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- Newsgroups: sci.classics
- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!Csli!andrews
- From: andrews@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Avery Andrews)
- Subject: Re: Authoress of Odyssey
- Message-ID: <1992Nov13.104533.27299@Csli.Stanford.EDU>
- Organization: Stanford University CSLI
- Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 10:45:33 GMT
- Lines: 24
-
- In article <1dluvnINNqu5@agate.berkeley.edu>
- lizi@hermes.berkeley.edu (Cosma Shalizi) writes
-
- > Actually, Lucian says someplace that Homer was a Hellenized oriental like
- >himself, though not, as I recall, Phoenician. And there would have been a
- >good reason for her to invent vowels: How else do you record the meter?
- >Feh. I like this story better than Graves' :).
-
- Sadly for my fantasy, Powell says that the deviser couldn't have been
- (linguistically) semitic because of the way (s)he munged the sibilants,
- & also winds up making a bit of a case that it was Palamedes (whence
- the assumption of maleness, presumably). But the meter is one of his
- arguments: a consonantal system could probably have been made to work
- for commercial purposes, but not for poetry in an artificial language,
- especially one with words like `e:eroeidea'.
-
- What strikes me as most remarkable about the whole business was how much
- money must have been spent on it, given what I think I recall reading
- about the price of writing materials in this group a while ago.
-
-
- Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au
-
-
-