Linguistics and the Teaching of Classical History and Culture

Littman, Robert J., 1943-

Classical World, Volume 100, Number 2, Winter 2007, pp. 143-150 (Article)

Published by Classical Association of the Atlantic States

DOI: 10.1353/clw.2007.0013

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LINGUISTICS AND THE TEACHING OF

CLASSICAL HISTORY AND CULTURE
ABSTRACT: This paper looks at uses of linguistics to aid in the teaching
of Greek and Latin languages, history, and culture. The teaching of dialects and linguistic differences among them can aid the student to learn
new dialects. Linguistics can be used to explain the origins of GraecoRoman and Indo-European civilizations. Historical linguistics can be used
along with archaeology and written historical and literary accounts to show
the closeness and relationship of the two cultures and that the Greeks and
Romans share a common patrimony of language and religion.

Linguistics can be a useful tool for the teaching of Greek and

Latin languages, history, and culture. There are many ways to use
this in the classroom. Some authors and subjects naturally lend themselves to these tools. The use of various differences in dialects can
be useful both in literature and history. For example, in teaching
about Homer, many students find the concept of oral poetry difficult to comprehend. They are used to literature that is composed by
a single individual. Taking them through the various dialects involved,
namely, Ionic, Aeolic, and Arcado-Cypriot (alongside Mycenaean),
makes oral composition theory more convincing, especially if one
reinforces the parallel of dialects with anachronisms, such as Bronze
Age warriors casting an Iron Age spear. 1
Another fruitful area is the study of the alphabet, its origins,
its variations, and its spread from Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome,
and the Mediterranean. This can do much to explain cultural diffusion and how human societies develop. 2
Another area that can be reinforced by linguistics is Greek and
Roman mythology and the historical influence of Greece and Greek
culture on Rome. Teaching students about how the Romans added
letters to their alphabet, such as Y and Z, to deal with the influx of
Greek loan words, or how the Romans managed to develop the forms
of Roman names of Greeks, can show Greek influence on Rome
and fascinate students. 3 One obvious model is the transformation of
Odysseus into Ulysses, first into Latin and then into English.
Working through loan words can aid in explaining literary as
well as cultural influences of Greece on Rome. One example is the
travels of the name of the Persian monarch Xerxes through various
1
C. D. Buck, The Greek Dialects (Chicago 1965); G. Nagy, Greek Dialects
and the Transformation of an Indo-European Process (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
2
L. H. Jeffrey, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece: A Study of the Origin
of the Greek Alphabet and Its Development from the Eighth to the Fifth Centuries
B . C . (Oxford 1961); J. Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet: An Introduction to
West Semitic Epigraphy and Palaeography (Jerusalem 1987); B. Powell, Homer and
the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (New York 1996); R. Woodard, Greek Writing
from Knossos to Homer: A Linguistic Interpretation of the Origin of the Greek Alphabet and the Continuity of Ancient Greek Literacy (Oxford 1997).
3
Buck (above, n.1); A. L. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and
Latin (New York 1995).

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languages (see appendix on p. 150). Khshayarsha is the name in

Old Persian, which is transliterated into Greek as Xerxes. When
Khshayarsha is transliterated into Hebrew it is rendered as Ahashwerosh.
Hebrew often uses an initial aleph to indicate loan words. When
the Hebrew is transliterated into Greek in the Septuagint and other
later Greek works, it becomes Ahasueros. The final result is that
we have two names of the Persian monarch in Greek, Xerxes and
Ahasueros, which at first sight bear no linguistic resemblance to one
another. 4 This can be used as an example both of cultural diffusion
and of the development of religious and linguistic elements of Greek,
Hebrew, and Roman societies. Also, it can be used as an example
of how precarious transliteration from one language to another is in
determining how ancient languages were pronounced.
Dialects and language diffusion can be very useful in dealing
with the history of the ancient Mediterranean and origins of peoples.
Some obvious areas include the use of Semitic loan words in Middle
Egyptian, 5 loan words in Latin, the spread of the Hellenistic koine,
and the adoption of the Greek alphabet, as well as Greek loan words,
by Coptic, which is as much as twenty percent of the language. 6
The use of these factors can help paint a picture of the ancient world
that is very different from the way it was viewed in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, one in which there was an enormous
mixing of cultures and languages with one another.
Perhaps the best example to use to evaluate the strength of linguistics as a tool is the origin of the Greeks and the Romans, together
with the existence and origins of the Indo-Europeans. Two scientific disciplines developed in the nineteenth century, Indo-European
linguistics and archaeology. Using linguistics, a historical reconstruction
was made of the origins of the Greeks, Romans, and other IndoEuropean peoples. Perhaps it is useful to look at this process and
the controversy arising from it because it poses a major methodological question in the use of linguistics; that is, can historical linguistics
be used to reconstruct the history of peoples? If the answer is in
the affirmative, then the use of linguistics can be both a research
and a teaching tool concerning the origins of civilization.
Indo-European studies began with Sir William Jones, a justice
in the High Court of Calcutta. In 1786 he presented a paper at the
Asiatic Society of Bengal. He wrote the following:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is
of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek,
4
R. J. Littman, The Religious Policy of Xerxes and the Book of Esther,
Jewish Quarterly Review 65 (1975) 14555.
5
J. E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third
Intermediate Period (Princeton 1994); Y. Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords
in North-West Semitic (Atlanta 1999).
6
H. Frster, Wrterbuch der griechischen Wrter in den koptischen dokumentarischen
Texten (Berlin 2002).

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more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely

refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a
stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in
the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been
produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no
philologer could examine them all three, without
believing them to have sprung from some common
source, which perhaps, no longer exists. 7
By the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was firmly entrenched among scholars as an Ursprache,
an original language that was the parent of all those in this language family. Furthermore scholars such as Adolphe Pictet 8 created
the notion of linguistic paleontology, arguing that it was possible
to build a picture of the life of these people by looking at common terms for various animals, sheep, goat, ox, cow, and horse.
Based on these, possible homelands were suggested, particularly
the southern Russian steppes. With the birth of prehistorical archaeology, new suggestions based on pottery, such as Corded Ware,
along with historical Indo-European linguistics, led one prominent
scholar, Gustav Kossina,9 to suggest a north German homeland. Gordon
Childe 10 argued that the pottery of the Greek Middle Bronze Age
(1900 B . C .) indicated the first arrival of Greek speakers in Greece.
First he suggested a southern Russian, then an Anatolian origin.
Marija Gimbutas 11 studied the Kurgan, i.e., barrow culture, referring to prehistorical burial mounds, and suggested that these people
were the Proto-Indo-Europeans.
As archaeology developed as a science, a tension developed between
archaeologists and Indo-European historical linguists. Three main
camps have developed: the first, those who question the validity of
the evidence presented by linguists, especially the claim to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European; the second camp, those who use the theories
of the historical linguists to complement their own; and the third
camp, those who argue that there is simply not sufficient evidence
to solve the problem of Indo-European origins.
The leading proponent of the first camp is the prehistorical archaeologist Colin Renfrew.12 Based on his perception of the archaeological
7
Sir W. Jones, Third Anniversary Discourse: On the Hindus, in G. Cannon, ed., The Collected Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 3 (New York 1993) 2346;
reprint of 1807 edition.
8
A. Pictet, Les origines indo-europens (Paris 1877).
9
G. Kossina, Die indogermanische Frage archolgisch beantwortet, Zeitschrift
fr Ethnologie 34 (1902) 161222.
10
V. G. Childe, On the Date and Origin of Minyan Ware, JHS 35 (1915)
196207.
11
M. Gimbutas, The First Wave of Eurasian Steppe Pastoralists into Copper
Age Europe, JIES 5 (1977) 277338.
12
C. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (New York 1988).

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R OBERT J. L ITTMAN

evidence, he argues that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, originating

somewhere in Anatolia before 6000 B.C., moved northwest into Greece
and the Balkans and then east into Romania, Ukraine, and Russia.
Renfrew draws on the archaeological evidence of demographic and
economic expansion from Anatolia into Greece and the Balkans. He
explains the early spread of farming with a wave theory of advance,
where no farmer would have necessarily settled further than twenty
to thirty miles from his birthplace. Archaeologists who agree with
Renfrew must dismiss what linguists have been saying about PIE
for the past 200 years. Most linguists would be loath to do so. On
the other hand, most archaeologists have agreed with Renfrew. They
see comparative linguistics as unreliable and based on incomplete
premises in reconstructing historical situations. They argue that there
is not one piece of archaeological material that can unequivocally
be called Indo-European.
The most interesting scholar of the second camp, who advocates
the theory of Indo-Europeans and links the material with archaeology, is David Anthony. 13 Indo-Europeanists have studied thousands
of cognates and reconstructed a great deal of PIE vocabulary and
details of grammatical structure. Because these lexical cognates follow the rules of sound change in various languages, it is argued that
they go back to an original PIE language. Familiar examples are such
words as *(d)kmtom, the word for 100 (see appendix). It appears as
imtas in Lithuanian, centum in Latin, and satem in Avestan. For
the palatal k in *(d)kmtom to be an accurate reconstruction, it has
to follow the same pattern of regular correspondence in the first letters of cognates spoken in geographically widespread countries, from
Ireland to India.
Anthony argues that terms for domesticated sheep, pigs, and cattle
suggest that speakers of PIE lived after 6000 B . C ., when the earliest
Neolithic economies were established. Terms for wheel, axle, and
draft pole suggest PIE existed as a single language after 3500 B . C .,
when wheeled vehicles were invented. Anthony argues that PIE must
have begun to disintegrate before 2000 B . C ., and that linguistic evidence points to a homeland somewhere between the Ural and Caucasus
mountains in present-day Russia and Ukraine between 3500 and 2000
B . C . Anthony then tries to find archaeological evidence to confirm
this based on linguistic reconstruction. He sees the primary marker
of PIE-speaking societies as the use of the horse. Anthony excavated on the western bank of the Dnieper River in the present-day
13
D. W. Anthony, The Archaeology of Indo-European Origins, JIES 19 (1991)
193222; The Earliest Horseback Riders and Indo-European Origins: New Evidence
from the Steppes, in B. Hnsel and S. Zimmer, eds., Die Indogermanen und das
Pferd: Akten des Internationalen interdisziplinren Kolloquiums, Freie Universitt
Berlin, 1.3. Juli 1992 (Budapest 1994) 18597; Is there a future for the past?
An Overview of Archaeology in Western Russia and Ukraine, Journal of Archaeological Research 3 (1995) 177204; Horse, Wagon & Chariot: Indo-European Languages
and Archaeology, Antiquity 69.264 (1995) 55465.

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town of Dereivka. There he found that the people of the Sredni Stog
culture built a Copper Age hamlet and cemetery between 4200 and
3800 B . C . There was a horse burial, and examination of the horses
teeth demonstrated that the horse had a bridle and was therefore
domesticated. He argues that the Yamna culture, descendants of the
Sredni Stog people, put together a package of herding, riding, and
wagon driving between 3500 and 2500 B.C. Their culture spread across
the steppes north of the Caspian and Black Seas, as evidenced by
their cemeteries consisting of Kurgans or low burial mounds. Archaeologists Gimbutas, 14 James Mallory, 15 and Anthony have proposed
that the Yamna culture was the first to carry PIE into Europe and
that cultures descended from it carried languages related to those
of Iran and India. The Yamna used trade and commerce to dominate their neighbors, and PIE was a local language that gained high
status and displaced other languages.
A crux of Anthonys argument depends on arguments about wheeled
vehicles. Renfrew maintained that PIE did not have terms for wheeled
vehicles because the language dispersed before they were invented
and that later IE languages borrowed the terms from one another.
Anthony argues that for this to have happened the loan word would
have to be the same in all cultures. The archaeological evidence shows
that wheeled vehicles appeared almost simultaneously in eastern Europe,
the steppes, and the Near East after 3500 B . C . Anthony argues that
since IE languages have true cognates for these words, rather than
loan words, this shows PIE cultures were clearly familiar with wheeled
vehicles. IE *ret-, roll: IE o-grade *rot-, plus IE collective suffix
gives IE *rot-eh2, wheel > Lat. rota (beside already-IE derivative
*rot-h2-os, wheeled thing > Indo-Iranian ratha-, chariot); IE *kwel-,
turn: reduplicated noun-derivative *k w e-k w l-os, repeated-turner = wheel > Gk. kuklos, and OE hweohol/hweol > Eng. wheel.
If Anthony and the other PIE linguists are correct, all this means is
that PIE split before 3500 B . C . That does not contribute to answering the question of where the PIE people originated, or when the
PIE split, whether in the neolithic or mesolithic. It is simply guesswork to say anything more.
Based on archaeological evidence, Anthony, following Gimbutas,
argues that there is archaeological evidence of the migrations of the
Yamna, from the western steppes into the lower Danube Valley, the
Balkans, and eastern Hungary between 29002700 B . C . This is evidenced by their kurgan burials. He sees another migration between
2200200 B . C . eastward from the Volga into the Ural Mountains. But
again, there is no evidence to show that these peoples even spoke
an Indo-European language.
The third group of scholars includes those who believe that comparative linguistics is unreliable and based on incomplete premises
14
15

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Gimbutas (above, n.11).

J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (London 1989).

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in reconstructing historical situations. There are many problems with

the linguists reconstruction of the linguistic material and then use
of the linguistic material to create a historical picture. The first problem
is the date of writing for Indo-European material. While oral records
of events can be astonishingly accurate, in the absence of written
records it is impossible to sort out truth from fiction. While IE linguists, and archaeologists who support them, put many of these migrations
and changes in languages back to 3000 B . C . and earlier, we simply
have no written evidence of any Indo-European language before the
early-to-mid second millennium. The earliest Old Hittite documents
from Bogazky date to around 1650 B . C ., although the earliest words
recorded in any IE language are attested earlier, Anatolian forms
appearing in Assyrian documents from Karum Kanesh, c. 1900 B . C . 16
The earliest documents in Greek are Linear B, which date to around
14001200 B . C . 17 The Sanskrit documents of the Rig-Veda are even
later, set down in the middle of the first millennium, although the
composition of the Rig-Vedic hymns themselves probably belongs
to 15001000 B . C . 18 While historical linguists division of languages
and posited relationship of one language to another might well be
correct, there is simply no way to put any sort of reliable time frame
on the material. The early nineteenth-century attempts to recreate
an Indo-European society based on imaginary PIE reconstruction have
been rejected by archaeologists. Moreover, there does not exist one
archaeological artifact that can be said with certainty to be ProtoIndo-European. While there are now early cultures that scholars have
identified with the PIE, such as the Kurgan culture, the Yamna, we
have no hard material-culture evidence that these people spoke an
Indo-European language or belonged to an Indo-European culture.
That does not mean there were no original Indo-European-speaking
people, only that the details of their culture are not recoverable through
historical linguistic reconstruction.
Another area that is suspect in historical linguistics is that of
glottochronology (now largely discredited), that is, the attempt to
view the history of a language by examining the basic core vocabulary and the rate of loss or change in the vocabulary. Using this
method, Morris Swadesh 19 postulated that PIE could be dated to 3000
B . C . The main flaw in this methodology is its assumption that common words of a language are maintained at a definite or fixed rate.
This does not take into account sociolinguistic factors.
What, then, can be useful in linguistics in the teaching of classics? Well, one can demonstrate through the use of language that
there is a common language group, spoken from India to Europe;
16

O. Gurney, The Hittites (New York 1990).

J. Chadwick, Linear B and Related Scripts (Berkeley 1987).
18
B. A. van Nooten and G. B. Holland, Rig Veda: A Metrically Restored Text
with an Introduction and Notes (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
19
M. Swadesh, The Origin and Diversification of Language, ed. J. Sherzer
(London 1972).
17

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that the Greeks and the Romans were part of this language group,
as were the Persians, Hittites, and Indians, among others; and that
these diverse people had the same name for some of their deities,
Zeus in Greece, Dyaus Pita in India, and Jupiter in Rome. The earliest archaeological evidence for these peoples dates to the early second
millennium B . C ., when the Greeks first appear in Greece, and the
Hittites in Asia Minor. Based on kinship terms and social organization, all these groups were patrilineal and patrilocal. Where did they
come from? How and when did they spread? Are they in fact descendants of the same peoples? The use of mitochondrial DNA, together
with future archaeological excavations, may give us more information some day. 20 The historical linguists might some day be proved
correct in their reconstruction of history. But for now, we simply
do not know the answers. All we have today are artificial constructs,
based on extremely partial and incomplete data.
But where historical linguistics can best be used in studying
the history and culture of Greece and Rome is the interaction of
these two cultures. Historical linguistics can be used along with archaeology and written historical and literary accounts to show the
closeness and relationship of the two cultures. It can help to show
that the Greeks and Romans share a common patrimony of language
and religion, that both bear the same name for the King of the Gods,
and that both have the same kinship structures. In short, historical
linguistics can reinforce the archaeological and written sources and
confirm what we know about the interrelationship of these two cultures, especially in the area of cultural contact and diffusion. 21 When
linguistics is further used to elucidate oral poetry, Homer, dialect
differences, language change and development, the development of
the Greek and Roman alphabets, changes in cases and moods, evidence of pronunciation, and the structure of languages, then it becomes
a powerful, though under-utilized tool for the instruction of the classics.
University of Hawaii
Classical World 100.2 (2007)

20

ROBERT J. LITTMAN
littman@hawaii.edu

L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, The History and Geography of Human Genes (Princeton

1996).
21
T. J. Dunbabin, The Western Greeks: The History of Sicily and South Italy
from the Foundation of the Greek Colonies to 480 B . C . (Oxford 1968).

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APPENDIX
Old Persian
Khshayarsha

Hebrew
Ahashwerosh

Greek
Xerxes

Greek
Ahasueros
PIE
*(d)kmtom

Lithuanian
imtas

Latin
centum

Avestan
satem

centum/satem subdivision
(centum)
(satem)
Germanic
Baltic
Venetic
Slavic
Illyrian
Albanian
Celtic
Thracian
Italic
Phrygian
Greek
Armenian
Anatolian (Hittite, Luvian, etc.)
Iranian
Tocharian
Indic

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