Re: Alexarchus the Conlanger(?)

 >>
 >>> I came across a piece about a certain Hellenistic
 >>> aristocrat named Alexarchus in Peter Green's "Alexander
 >>> to Actium". This apparently excentric gentleman, a
 >>> brother of Cassander, is supposed to have have founded
 >>> an utopianist city called Ouranopolis ("City of Heaven")
 >>> on the Athos peninsula, for which he is said to have
 >>> made a language; Green writes that "he was a linguist,
 >>> who invented a language for his foundation: a specimen
 >>> perserved by Athenaeus looks like the Greek equivalent
 >>> of Anthony Burgess's Nadsat in _A Clockwork Orange_,
 >>> foreign loanwords oddly compounded. It would be
 >>> interesting to know if he actually got people to talk
 >>> that way."
 >>>
 >>> Anyone here know more about this intriguing project?
 >>>
 >>>                                           Andreas

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!

It is also significant that the Romans apparently never
dreamt of ever using any other languages than Latin and
Greek, despite the fact that there at least two other
languages -- Egyptian and Aramaic -- with long traditions as
administrative and literary languages and considerable
numbers of speakers within the Empire. Certainly there was a
need for interpreters and translators for these and other
languages, but apparently only Latin and Greek had any
official status.

It is also significant that when Christianity entered the
scene and wished to translate its scriptures into different
vernaculars it was felt that each language needed to have
its own distinct script -- notwithstanding that Romans,
other Italians, Celts and others had used the Greek alphabet
only minimally altered for centuries. When St. Cyril set
about to create a Slavic alphabet he first invented an a-
priori script, the Glagolitic, which only later was replaced
with an augmented Greek alphabet, and then with signs
borrowed from Glagolitic. The circumstances when the
Georgian and Armenian alphabets were created were AFAIK
similar: most notably they are said to have been invented by
the same man, yet they are very different.
--


/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

                                 (Max Weinreich)

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