u/benjamin-crowell

When I try to write Greek, I feel totally lost about the connectives and particles. It seems like many of them can be used in multiple distinct ways, and they can also be combined in various ways. I own a copy of Dickey's composition book, and also the one by Lewis and Styler, but neither of them seems to go into the kind of detail that would be needed to make me feel more competent. I was thinking about just picking a random Greek text and going through it sentence by sentence and making lists of various examples, and sorting them out on index cards or something. I'm sure I would learn a lot from that, but it would be a big, time-consuming project. Is there a book or article that anyone can recommend?

If I want to say that 1+1=2, is it correct to express it like this?

ἓν καὶ ἕν ἐστι δύο.

My reasoning is that neuter forms are used for numbers as abstractions, and plurals of neuters usually take a singular verb. However, I don't know if ἐστι is idiomatic, or if it should be something else like ποιεῖ.

The following is a sketch of a problem that came up in a software project I'm working on, which is a retirement/hobby project, not a school assignment. There is no AI involved in any way.

I have a known set S of words, and a list of k words which are sampled from S.

The sampling procedure is that we have k=N+S, where N stands for noise and S for signal. Typically N100-1000 and S1-10. The noise words are chosen with independent and identically distributed probabilities, and the probabilities P_i are known. The signal words are chosen from some much smaller set, with an unknown distribution, and are specific to this particular sample.

As an example with a small sample, we could have this:

the when fastidious very the a fastidious table dog kimchi take for the

I want to devise some kind of statistical test that does a good job of telling me which words are good candidates to be signal words. Write n_i for the number of times that word i occurs in the sample. A priori, we would have expected that n_i would follow a Poisson distribution with mean kP_i, which is typically <<1. However, we are going to get N noise words no matter what. Roughly speaking, I would think that i would be a signal word if n_i=2 and P_i<~1/k, because the first occurrence was just because we had to get some word, but it's less likely that we would get a second hit on the same word, if P_i is this small.

Is there a nicer or more well-founded way of expressing this test, and handling the cases n_i=1 and n_i>2, all on the same footing? In the example above, I would want "fastidious" to be flagged as an almost certain signal word, and kimchi also with decent confidence.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions. I'll be out of town all day tomorrow, so please accept my apologies if you reply but I don't post a response for a while.

There is this long sentence in Heliodorus:

> δέος δὲ διαφθαρῆναι μὲν καταμείναντας λιμῷ, διαφθαρῆναι δὲ ἐφόδῳ τινῶν, ἤτοι τῶν ἐναντίων πάλιν ἐλθόντων ἢ καὶ νὴ Δία τῶν σὺν ἡμῖν γεγονότων, εἰ καθ᾽ ἕν ποτε συλλεγέντες καὶ τὸν ἐνθάδε θησαυρὸν οὐκ ἀγνοοῦντες ἐπέλθοιεν διὰ τὰ χρήματα.

I can't find any finite verb in this sentence (except for ἐπέλθοιεν, which is inside a conditional). Is this an idiom where δέος implies "The fear is that ..." or "A fear exists that ...?" I don't see anything relevant in the LSJ or CGL entries. I guess the copula can always be implicit in Greek, but it seems to me like that usually happens when it's clearer what is copulating with what.

I have a Greek-English dictionary that has entries like this:

ἀνήρ - man, husband

I would like to figure out some method for a computer to determine whether another English word aligns well with such a definition. Examples of inputs and outputs, for the definition given above, would be: man->true, fellow->true, person->true, temple->false, throw->false. (The output could instead be some kind of quantitative score rather than a boolean.)

Methods I've thought of, but am not really satisfied with:

1. Compare every word in the definition with the given word, using a word embedding. (Or sum the vectors for the words in the definition.) Exclude common words like "the." Problem: I've played around with Word2Vec and BERT for this, and the results just aren't that great. E.g., the BERT model I tried gave a very high rating to the pair goat-mountain.

2. Use WordNet's lists of synonyms. Problem: Their definition of synonymy is sometimes too strict and other times too permissive. They don't consider man-person to be a synonym pair, but they do consider dog-click to be (e.g., "dogging the hatch").

3. Use a similarity measure based on WordNet's graph structure. There is a review of these methods in Lingling Meng et al, 2013, A Review of Semantic Similarity Measures in WordNet. Problem: This will still be too permissive for pairs like dog-click.

4. Query an LLM. Problem: This is a hobby project, and I don't want to spend money.

Any ideas for approaches that I haven't tried?

I'm currently working on a small keyaki plate and a large, thick maple bowl, which I intend to do with predominantly black urushi, but some honsyu and maybe some simple maki-e decorations. These are my first attempts to get a mirrorlike finish on a real urushi project. Previously I practiced on a couple of pieces of scrap lumber (which were pine and difficult to work with), and I also did a bowl where I had intended to get a mirrorlike finish on the inside with honsyu, but actually it ended up showing the wood grain (which was OK).

I've found that there is quite a learning curve in terms of getting rid of contaminants, and also mixing up a black lacquer that cooperates when I'm applying it, that has good leveling, and that is easy to apply in a thin enough layer so that it doesn't pucker. The recipe that I'm currently using for a small batch, after some iteration, is this (in units of grams):

0.50 black urushi (kourin jou)

0.25 clear urushi (kourin jou suki sugurome)

0.13 ki

0.12 naphtha

0.05 turpentine

Because it's difficult to measure out these small quantities for each work session, I'm thinking of mixing up the three urushis and putting them in a syringe. Before I did that, I thought I would ask for comments on whether what I'm doing makes sense. I'm also curious whether it would work to include the thinners in the mix that I'm going to store. I would think that being sealed inside the tube would prevent the thinners from evaporating, but I don't know if they would do something bad to the chemistry over longer periods stored in the fridge, or whether the naphtha would cause degradation of the gasket, which I guess is some polymer.

The purpose of the ingredient list, based on my understanding of what other people have said and my trial and error, is:

black urushi ... the basic ingredient

clear urushi ... for better leveling

ki ... to lower the viscosity for easier handling

naphtha ... to make it easier to get a thin enough layer to avoid puckering

turpentine ... for better leveling

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

I came across this set of lemmas in LSJ, which somehow just felt like a brain-slap to me:

νέρτερος νέρτατος νερτέριος νερτεροδρόμος νερτερόμορφος

They basically all seem to relate to the underworld, or to the less mystical idea of being underground.

Beekes has no entry for any of these.

Is there anything that can be said about this word-family's etymology? I'm imagining some Cthulhu-style underground deity, Νέρτων, lost in the mists of Pelasgian deep time.

Aethiopica 1.30:

ἅπερ ὡς εἶδέ τε καὶ ἤκουσεν ὁ Θύαμις, ἐνθύμιον αὐτῷ τὸ ὄναρ γίνεται, καθ᾽ ὃ τὴν Ἶσιν ἑώρα καὶ τὸν νεὼν ἅπαντα λαμπάδων καὶ θυσιῶν ἀνάμεστον· καὶ ταῦτα ἐκεῖνα εἶναι τὰ νῦν ὁρώμενα, καὶ πρὸς τὰ ἐναντία τῶν προτέρων τὴν ὄψιν συνέβαλλεν, ὡς ἔχων οὐχ ἕξει τὴν Χαρίκλειαν, ὑπὸ τοῦ πολέμου ταύτης ἀφαιρεθείσης, καὶ ὡς φονεύσει καὶ οὐ τρώσει, ξίφει καὶ οὐκ Ἀφροδίτης νόμῳ.

NOTE: Reddit sometimes decides to autotranslate posts. If this passage from the Aethiopica shows up in some other language than Greek, that's what's happened.

The context here is that the bandit king Thuamis is in love with the young priestess Chariclea whom he has captured, and he has had a dream from Isis, which he originally interpreted as meaning that he would end up having her as his woman. Now his outlaw community is being attacked by an armed force, and he thinks, uh oh, the dream probably actually meant that Chariclea is going to get killed.

Why are the verbs φονεύσει and τρώσει in the active voice? I'm assuming the implied subject to be Chariclea.

[EDIT] This post may not be of much interest to others now that my problems have been cleared up. The TL;DR is that I was using coffee filters for filtering urushi, and I didn't understand that the filters were introducing lint and crud into the urushi. The solution to the problem (for me, for the time being) is just not to do the filtering at all.

---

[original post]

I've been trying to use coffee filters for filtering urushi, but it seems not to be working well. I'm not totally sure what is going wrong, but I'm getting a ton of particles coming out on the surface. (I'm starting to wonder if this one batch of kourin urushi is just unusually high in crud.) At first I thought it was dirty brushes or something, but I systematically worked on keeping everything clean, and I'm still getting crud. My suspicion is that the coffee filters are too thick, so that when I force the urushi out through them, the paper is actually just rupturing. But of course by the time I'm that far along, it's a wadded-up mess, so I can't easily tell.

The traditional thing to use seems to be a type of very thin filter paper called Yoshino paper, sold by Mejiro Co. There was a US reseller on amazon, but they no longer have the item. You can buy it from urushi.life, but that takes a month to get to the US and would require combining the item with a lot of other stuff to get a decent price on shipping. Since I'm not even sure if I've diagnosed the problem correctly, I don't really want to wait a month to find out if this helps.

Is there some kind of filter paper used in chem labs that would work for this purpose and be easy to obtain? It seems like all I'd really care about would be that it has to be strong and thin.

I came across a video on youtube of someone using a linen cloth for this. That might work, but I'm unclear on how to spec how fine the weave of the cloth has to be, and I'm also not sure how you go about cleaning the cloth afterward, or whether you just have to throw it away. Wash it in turpentine? It seems like it would take a lot of turps.

Aethiopica 1.26:

> πολλὰ μία ἡμέρα καὶ δύο πολλάκις ἔδοσαν τῶν εἰς σωτηρίαν, καὶ τύχαι παρέσχον ἃ βουλαῖς ἄνθρωποι μυρίαις οὐκ ἐξεῦρον.

Why is there the genitive τῶν, and what is its gender? I'm taking "τῶν εἰς σωτηρίαν" to be a unit, which I would have thought would mean something like "of the things leading to salvation."

If τῶν is neuter and refers to the same thing as ἃ, then this sort of makes sense to me except that I would have expected ἔδοσαν τὰ εἰς σωτηρίαν, "have given the things that would provide salvation." δίδωμι has a slot for an accusative describing what is given.

Or if τῶν is feminine and refers to ἡμέρες, then I don't understand how the syntax of the part before the comma fits together.

Would it make sense for there to be a comma after παρέσχον, so that the relative-pronoun phrase "ἃ ..." is the object of both ἔδοσαν and παρέσχον (both aorist)? In that case, is the idea that time provides these things, and it's getting them out of (genitive τῶν) a basket of goodies, any one of which could lead to salvation?

I have a text I'm formatting (the Aethiopica) in which there are long portions, stretching across many section headers, where there is a framed story being told by someone. The direct speech can get as much as three levels deep, which is cumbersome, and for the reader it can be confusing trying to remember who is speaking. I'm using dinkuses (***) to transition into some of these longer narratives, and I also want to use titles on the sections to indicate who's speaking. If it was in English, it would look like this:

4.33

...

"Oh, please don't end your story now, Calasiris. We're dying of curiosity."

-***-

Well, if you really want to know, what happened was that after we got to Memphis, ...

4.34 Calasiris continues

And that night I had a dream...

If it was the first time I was quoting Calasiris's speech without quotation marks, I would just have "4.34 Calasiris," but here his unmarked speech started in the previous section, so I want to mark it as "continues" or "continuing." In Greek, I'm wondering what is the most idiomatic way of saying this. What I've come up with so far is Καλάσιρις βαδίζων. Is there something more idiomatic I could use?

Aithiopika 1.21:

ἣ δὲ πολύν τινα χρόνον τὸ βλέμμα τῇ γῇ προσερείσασα, καὶ πυκνὰ τὴν κεφαλὴν ἐπισείουσα, λόγον τινὰ καὶ ἐννοίας ἀθροίζειν ἐῴκει·

The context is that she is being held captive by a pirate chieftain, who has asked her if she will marry him of her own free will. She is an upper-class virgin, in love with a different man, and is very brave but AFAICT is either shy as part of her personality or behaves shyly as part of the author's characterization of how a virtuous girl should behave in such a situation.

What does πυκνά mean here? Frequently? Wisely? Discreetly? The translation I looked at had "slowly," which didn't seem to match anything in the LSJ entry.

For some time now, reddit has had a misfeature that non-transparently replaces a post with a machine translation into what it thinks is the user's native language. I got reminded of this recently when I made a post here that was in ancient Greek, and I started getting comments that didn't seem to make sense -- because the people writing the comments were seeing a machine translation into English. For example, people were criticizing the translation, which they attributed to me.

It's possible to turn off this misfeature for specific languages, but it seems like you can't turn it off globally. In the web browser interface, Go to Settings - Preferences - Language - Content Languages. You can turn it off for up to 10 languages.

Your experience will probably also depend on whether you're using the cell-phone interface or the web browser one. They also seem to fiddle around and change the behavior of this feature every 6 months or so.

It seems like a no-brainer that reddit should allow specific subreddits, such as this one, to turn off the feature throughout the subreddit. However, they don't really care as long as they're optimizing ad revenue. Just one more way in which tech billionaires are making the world worse in ways that nobody asked for.

The title says what it is. Recently I noticed that, after curing, there were about a dozen tiny craters in the fairly thick coat of ki I'd just applied to a plate. I thought maybe it was something happening during curing. I had to fill them in with sabi.

But then I did another coat today on the same plate, and I noticed the same thing in the fresh ki as I was brushing it on. It looked like little bubbles. Maybe they're air bubbles? Nuclei formed by dust? I though they might be drops of vegetable oil that I hadn't succeeded in cleaning out of the brush when I got it ready to use, but that seems like it wouldn't make sense because urushi and oil are mutually soluble.

I kept brushing to try to get them to go away, and after about 5 min of steady brushing, the ki was getting tacky and they were almost all gone.

Have other people experienced this?

Another thing that occurred to me was that it might be because the ki was going bad. I think I bought it in April. I've had this portion of it in a 60 mL plastic syringe, inside a ziplock bag with a big dessicant packet, in the fridge. But maybe air or moisture is getting in and messing it up...? However, I don't see any signs of cured urushi collecting inside or gumming up the gasket on the plunger.

Or maybe the problem is something else having to do with the brush, like I have some kind of crud trapped in it (other than oil) that I'm not getting out.

σχολαστικοὶ δύο ἐδυσφόρουν πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἐπὶ τῷ τοὺς πατέρας αὐτῶν ζῇν.

τοῦ δὲ ἑνὸς εἰπόντος· «θέλεις οὖν; ἀποπνίξει ἕκαστος ἡμῶν τὸν ἴδιον.»

«μὴ γένοιτο,» εἶπεν ὁ ἄλλος, «ἵνα μὴ πατραλοῖαι ἀκούσωμεν. ἀλλ᾽, εἰ βούλει, σὺ τὸν ἐμὸν σφάξον, κἀγὼ τὸν σόν.»

--Φιλόγελως

I've been a computer hobbyist since about 1980, and I'm a lifelong science nerd. When LLMs became a big thing around 2022, I played around with them and interpreted them as snake oil or "stochastic parrots."

But things change over time, and although I initially saw the technology as 100% stupid, I see the current iteration as 90% stupid, 9% evil, and 1% ... holy shit, it's amazing that it can do that. One thing that's changed is that although the initial chatbots were LLMs and not much more, there are now more complex systems with a lot of moving parts, with an LLM as just one of the parts.

Has there been a book written yet at the semi-popular level that explains the science while showing appropriate skepticism about the hype? It's OK if your answer is "No, book publishing hasn't yet caught up." I'm not super interested in sociological, political, or environmental critiques of AI, since I have already formed my own provisional opinion on those aspects of it (that it's probably really bad). I'm open to reading a book that describes the science as it was a couple of years ago, or an interesting, well-researched book that is in some other way a near-miss in terms of my criteria.

Every year at the beginning of August, I've been posting a vocabulary quiz here (2024 2025). The comment threads from the previous tests contain a lot of discussion of the most common issues and questions that occur to people about this test. The source code for generating the quizzes is here. If you don't want to count compounds as part of your vocabulary, on the theory that many compounds have meanings that are obvious, then simply don't count those, and your estimate will be lower. There is no universally valid way to estimate the size of someone's vocabulary, and for example, there are various published estimates of the average size of a US first-year college student's English vocabulary, differing by more than an order of magnitude. This year's test was generated using the same algorithm and data as last year's, so if you took the test then and take it again now, the results should be comparable, and you can tell if your vocabulary grew.

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 20: ________
  ἄν βία γῆ δίδωμι ἕ
  εἰς ἐπεί ἱερός καί κατά
  μή οἶκος παῖς πᾶς πρός
  πρόσωπον σπέρμα τίκτω χρόνος χρύσεος

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 100: ________
  ἀνάγω ἀνδροφόνος διαιρέω δμώς ἐπιβάλλω
  ἡλικιώτης ἵκω λίθος πατρίς πεντακισχίλιοι
  πολίτευμα πομπή πρόθυμος προσάγω σός
  συλλαμβάνω συνήθης τίω τυγχάνω χρηστός

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 200: ________
  ἀίδιος ἀνδραποδίζω ἀπαρχή ἀραβέω δισμύριοι
  δόλος εὐψυχία ἠθεῖος ἰάχω κατάκειμαι
  κατακρίνω κατατίθημι μέδομαι μήδομαι ὅρμος
  παραβάλλω προβολή σκηπτοῦχος σύμπτωμα τύραννος

Count how many of the following words you know
and multiply by 1000: ________
  ἀδόκιμος αἶνος ἀκρογωνιαῖος ἀνακαινίζω ἀρχεῖον
  ἀφθορία βλάξ γεῦσις ἐκπαθής ἐπιλείπω
  ἠπεροπευτής αἱμοφόρυκτος κατακαλέω κορυφόω νεόδαρτος
  περιούσιος σκόπελος στηρίζω συμφερτός τιμόω

Add up the results. This is an estimate of how
many dictionary words you know in ancient Greek,
out of the 26838 most common words.

[EDIT] There was an error in the original test I posted. The bogus lemma ἰμάτιον (nonexistent lemma with smooth breathing) was included in the final group. I replaced it with another randomly chosen word, αἱμοφόρυκτος.

Heliodorus, Aethiopica 1.16:

ἐπῄνει ταῦτα ἡ Δημαινέτη, καὶ προστιθέναι τάχος τοῖς δεδογμένοις ἱκέτευεν.

Here Demaineta is telling her slave to go ahead with a plan. My understanding of ἱκετεύω is that it's something like "supplicate, beg," and it has connotations that it's what a mortal does to a god or a human to another human who is in a position of power or dominance over them. Is it unusual that this is used here to describe what a mistress does to her slave? Can the verb's meaning just be diluted to "ask to?" Or is there a humorous implication here, that, ha ha, the slave has her mistress wrapped around her finger?