Greek lesson
hetero = different, homo = same
graph = writing, phone = speaking (I use the word:sound)
most English words pairs are heterographic heterophones
hat, discipline
some English word pairs are
homographic homophones
same writing - same sounding
bank (place for money) vs. bank (side of river)
some English word pairs are
heterographic homophones
different writing - same sounding
sail sale
these are often called homonyms
some English word pairs are
homographic heterophones
same writing - different souning
tear (to rip), tear (a result of crying)
To accurately describe the ambiguity, you need a word to describe the writing and a word to describe the pronunciation (sound).
The term homophone could refer to bank vs. bank words or sail vs. sale words
I have a friend who did her masters on heterographic homophones and homographic heterophones. After the first time she did an oral presentation she always referred to them as bank-bank words vs. tear-tear words when presenting her work orally.
Showing posts with label Greek. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Greek. Show all posts
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Ancient Olympics
STORY PREFACE
Story Summary
Since 1896, the world's leading athletes compete in the Olympics. Baron Pierre de Coubertin (father of the modern Olympics), believed that athletic competition between amateur athletes would help improve international relations. He faced strong initial opposition to his idea that sports could temper politics.Athens, the capital of Greece, hosted the first modern games. For more than a thousand years, another place in Greece - a sacred area called Olympia - hosted the ancient games. What do we know of those ancient games? How did they start? Why were they always held in Olympia?
To learn the answers to those - and more - questions, we need to take a trip back in time to the Archaic Period of ancient Greece.
THE LEGEND BEHIND THE GAMES
Oinomaos (Oenomaus) was a legendary king of Pisa (an area not far from Elis in the western part of Greece). His daughter Hippodameia, of marriageable age, had many suitors with whom Oinomaos was not always pleased. He had reason to worry. An oracle had warned Oinomaos that he would die at the hand of his son-in-law.
Boastful of his chariot-racing skills, Oinomaos issued a legendary challenge. He would determine the worth of any potential son-in-law by testing his racing skills. If the king failed to overtake any of his daughter's suitors in a chariot race between Olympia to the Isthmus of Corinth (where ships were moved overland in ancient times but now travel through the man-made Corinthian Canal), the victorious racer would could marry Hippodameia.
However, if any suitor lost the race, he would die. Many erstwhile suitors had already lost their heads to the sword of Oinomaos. The king, an expert charioteer, thought he would never lose. Then love interfered.
Desiring to marry a handsome suitor named Pelops, Hippodameia approached her father's charioteer, Myrtilus (Myrsilos), with a devious plan. If her father's chariot were missing a linchpin from one of its wheels, she could fix the outcome of the race between her father and her suitor. Myrtilus, also in love with Hippodameia, agreed to betray the king. He loosened the linchpin so the wheel would break free from the axle. (Note that some of the legends say it was Pelops who concocted the plan.)
With Oinomaos holding the reins of his horses, attempting to overtake the speeding chariot in front of him, his chariot wheels fell away. According to one version of the story, the king was caught in the reins and was dragged to death. Another version says that Pelops killed him. In either event, Oinomaos lost both control and his life. Pelops won the day and the bride. He also became king and, after conquering nearby Apia and Pelasgiotis, named the entire region after himself.
The southern part of the Greek mainland is called the Peloponnese (or Peloponnesus, meaning Island of Pelops) to this day.
To honor Zeus (whose statue at Olympia, later sculpted by Pheidias, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world) and to celebrate the life of Oinomaos (after his death) Pelops organized commemorative games to be held in Olympia. It was the beginning of a thousand-year tradition in the ancient Greek world. According to legend, it was also the beginning of a curse on Pelops' family.
Boastful of his chariot-racing skills, Oinomaos issued a legendary challenge. He would determine the worth of any potential son-in-law by testing his racing skills. If the king failed to overtake any of his daughter's suitors in a chariot race between Olympia to the Isthmus of Corinth (where ships were moved overland in ancient times but now travel through the man-made Corinthian Canal), the victorious racer would could marry Hippodameia.
However, if any suitor lost the race, he would die. Many erstwhile suitors had already lost their heads to the sword of Oinomaos. The king, an expert charioteer, thought he would never lose. Then love interfered.
Desiring to marry a handsome suitor named Pelops, Hippodameia approached her father's charioteer, Myrtilus (Myrsilos), with a devious plan. If her father's chariot were missing a linchpin from one of its wheels, she could fix the outcome of the race between her father and her suitor. Myrtilus, also in love with Hippodameia, agreed to betray the king. He loosened the linchpin so the wheel would break free from the axle. (Note that some of the legends say it was Pelops who concocted the plan.)
With Oinomaos holding the reins of his horses, attempting to overtake the speeding chariot in front of him, his chariot wheels fell away. According to one version of the story, the king was caught in the reins and was dragged to death. Another version says that Pelops killed him. In either event, Oinomaos lost both control and his life. Pelops won the day and the bride. He also became king and, after conquering nearby Apia and Pelasgiotis, named the entire region after himself.
The southern part of the Greek mainland is called the Peloponnese (or Peloponnesus, meaning Island of Pelops) to this day.
To honor Zeus (whose statue at Olympia, later sculpted by Pheidias, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world) and to celebrate the life of Oinomaos (after his death) Pelops organized commemorative games to be held in Olympia. It was the beginning of a thousand-year tradition in the ancient Greek world. According to legend, it was also the beginning of a curse on Pelops' family.
OLYMPIA: HOST OF THE GAMES
Festival games were held in Olympia, in the section of Greece called Elis. (Elis is in the northwestern Peloponnesus.) Getting more rain than other parts of this dry country, Elis has more trees and forests. It also has beautiful groves. One of those groves, called Altis, was a sacred place.Located in the valley between the rivers Alpheus and Kladeos, the grove of Altis represented holy - hence, neutral - ground. It was home (be patient with this slow-loading Greek web site) to the great sanctuary of Zeus, chief god of the Greeks, whom the ancients believed lived on Mount Olympus. A smaller sanctuary, dedicated to Hera (the wife of Zeus) was part of the sacred site. The area, where Greeks traveled to honor their gods, was also a perfect place to honor their top athletes. Included in the temple of Zeus (on the East Pediment) was a depiction of the chariot race between Oinomaos and Pelops.
For more than 1,000 years - in war or peace - Greeks gathered in Olympia for the Olympic festival. According to Hippias (a sophist who lived in Elis and, in the 5th century B.C., compiled a list of initial victors), the games began in about 776 B.C. They ended, in 393 A.D., when Emperor Theodosius I closed all ancient pagan sanctuaries and banned all associated games. His successor, Theodosius II, had the temples demolished in 426. Thereafter, earthquakes and floods buried the remains until the mid-19th century.
Let's take a trip to Olympia (today a small town of about 1,800 people who farm and tend to the tourists) to view what remains of the original Olympic stadium (and its surroundings).
A TRIP TO OLYMPIA
What did athletes, judges, and spectators see when they participated in the ancient Olympic Games? Between the writings of ancient historians, and ruins of buildings at Olympia, we can piece together what the games must have been like thousands of years ago.- Spectators passed through a vaulted entry way as they came into the Stadium.
- They sat on wooden stands which were mounted on the earthen bank surrounding the stadium. The distance from the foreground starting line to the finish line (with its still-original stones) was a stade (also called stadion and measuring about 192.28 meters) from which "stadium" gets its name.
- To be sure they had a good view of the finish line, judges had a nearby seating area.
- Olympic athletes trained in a Gymnasium at Olympia.
- The Philippeion (situated to the left of the path which led back to the Stadium) was started by Philip of Macedon and likely finished by his son, Alexander the Great, hundreds of years after the first Olympic Games.
- Only foot races were part of the original games. Later, other sports were added and athletes, especially wrestlers, trained in the courtyard of the Palestra.
- Pheidias, the sculptor, had a studio at Olympia where he worked on his great statue of Zeus. Parts of the two-room studio, and its exterior, remain.
- Deterioration of the great temple of Zeus was aided by an earthquake which caused many of the columns to fall.
WHO PARTICIPATED?
Male Greek athletes, who were born free, participated in the ancient Olympics. They wore no clothes during their meets and ran barefooted. Scholars believe the type of clothing worn at the time would have restricted peak athletic performance.Olympic festivals were so important that the Greeks imposed a Sacred Truce so athletes could freely travel. (In Greek, the word for truce - ekecheiria - means "holding of hands.") The words of the Truce were inscribed on a bronze discus, housed in the Temple of Hera, at Olympia. Its impact was significant.
While in effect, the truce suspended wars and death penalties, prevented armies from entering Elis and/or threatening the Games, and held legal disputes in abeyance. Sanctions were imposed against violators.
Women and girls could not participate as athletes in the ancient Olympic games. When equestrian events were added, women were allowed to own competing chariot teams and individual horses, but they could not ride the horses or guide the teams themselves. Pausanias (writing in the 2nd century A.D.) reports (at 5.8.11):
Afterwards they added races for chariots and pairs of foals, and for single foals with rider. It is said that the victors proclaimed were: for the chariot and pair, Belistiche, a woman from the seaboard of Macedonia...
Unmarried girls were allowed to watch the competition, but married women were absolutely forbidden on penalty of DEATH. Pausanias:
As you go from Scillus along the road to Olympia, before you cross the Alpheius, there is a mountain with high, precipitous cliffs. It is called Mount Typaeum. It is a law of Elis to cast down it any women who are caught present at the Olympic games, or even on the other side of the Alpheius, on the days prohibited to women.
A story is told of an exception to that rule. Pausanias continues:
However, they say that no woman has been caught, except Callipateira only....She, being a widow, disguised herself exactly like a gymnastic trainer, and brought her son to compete at Olympia. Peisirodus, for so her son was called, was victorious, and Callipateira, as she was jumping over the enclosure in which they keep the trainers shut up, bared her person. So her sex was discovered, but they let her go unpunished out of respect for her father, her brothers and her son, all of whom had been victorious at Olympia. But a law was passed that for the future trainers should strip before entering the arena.
Females, in honor of Hera, were allowed to run foot races in the Olympic stadium. However, these races (for girls, teenagers, and young women who likely wore knee-length tunics covering the left shoulder and breast) were not part of the ancient Olympic games, and the distance they ran (about 160 meters) was less than the distance for male competition (about 190 meters)
.
When Pierre de Coubertin launched the modern Olympics in 1896, he incorporated the ancient tradition of preventing females from participating in track and field events. That total ban lasted until the Amsterdam games of 1928. After Germany's Lina Radke collapsed that year, following her gold-medal run of the 800 meters, women were once again banned - this time from all races over 200 meters. Those restrictions were not lifted until the 1960 games.ANCIENT OLYMPIC SPORTS
The Olympics began in the Early Archaic Period - a time of Greek political, economic and cultural development. Some scholars think that Homer, a blind poet who is credited with both the Iliad and the Odyssey, likely lived (if he was an actual person) around 800 B.C., a mere twenty-four years after the first recorded Olympics.Homer's epics - perhaps first written in the Ionic version (see Note 4) of the Greek alphabet (which has roots in Phoenician characters) by someone who was listening to a "live" Homeric performance - remain important links to this ancient period.
Olympic sports, at the time of Homer (scroll down 80%) and later, were rooted in religion. First - and always foremost - athletes participated in sports to honor their gods. The Olympics were created to honor Zeus. The modern meaning of "sports" and "games" is therefore not descriptive for what the Greeks were really up to at their Olympics.
Competitive exercises, for a Greek living in the Archaic Period, were called agon (from which we get our word "agony"). Gymnikos agon (meaning "naked struggle") was the way an ancient Greek viewed athletic competition.
Ponos, Greek for "pain," was an expected part of training and competing. (The Greek god Ponos, parenthetically, was the son of Eris [strife] and Erebus [darkness].) And ... Olympic sports, at that time, were not team events. Focus was on individual performance and winning. No prizes were given for second and third place.
The foot-race was the first Olympic event - and the only event for the first 13 Olympiads. It measured a distance of one stade (192.28 meters for the Olympics) and took place in the stadion (from which we get our word "stadium"). The point of the race was to beat the best man, not run to a stop watch. Runners who "jumped the gun," to use a modern phrase, could be flogged by referees holding willowy rods.
At first, the Olympic stadium (where foot-races were run) was itself inside the Altis (the sacred area). Spectators viewed races from the Kronion (Kronos Hill). By the late Classical period, however, a stadium was built east of the sacred precinct, where its remains (connected to the sanctuary by a vaulted passageway) are still visible.
Other sports - beginning with wrestling and the pentathlon in the 18th Olympiad - were added and, by Classical times, the games numbered eighteen. They included boxing, horse racing, and additional running events. The Marathon, which takes its name from the famous battle in 490 B.C.) was never part of the ancient Olympics.
Thanks to surviving Greek pottery, we can view ancient athletes in action. Let's take a look at their prowess.
ATHLETES IN ACTION
The stadium at Olympia held 45,000 spectators. The high priestess of Demeter Chamyne, a Greek goddess, was the only woman allowed to watch the events.No time records of early foot races exist since there was no way to measure how long it took for the winner to reach the finish line. What does survive are statues and pottery depicting the runners.
A few important points about some events will highlight differences between the ancient and modern games:
- A key running event was called the Hoplitodromos (click here for the correct pronunciation) where athletes ran in full battle armor.
- The pentathlon included jumping (where, accompanied by flute music, athletes jumped into a pit holding halteres in their hands); running; javelin (separated into distinct events for distance and accuracy); discus throwing; and wrestling (part of the pentathlon in the Olympics but a separate event in the Panhellenic games).
- Wrestlers practiced as a trainer, rod in hand, coached their efforts.
- Boxing, as depicted in the mural from Acrotiri (found in ancient Thera) where two children are having a go at each other, was one of the oldest events.
- As boxers participated in their sport, Nike (the winged goddess of Victory) watched.
- Horse racing, an aristocratic sport then as it is now, included the quadriga (four-horse chariot) race which, according to ancient accounts, was the most spectacular (a la Ben Hur) equestrian event of all.
Like today, the real rewards were far more than a crown. So important was a win (for the athlete, for his family, for his town) that specific Olympic victories were used as historical reference points. (The battle of Marathon, for example, took place in the third year of the Olympiad in which Tisicrates of Croton [scroll down 60%] won the stadion for the second time.) Thousands of years later, we still know the names of athletes because Greek writers immortalized their exploits in stories and poems.
One is left to wonder whether victors in the modern games will still be talked about a thousand years from now!
USED AND RECOMMENDED SOURCES
A "primary source" is the best place to get first-hand information. A person who experiences an event, and gives an account of it, is a source of primary information. Maps, photographs, drawings, videotapes, diaries, letters, manuscripts and other similar items can be primary sources.Someone who interprets primary sources - like a scholar, for example - is creating a secondary source. (See Yale University's web site for a good understanding of the differences between primary and secondary sources.)
It is our policy to link to primary source material whenever possible. That is the reason most of our links are to worldwide national archives, museums, universities, military and government sites as well as other institutions like historical societies and libraries. It is our aim to provide a virtual trip to reliable places where primary sources are maintained. We frequently link to scholarly sources as well. All links serve as footnotes to our stories.
Where helpful, we link to scholarly narratives that explain the subject, or issue, in more detail. Scholarly-narrative links - when we use them - usually appear near the end of our stories, when the reader is more prepared to explore them.
Each recommended link, embedded in the story, takes you directly to the source of the footnoted information. If you would like to visit the main page of the linked site, or to further explore its content, eliminate everything in the URL after the ".edu, .gov, .org," etc., and then press "enter." That will take you to the main site where you can then search for whatever additional information you may need.
All images hosted by AwesomeStories are either created by us or were found in the public domain. If we have, unwittingly, used copyrighted images of any sort, please let us know and we will immediately remove them. All other images in the site are direct-links to national archives, libraries, universities, government web sites, historical societies and other similar institutions. If you wish to use any of the images hosted by other web sites, you need to contact those institutions directly.
We have thoroughly researched appropriate links, although we are not reponsible for content at third-party sites. Wherever possible, people who really know the subject matter have reviewed the stories for accuracy.
Our main objective is to help our visitors find their way to some of the best on-line information regarding the profiled subjects - and to have fun at the same time. We hope you have enjoyed your visit.
Awesome Stories
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1 - Story Preface
chapter 2 - The Legend Behind the Games
chapter 3 - Olympia: Host of the Games
chapter 4 - A Trip to Olympia
chapter 5 - Who Participated?
chapter 6 - Ancient Olympic Sports
chapter 7 - Athletes in Action
chapter 8 - Uses and Recommended Sources
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
