and reception

10 May

Alba Boscà Cuquerella, Salamanca/Bristol, How to apologise if you are a woman: some remarks on the use of gnomai by Euripidean female characters

17 May

Joe Watson, Warwick, Ciris’ progress: genre, metapoetry and philosophic ascent in the Ciris 

24 May

Diana Rodríguez Pérez, Oxford, Ancient repairs on Athenian pottery: preliminary thoughts – and a cup

31 May

Julie Doroszewska, Warsaw, Thinking of thinking: conceptual metaphors of cognition in the Plutarchian corpus

 

Students get paid to do research

We are looking forward to having lots of undergraduate research collaborators this summer, thanks to University of Reading’s UROP—Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme. This is an amazing opportunity for our talented undergraduates to get paid for a 6-week experience, usually between their 2nd & 3rd years of study, doing real research alongside their teachers. In each case the research should result in academically rigorous published outputs. Classics benefits most years from this opportunity, but competition is stiff, both for getting the project funded and for choosing the lucky student from among those who apply. This year we have secured funding for three of our projects, namely:

Athenian Festival ware in the Ure Museum. Collect and analyse examples in Reading’s Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology of black-figure ceramics created and used as festival ware in ancient Athens, as a testbed for a larger project—Immanence and Innovation—amassing and analysing evidence of such ceramics from international collections. Now open to 1st year students, updated deadline for applications is 22-May-2023.

In the Company of Monsters: New Visions, Ancient Myths. This project uses contemporary visual art to investigate the power of ancient mythology to engage modern audiences and to explore contemporary themes of identity and diversity. The student will research and create inclusive text to accompany a research-led exhibition at Reading Museum.

Public interactions with Lowbury Hill. Working under the umbrella of the Mymerian project (https://research.reading.ac.uk/mymerian/) we seek to gather, analyse, and interpret trends in modern and contemporary public perceptions of the archaeology and history of Lowbury Hill, Oxfordshire, through research in archives and print media.

Interested 2nd year students are encouraged to peruse the UROP placements available this year: indeed students are encouraged to apply to UROPs from other departments, if they have the right skills and knowledge. The main UROP page and the pages for each project indicate the application procedure, but all applications from interested students are due before 3 April 2023 (Athenian Festival ware UROP application now open until 22-May-2023)

Classics goes Forensic

This week, PhD student Summer Courts will be collaborating with Dr Sophie Beckett and Cranfield University’s Forensic Institute to continue her research on the two Early Medieval individuals from Lowbury Hill. These two people, one male and one female, have had vastly different stories told about them. The man, who was buried under a mound with a variety of weapons and other grave goods has been interpreted as an Anglo-Saxon warrior, as displayed in the Oxfordshire Museum, Woodstock. Conversely, the woman who was buried in the line of the Roman-period enclosure wall on the site has been viewed as a human sacrifice or a victim of facial mutilation.

During a previous visit to Cranfield, Summer studied the bones of the Lowbury Lady in order to create a biological profile (sex, age, stature, and health assessment) and investigate claims surrounding her death. Careful analysis revealed that the Lowbury Lady may not have been as old as initially reported, with several aging methods revealing an age between 30 and 45-years-old. Additionally, we learned that the woman would have stood between 5’ 3’’ and 5’ 5’’ tall. Examination of skull revealed no traces of a violent death, but did show that many of the fractures to her cranial bones would have occurred after death due to the compressive force of the earth beneath which she was buried. This is evidenced by the angle of the fractures and the staining of the bone exposed by the breaks, which is the same colour as the external bone surface. Fresh breaks are usually lighter in colour than the external bone surface and peri-mortem fractures have a different appearance than older fractures.

The Lowbury Lady’s cranium showing fractures and repairs. Photo: Summer Courts

This week will see Summer continue her work on the Lowbury Lady by selecting samples for destructive analysis. Samples from the woman’s teeth will be sent to the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre in Glasgow for strontium and oxygen isotope analyses which will reveal where she grew up and answer questions about whether or not she was local to the area around Lowbury Hill, Oxfordshire. Summer will also send bone samples for carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis to gain insight into the types of food the woman was eating. Finally, the Lowbury Lady’s temporal bone (the part of the skull near the ear) will be sent to Germany for a DNA analysis in collaboration with Dr Stephan Schiffels at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology  so that we can find out more about her ancestry and any diseases she may have had.

Over the next week Summer will also be selecting samples from the Lowbury Man for destructive analysis. Previous analysis by Cranfield University MSc student Harriet Bryant-Buck has shown that Lowbury Man was 45+ years of age at death, stood between 5’ 5’’ and 5’ 10’’ and grew up in Western Cornwall or the somewhere along the western coast of Ireland. Summer will also be sending a portion of the Lowbury Man’s temporal bone (the part of the skull near the ear) to Germany for aDNA analysis. The temporal bone has been selected for sampling as the bone that forms the petrous portion of the temporal is extremely dense and is more likely to retain traces of DNA than other, less dense bones.

This research, which has been generously funded by the AHRC via the South, West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, will give us a wealth of new information about the Lowbury duo and will begin to allow us to tell their stories in a more holistic and nuanced way than before, providing a window on the real lives of these two individuals from our early medieval past.

Professor Jane F Gardner, 1934–2023

We are saddened by the death of Prof. Emeritus Jane F. Gardner. She died peacefully on the evening of 28th January 2023 in the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, just short of her 89th birthday. Prof. Gardner’s academic work remains seminal in the fields of Roman law, slavery, and women and families in antiquity. These and her other voluminous achievements will be included in an obituary that we are preparing for publication. Prof. Gardner’s absence will be deeply felt by colleagues and friends throughout academia and especially in Reading’s Department of Classics, from which she retired as Professor in 1999 and its Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology, where she served as Curator from 1976 to 1992. At Prof. Gardner’s request there will be no funeral but we will celebrate her life and work with a memorial event, probably in late April. Those interested in attending this event are encouraged to contact Professor Emma Aston at e.m.m.aston@reading.ac.uk.

Emeritus Prof. Jane Gardner speaking of Reading Classics’ tradition of innovative teaching and research in the Ure Museum in 2018

Reading Classics at the AIA-SCS 2023 Annual Meeting in New Orleans

I returned from the AIA-SCS 2023 Annual Meeting in New Orleans (a.k.a. NOLA), just in time for the new term, glad to have seen old friends, learned new things, and enthused about the future of our academic field. This is the Joint Meeting of North America’s big professional organisations for (old world) archaeology—Archaeological Institute of America—and Classics—Society for Classical Studies.

 

Jessie Feito and Prof. Amy Smith

This annual meeting traditionally hosts up to 3000 scholars, teachers & others, from across the world. The numbers were hard to judge this year because it was a blended meeting, with all papers accessed online whether or not they were delivered ‘in the flesh’. Reading’s Classics department chose both options, with Prof. Aston & me each delivering papers, Aston’s online, in Insiders and Outsiders in Ancient Thessaly’ (no surprises there!) and mine in person, in a double-session, Phenomenology and the Painted Vase. One of our recently minted PhDs, Jessie Feito, spoke on the results her postdoctoral project, with Koç University—’Fields of Gold: Lydian Diet at Sardis’—in a session on the Social Life of Landscapes. They also caught up with Signe Barfoed, who has just finished her Norwegian Research Council postdoctoral fellowship with Classics@Reading but is now in Oslo.

 

‘Joan of Arc’ at the parade

In between academic meetings participants had to dodge contestants in the Miss Universe contest, with which we shared the hotel, and of course their photographers! NOLA treated us to four days of perfect sunny weather and amazing food (once we escaped the hotel). Our former colleague and friend Katherine Harloe (now Director of the Institute of Classical Studies) beckoned us to an award-winning Trinidadian restaurant and I even escaped long enough to attend NOLA’s first parade of the year, the ‘Maid of Orleans’ Parade celebrating Joan of Arc’s 611th birthday, on 12th Night! It is clear in any case that NOLA is a great place to meet and think about lessons from the past!

Written by Professor Amy Smith.