Re: Alexarchus the Conlanger(?)

I'd like to thank all that replied to this thread!

Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...>:

>  >>
>  >>> 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!
If Green's comparison with Nadsat is accurate and representative, the language
may have been a sort of "perfected" Greek.

Since Alexarchus himself was Macedonian, and presumably bilingual (Macedonian
and "real" Greek, whether those be considered different languages or not), he
might have had a somewhat more liberal attitude than a proper Greek would have
had.

                                                      Andreas

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