Re: Attic months

Mark J. Reed wrote:
> On 1/2/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
>
>
>>Yes - the Greek world generally seems to have used a lunisolar calendar
>>in which each month began with the new moon, as in Jewish & Muslim
>>calendars; and, like the Jewish calendar, a 13th lunar month was
>>intercalated at regular intervals to keep the calendar in line with the
>>solar year.
>
>
> Or at irregular ones, at any rate.
The earlier systems appear to have used an 8 year cycle of 99 lunations,
i.e. three years in the cycle had an extra intercalated month. But as
this is about a day and half out of sync with the solar year at the end
of the eight-year period, I guess there must have been ad hoc
arrangements from time to time to modify the intercalation to bring the
months back in line with the solar year.

> Based on what I've read so far,
> the Athenian calendar seems to have been administered in a somewhat ad
> hoc fashion during the classical period, despite Meton's work.
Yes, Meton's 19 year cycle was more accurate, but even his cycle was not
100% accurate (it is one day adrift after 219 years). In the 4th cent
BCE a guy called Kallipos sought to remedy the defects of the Metonic
cycle by using a cycle of 76 years. But even his system gets a day out
of sync after 553 years.

But while the Metonic cycle caught on (it is still used for the modern
Hebrew calendar and for determining Easter in both the Old and the New
style calendars), the Callipic cycle did not catch on. I guess a 76 year
cycle was felt just too long for practical use.

> While
> never quite as badly out of sync as the Roman calendar became before
> Julius's reform, there are several references with two dates, one
> "according to the gods" (based on the season) and the other "according
> to the archons" (based on the calendar).
The "according to the gods" is the traditional 12 or 13 lunation system
of the lunisolar calendar, "according to the archons' must surely refer
to the civil calendar brought in under Kleistenes in the 5th cent BC in
which the civil year consisted of 360 days, divided into ten 'prytanies'
of 36 days each. The councilors of each of 10 'tribes' took it in turns
to act as administrators during each prytany.

Kleisthenes attempted to keep the two systems in sync thus:
(a) the civil year began as close to the 1st Hekatombaion as possible.
(b) the lunisolar year had a 13th month in the 1st, 3rd & 6th years of
an eight-year cycle;
(c) the civil year had a cycle of five years, and intercalated an extra
prytany of 30 days within this period. The intercalation does not seem
to have been at a set point, but determined, it would seem, when the
start of the civil had moved too far from the 1st Hekatombaion.

A simple calculation (5 x 8) shows the civil & religious systems came
back together after 40 years. But even so, neither system was correct
(presumably when the Metonic cycle became normal for the lunisolar year,
the Athenian prytany system had fallen into disuse) - so I guess there
would always have been some ad hoc tinkering when things got noticeably
out of alignment.

As for the Romans - the intercalation was determined by the Pontifex
Maximus, and in the turmoil of the long period of civil wars which
followed the Punic Wars of the 3rd century BC (when the rich got richer
& the poor got even poorer), intercalation was often neglected (the
Pontifex no doubt more concerned at saving his own neck than worrying
about the calendar) or manipulated for purely political purposes
(changing dates of elections etc), so that when Gaius Julius Caesar
assumed control of the Empire and, among other things, was created
Pontifex Maximus, the calendar was in a complete mess.

>
>>>Any help reconstructing the native spelling would be appreciated.
>>
>>Done - see below:
>
>
> Wow!  Not only the spellings, but the pronunciation and etymology.
> As the Athenians would no doubt say, you da andros!
>
>
>>>Hekatombaion  (Cancer)
>>
>>As above, but the final 'o' is long: ἑκατομβαιών /hekatombaj.O:n/
>
>
> Wait, wait, what?  In Greek, *short* O's are /o/ and *long* O's are
> /O/?   My little Romance-centric brain tells me that's just . . .
> wrong. :)
Forget Romance - think Middle English   :)

There is only one short 'o'; whether it tended towards [o] or [0] we
cannot tell, tho the fact that long o which developed in Greek itself
was [o:] as opposed to the inherited IE long o which was [0:]. It seems
that in the classical pronunciations, the mid vowels /e/ and /o/ had,as
in Middle English, _two_ long pronunciations, one high & the other low.
Before the Athenians adopted the Ionian alphabet, all three sounds were
denoted by the same letters E and O. After the adoption of the Ionian
alphabet, the sounds were written thus:
ε /e/; ει /e:/; η /E:/
ο /o/; ου /o:/; ω /O:/

Thinks: it might be better to represent the thing _phonemically_ thus:
ε /e/; ει /e_r:/; η /e_o:/
ο /o/; ου /o_r:/; ω /o_o:/

By the Hellenistic period, the long vowels had shifted upwards, so that
ει = /i:/ and was identical in sound with long ι, while η had become
/e:/; likewise, ου had become /u:/ and ω was just /o:/.

For a reasonable description of ancient Greek pronunciation, I suggest
Sidney Allen's "Vox Graeca", ISBN 0521335558 (paperback) or 0521040213
(hardcover). But better still IMO, if you read French, is Michel
Lejeune's "Phonétique historique du Mycénien et du Grec ancien", ISBN
2-252-03496-3

>>In modern Greek such nouns become masculines ending -ώνας
>
>
> And how is Zeta pronounced in modern Greek?
[z]

But the final letter of -ώνας is sigma [s].

>
>>>Mounichion      (Aries)
>>
>>μουνιχιών /mo:nikhiO:n/ --> /mu:nikhiO:n/
>
>
>>But the Attic spelling with iota between the nu and khi, instead of the expected upsilon, is odd.
>
>
> I did see it transliterated elsewhere with a |y| instead of an |i|
> there.   Is there a hypothesis to explain the oddity?
Not that I know of.


> Many thanks!
You're welcome.

--
Ray
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