So what trend in modern linguistics is this guy satirizing? Do they like to pretend that well-known things like entautha and oun are mysteries?
Not modern. Outsiders coming into the language (even for modern Greeks—the diglossia TFA mentions between spoken and written language in English existed for 1500+ years in Greek) find particles difficult to grasp, and the dictionary definitions do not really convey all the senses that the particles mean, like mathematics teaches from natural definitions of numbers progressing to Dedekind cuts. You know _Portuguese irregular verbs_, by Alexander McCall Smith, the comic novel where Dr. Professor von Igelfeld rests his reputation on a magisterial volume on the (strangely enough) Portuguese irregular verbs? Denniston’s _The Greek particles_ ultimately spans almost 700 pages after posthumous revisions (1960?). Page after page on individual particles. I think TFA satirizes that drive to squeeze every bit of meaning from the particles.
Thank you. For future readers, here is the great opus itself.
https://archive.org/details/john-d.-denniston-the-greek-part...
Re:Greek Particles (1990)
by thaumasiotes on Tuesday April 29, 2025 @10:53AM
(#43833527)
> The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).
The systematic study of Sanskrit also goes back literal millennia. Why would the understanding of the particles differ?
To the degree that we believe we understand the ancient Greek particles better, how do we know that's true? It's a dead language; the corpus is the corpus.
Of course you're entirely right that Greek particles are not some unfathomable mystery. The systematic study of Greek language goes back literal millenia, and the particles are well understood (unlike say Vedic Sanskrit particles).