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December 14

Ancient Greek Translation Help

Hello, I'm making a fictional magic system and I'd like help with making sure I'm using the correct real-life procedure. Here's an example: Μᾰντεύω μέσω τό Σκέπτομενον ἐμοῦ περῐ́ ἡ Κῠνέουσᾰ αὐτῆς περῐ́ ὁ Μετώπου αὐτῶν. I'd translate it literally as "I divine by means of the observation of mine of the kissing of her of the foreheads of them guys" meaning "I divine by means of my observation of her kissing of their foreheads."

Overall, I think I'm unclear on what agrees with what. For example, does the gender of the noun determine the gender of the article, or is it the gender of the possessive pronoun? Some specific questions:

Is the first person singular present active conjugated verb correct (Μᾰντεύω)?
Are the prepositions correct (μέσω, περῐ́, and περῐ́)?
Given this is spoken in the first person by one non-binary diviner, are the first article (τό), the inflection on the participle (-ενον), and the first possessive pronoun correct (ἐμοῦ)?
Given the kisser is one female, are the second article (ἡ), the inflection on the first descriptive genitive noun (-ουσᾰ), and the second possessive pronoun correct (αὐτῆς)?
Given the bearer of foreheads are more than two men, are the third article (ὁ), the inflection on the second descriptive genitive noun (-ου), and the third possessive pronoun correct (αὐτῶν)?

So far, I've used the Wiktionary articles on these words, the Wikipedia article Ancient Greek nouns, as well as these sources:

I appreciate help answering my questions and if you have any other sources to share that I haven't already looked at, please do share. Thank you. Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 23:49, 14 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If you don't get the words right, you may always say that they are barbarous names as they did in Hellenistic magic.--Error (talk) 11:58, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That's helpful. I do also want to learn more about gender agrees with inflections in verbs, nouns, and articles though. Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 15:01, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, there's this from the Ancient Greek grammar article :"The definite article agrees with its associated noun in number, gender and case." So that solves that question, but now I'm looking for an answer to what the noun inflection agrees with. Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 17:19, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Some remarks.

The smiley breve mark ˘ over vowels may be seen in dictionaries but is not used in actual texts, so for example περῐ́ should be περί. But if the mark is arched the other way around, like a frown, it is a genuine Ancient Greek accent and should remain, as in ἐμοῦ.
Why do you write the first letters of nouns with capital letters? Usually we now use sentence case when rendering Ancient Greek texts. The ancient Greeks themselves used only one case; they wrote ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ (without accents} or, later, γνῶθι σεαυτόν.
The word μέσω is Modern Greek. You could use instead διά + the genitive. Then you get, διὰ τοῦ σκέπτομενου ἐμοῦ.
But the form σκέπτομενον is the passive participle of σκέπτομαι, "that is being watched". Using as a noun, like here, it means "that which is being watched", so τό σκέπτομενον ἐμοῦ means "that of mine which is being watched", which I think is not what you mean.
Also, the primary sense of σκέπτομαι is to "watch", to "examine", and seems a bit creepy in the context, something like a voyeur spying on kissing people. You need a noun here; instead of going for a verbal noun, why not simply use ὄψις, meaning "sight", which can like in English refer to the act of seeing, or to what is seen. Then you don't need to specify the "of mine" bit because it will be understood in the context. Then you get, διὰ τῆς ὄψεως.
The repeated use of περί, "concerning", makes this sound very stilted. You wouldn't say in English, "I divine through the sight concerning the kissing of her concerning the foreheads of them thar guys."
There are more issues, but for now I have to attend to issues in real life.

Disclaimer. I am not a native speaker of Ancient Greek. My most recent serious exposure was being taught the language over sixty years ago, and that was only to understand texts in Greek, not to create correct sentences. I can spot some obvious errors, but I can't know what a reasonably natural and grammatically correct translation would be. --Lambiam 18:07, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I asked ChatGPT to translate "I divine by the sight of her kissing their foreheads." This was the result:

ἐγὼ μαντεύομαι ὑπὸ τῆς ὄψεως αὐτῆς φιλοῦσας αὐτῶν τὰς μετώπους.

Ancient Greek is a pro-drop language (as is Modern Greek), so the subject ἐγὼ may be omitted. The form μαντεύω appeared only after the Ancient Greek period in Koine Greek. The preposition ὑπὸ (+ genitive) also means "by, through", with a clear sense of "by means of".

I don't know whether φιλέω for the verb "kiss" is better here than κυνέω. My impression is that neither is particularly amorous, but that φιλέω can also mean to touch tenderly. If you go with κυνέω, the word becomes κυνέουσας or, contracted, κυνοῦσας. For the kiss of Judas, Matthew and Mark use καταφιλέω.

The genitive plural αὐτῶν is the same for all three grammatical genders, so, as in English, you cannot tell that the kissees are blokes. But the genitive singular αὐτῆς is unambiguously feminine, so the kisser is definitely female. --Lambiam 21:15, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This is helpful and inspiring. In reply:

Noted, and this could be a device I use, like a paper town sub-plot.
It's just an artifact of the software I'm using.
I'll go with ὑπὸ since you've said it's clearly better and the AI supports your claim.
I think "that of mine which is being watched" is the sort of wordiness that makes sense for the story.
Certainly creepy, but not so much for the cultic story. I use this word because the fictional magic system has three 'types' of divination of increasing 'sincerity', so "sight" isn't quite right, I think, but maybe here I was just flat wrong on what a participle is and now I'm getting confused with the basic grammar, I guess. Here are the three types, so I'd welcome any pointers for using more a precise set of stems and a way to clear up my grammar confusion.

Stem: Σκέπτομ- (Observation or Examination)

Inflections: -ενος, -ένη, -ενον (m, f, n)

Stem: ἑρμηνεύ- (Interpretation or Explanation)

Inflections: -ων, -ουσᾰ, -ον (m, f, n)

Stem: Γιγνώσκ- (Judgement or Determination)

Inflections: -ων, -ουσᾰ, -ον (m, f, n)

Again, wordiness works.

Finally, can you speak to the the noun inflection agreement? Since the article agrees with the gender of the noun, does the noun inflection agree with the gender of the person? Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 23:26, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In a given context, the inflected form of a given noun is only determined by its number (singular/dual/plural) and the grammatical case imposed by the context (nominative/genitive/...). Wiktionary gives inflection tables for most nouns. For example, for ὄψις see wikt:ὄψις#Inflection (click "show"). When an adjective or participle is nominalized, it inherits the gender and number of the entity/ies of which it is an attribute. The gender of abstract entities is normally taken to be neuter, e.g. φαινόμενον. --Lambiam 23:57, 15 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm really grateful for your help. Nominalized participle was the grammar vocabulary word I was missing. I take it then that the translations I've listed are correctly nominalized participles, but should always be neuter (i.e., Σκέπτομενον,ἑρμηνεύον, Γιγνώσκον). Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 02:49, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The words ἑρμηνεῦον and γιγνῶσκον have circumflex accents.^[1][2] Whether the gender assignment is correct depends on the context. --Lambiam 10:55, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You said "when an adjective or participle is nominalized, it inherits the gender and number of the entity/ies of which it is an attribute". Does that mean in this context "it inherits the gender and number of the diviner"? Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 22:19, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There may be a grammatical misunderstanding. English has present participles, which are used like adjectives. English also has gerunds, which are verbal nouns. They have identical appearances but different meanings. When a participle is used as a noun, it becomes grammatically indistinguishable from the gerund, potentially creating ambiguities because the difference in meaning remains. In the sentence "people should receive in proportion to their deserving", deserving is a gerund. In the sentence "the delineation between the deserving and the undeserving is not a recent phenomenon", it is a nominalized participle. You appear to be under the impression that Greek present participles can be used as gerunds, but this dual use of the same forms is specific to English. The nominalized meaning of γιγνῶσκον is not that of some entity's act of knowing; it refers to the knowing entity itself. In the link I gave above the word is used by Xenophon, putting the words in the mouth of Socrates, as a participle qualifying the neuter noun βρέφος, meaning "baby". In this case the phrase has negative polarity – the baby does not know. But in some context we might have a savant baby, and then one could use neuter τὸ γιγνῶσκον to refer to the grammatically neuter baby itself, but not to its savviness, just like in English "the savant was drooling" does not mean we witnessed erudition produce saliva. --Lambiam 13:19, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If that theory of proportionality were correct, then your comments here would be a compliment. Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 17:32, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I don't understand this comment. As to the appropriate verbal noun, I think you can use τὸ + infinitive, e.g. τὸ σκέπτεσθαι ἐμοῦ. --Lambiam 22:43, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would be slightly skeptical of the assumption that non-binary people would want to be referred to by the ancient Greek neuter gender. It would be basically the same thing as using the pronoun "it" in modern English. Are non-binary people now OK with being referred to as "it"? And in older Indo-European languages, the masculine and neuter were distinguished from each other at most in the nominative and accusative cases. All other case forms were the same. There used to be a relic of this in English, when the possessive of "it" was "his" until around 1600, so that "his" (a historical genitive case form) had both masculine and neuter meanings. The form "its" was then brought into existence by analogy to eliminate this ambiguity (but still today, "whose" can be considered to be the possessive of both "who" and "what" for some purposes)... AnonMoos (talk) 21:56, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Surely me being in group doesn't make my opinion mean anything special, but 1) I'm skeptical that there's a 1:1 correspondence between Ancient Greek neuter gender and English "it", 2) the neuter gender is rather novel in my experience, so it feels validating, and 3) your comment answers none of the questions and in fact reading it was the most useless experience I've had all month, maybe all year, so congratulations Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 22:16, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

And congratulations to you for ignoring the expertise of someone who knows quite a bit more about ancient Greek than you do. You use the neuter gender whenever you say the word "it", so I don't know what's so "novel" about it... AnonMoos (talk) 23:48, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the best-known non-binary character from Ancient Greece is Hermaphroditus. What pronoun(s) do the original sources use for them? Narky Blert (talk) 11:27, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The proper noun Ἑρμαφρόδιτος is masculine. Diodorus Siculus in his book Bibliotheca historica, uses the masculine definite article: τὸν ὀνομαζόμενον Ἑρμαφρόδιτον – "the so-named Hermaphroditus".^[3] Lucian, in the Dialogue between Apollo and Dionysus, lets Apollo refer to Hermaphroditus, disapprovingly, with masculine pronouns: ὁ δὲ θῆλυς καὶ ἡμίανδρος – "he on the other hand is feminine and half-man".^[4] --Lambiam 14:10, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. This reply is based on creative problem solving (Narky's comment) and research with proper sources (Lambian's comment). Schyler (exquirito veritatem bonumque) 16:14, 17 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]