Matthew Scarborough, LH’s house Indo-Europeanist (e.g.), has a new project going, which I’ll let him introduce:
A small project that I’ve started doing for fun – and to be frank give me a small outlet in this current moment of being between jobs – is an account I’ve made over on Bluesky posting a line-by-line translation of Hesiod’s Theogony (for the non-Hellenists out there, a roughly seventh to sixth-century BCE short epic on the origins of the Greek pantheon) together with metrical analyses and, since line three, phonological transcriptions of the Greek text.
I am currently aiming to post one line per day, together with parsed vocabulary, and I’ve already put together a full translation and transcription with metrical analyses and parsing of the entire text on my computer, so the only thing preventing me from not doing the whole text over the course of the next two and a half years is simply me remembering to post a line per day (and Bluesky continuing to be a viable online platform, which in this current social media ecosystem, who knows?).
I do have an ulterior goal from all this, however. I aim to add philological and etymological commentary to the master file that I’ve prepared and add as an introduction a sketch of Greek historical grammar. In something more of a book-like format, it could serve as an introduction to Greek historical linguistics and Indo-European to students of Greek or students of Indo-European, and possibly a reliable linguistically annotated text for general linguists who might want illustrative examples of Ancient Greek in the heterogeneous variety of East Ionic that is typically used for early Greek epic poetry.
Anyway, if this is the sort of thing you might be interested in check it out. As of today I’ve posted up to line 43 of 1021, so there’s already a month’s backlog for reading. I think the expanded historical linguistic commentary and grammar outline is a good idea for a textbook project, but I don’t know how big of an audience there is for it. I can’t be the only person who thinks that the textbook would be a good thing to be out there if I can just manage to finish it in the first place. Let me know if the comments what you think.
I for one think this is a great idea and hope he keeps it up.
Yay Matthew! Good to see him being up to cool stuff.
Surely Hesiod is so ancient that he “spake” rather than “spoke”?
Spake was replaced by spoke sometime in the -800s, so while Zarathustra spake, Hesiod spoke. Homer did both, but spake is only found fossilized in old formulae.