Re: Alexarchus the Conlanger(?)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Benct Philip Jonsson" <conlang@...>

> Sally Caves skrev:
> > Addendum: I think it very likely that Thomas More,
> > scholar that he was, could have read about Alexarchus and
> > his Ouranapolis in Athenaeus. He remarks that his
> > Utopians have been exposed to Greek, and I think to
> > Persian as well.
> >
> > But then, this account drives home how universal this
> > impulse is in us: invent a country, a people, a language,
> > maps, ... get rich and make it all real.
>
> What makes this more intriguing to me is the question of the
> Greek concept of Language. We have all heard that the Greeks
> divided humanity into Greeks who spoke intelligibly and the
> rest who spoke like [barbar]. While it's true that they were
> aware that Greek had dialects, and that by Hellenistic times
> they must have been aware that different barbarians --
> Egyptians, Phoenicians, Scythians, Persians, the peoples of
> Asia Minor and of Italy, Celts -- didn't all speak the same
> [barbar], but to count in the Hellenistic world you had to
> speak Greek. One wonders how this attitude may have
> influenced an Hellenistic conlanger!
What intrigues me is how it impacted a Hellenistic critic!  What Atheneas
says about Alexarchus' linguistic eccentricities is interesting; he
eventually writes that even the Pythian Apollo could not decipher his texts
(he apparently wrote letters to people in his garbled tongue. It's hard to
know if Ath. is interested or disinterested, here, but my
sense, if we start from The Cratylus, is that the ancient and less ancient
Greeks on the whole were fairly intolerant of any neologisms and departures
from their language, except when it was used to make fun of other languages
(such as the gobbledy gook Aristophanes makes some of his foreigners speak
in his plays.
Ray would know this; he brought it up a year or so ago).

I think what you say in the rest of your letter is intriguing though: given
that there has been
increasing exposure to other cultures and languages, to what extent, then,
does Alexarchus display an interest in and approval of non-Greek, to the
extent that he invents his own kingdom and language?  Does he imagine that
he is king of that kingdom, or CONQUEROR of that kingdom? Tarn says that
Celment of Alexandria "treated him as a private man."

Sally