dreamer_easy | (no subject)

How do you crush them? I am in such a state at the moment that I can't focus on anything: all the things I love - textiles, reading, watching DVDs - doing to prove that it's not all work work work, I can't settle to. But I can't think what to do instead. I can't settle to work, obviously. It's all about staying awake until it's time to go to bed, then wishing the night were over because either I can't settle or I have dreadful dreams (e.g. about going completely apeshit in a restaurant because they brought me so much food! - adult nightmares are so much weirder than children's nightmares, aren't they?).

Ye cats! Have you got a decent doctor (or two)? What meds are you on? One possible idea: grab some music and go for a walk. Like, an all day walk. So you're knackered when bedtime arrives. I did this in the city the other day, alternately marching, shopping, and lurking in cafes; if nothing else the need to reach the other end of the CBD kept me going.

Yes, this is good. Actually, gardening has been quite good this weekend - private and safe, but nicely tiring. If I go out into London I spend money ;) Thank you. Also feeling better for being on LJ again and speaking to you!

Way hey! :D Are you on Tumblr? Come visit me:

http://dwellerinthelibrary.tumblr.com/

My postings at the mo are a mixture of Ancient Egypt and Korean pop stars. XD

Alas, I don't really do tumblr - though will keep an eye on your page. It's like having credit cards, I feel, or even horcruxes - as though the more social sites I am on the more I am splitting myself up (I don't have any credit cards and only one debit card, it just feels safer) - so work and home internet plus FB is really enough for me. LJ is an indulgence I tried to cure myself of, but I was missing you and reqbat and karinmollberg too much! And I guess you're NOT on FB. Well, it's perfectly acceptable to have another social account just to talk to three good friends, isn't it!?
I've done well this week - been doing a lot of Ancient Greek in preparation for teaching at the annual summer school, and can feel my brain cranking into academic action (making me, of course, feel a bit sad at the discovery that it is so little used in the normal course of teaching!). And I have been looking after my roses. Shall I tell you something dreadful: I may worry more about the roses than the cats while I'm away! I guess it's because they're even more hopeless: one football kicked over by the neighbours, and the poor little things could peg out.

Ancient Greek! You can help me with something! Hang on *goes to rummage*

Here we are! It's a chapter on Greek art which describes a statue as "a representation of Hermaphroditos anasyromenos (Hermaphrodite exposing itself)". I was a bit miffed at that "itself" (to quote Commander Riker, "To us, that's rude") so I poked around online trying to work out the gender of anasyromenos. According to Wikipedia (lol) the -os ending doesn't tell you the gender of a word, since it can be used for both male and female nouns, which I guess would be appropriate for Hermaphrodite. Does this make anything like sense?

I feel for your roses. The only vegetation I have ever successfully cultivated was a potato plant in a pot, which was cruelly annihilated by a fallen branch during a windstorm.

Aha! I can actually answer this question! :D
Yes, the -os ending is usually masculine, but - as the article says (I am usually happy with Wikipedia!) - there are two-termination adjectives, which use -os for both masculine and feminine (the usual feminine endings are -a/-e and the neuter -on, though there's also the 3rd declension which is a massive spanner in the works but not relevant here).
BUT what you have here is not an adjective, but a participle, so this IS a masculine ending, as of course is the -os on Hermaphroditos. Greek, being a patriarchal society, of course uses the masculine as a default setting. Though it's neat in a way, because of course the Aphrodite part of the name is so incontrovertibly feminine that there is a delicious juxtaposition with the masculine ending, which is linguistically quite shivery.
Yes, 'itself' is rude. No Greek or Roman would ever use the neuter of a living being, particularly a human, unless they had actually used a word like 'creature' to dehumanise or generalise them into a concept deliberately first. In Catullus' version of the Attis story, he makes Attis' self-castration render him female - so he has masculine adjectives beforehand, and feminine ones after, although he is also described as a 'fake-woman'. But very few Classical scholars are open to the simple option of saying 'hirself' or going for a neutral phrasing such as 'self-exposing'. Sad but true.
I am so excited, though, about the thing you have not picked up on, which is the lack of reflexive pronoun in the Greek. In Latin it would be 'se' which is gender-neutral. But Greek has a middle voice (as well as the active and passive) which is used for reflexive actions and for actions which you do for your own benefit, which is the -men- bit of the ending of the participle.
*cough* Er, does this help?!
:) x

This is extraordinarily interesting!!

If Hermaphroditos was exposing someone else, would s/he be, erm, anasyros?

There's a thing I keep coming across where "androgynous" is equated with "neuter", for example:

http://ikhet-sekhmet.livejournal.com/69316.html

http://ikhet-sekhmet.livejournal.com/57628.html

To what extent this reflects genuinely ancient ideas about gender idk. But it is interesting that Ancient Greek, like English, has no neuter pronoun suitable for human beings (other than "one", which isn't much help), making it difficult to even begin to discuss genders which don't fit the grammatical categories. (Fascinatingly, Sumerian lacks gender, but Akkadian, the language which replaced it, doesn't.)

This is all highly relevant to the novel I'm writing. Thank you! :D

anasyron (with a long 'oh') is masculine, anasyrousa in the feminine.

I think that the problem here is the tension between gender as in biological sex vs gender as in language. We cannot know, because we are way out of their mindset, exactly how ancient cultures saw this in their own languages (if a lion could talk, etc.), though the Catullus is an important clue. One (lol) also needs to remember that the Greeks, for instance, did not divide people up by sexuality - it was considered normal to be attracted to people you found attractive, regardless of their sex (the only abnormality was forcing your attentions on people who didn't want it) very healthy of them! So I do not think that one can say that Dionysus is asexual because he's bi-sexual (if I understood correctly where that page was going) - it's more that he, like Aphrodite, is so INCREDIBLY sexy and sexual, that he doesn't actually do it very often (but he does drink a lot) because the effects are so devastating.
As regards pronouns, I guess that the opposite of their view on sexuality is true - they never thought that someone might need a gender-neutral pronoun which was not inherently depersonalising.
Egyptian has genders, but you know more than I do about how that would work. When we neuter cats etc, we don't change their gender, and we certainly wouldn't with a human who had lost their primary sexual characteristics through accident or surgery unless se wished.
I will think more on this.

Well, it so happens that I have discovered a Greek slang term, 'gynaion' - which literally means "womanly thing", using the neuter ending to convey scorn for low class women who are no better than they should be. I should have remembered that Catullus does this too, with 'scortillum'. Discussion with pupils led us to translate the latter as "gash", though more prudish scholars suggest "tart" ...
I do not, btw, consider this usage to be anti-women, as such. If anything it is classist, referring to cheap prostitutes, and getting at their lack of gainful employment more than anything about them as women per se. There is presumably a similar usage for men of the same social group, it just so happens that the men I have been reading about are having sex with women.

I wonder if that linguistic shiver you get is similar to my frisson when the Ancient Egyptians create unexpected cosmic goddesses by whacking a "t" onto the end of the names of major gods - the female Ra, the female Horus, and I've just come across Atenet, the female sun-disc. Very keen on pairs and complements, they are, the Egyptians.

(This is me, btw, logged into one of my side journals. :)

Yes! Exactly! :D
And this is doable in Greek and Latin, though the point is that of course Zeus/deus/Ju[piter]/De[meter] are already all the same word!!!

Aha! I was just reading bits of Walter Burkert's "The Orientalizing Revolution". He draws a parallel between incidents in the Iliad and Gilgamesh, in which the goddess of love complains to her parents - Ishtar to An and Antu, Aphrodite to Zeus and Dione. He points out that just as Antu is the feminine of An, Dione is the feminine of Zeus. Hooray!

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=cIiUL7dWqNIC&lpg=PP1&ots=LMFvNJlF_7&dq=%22walter%20burkert%22&pg=PA98#v=onepage&q=dione&f=false