Language and Difference in Herodotus

Abstract

This dissertation examines Herodotus’ representation and understanding of languages, including but not limited to Greek itself. I argue that language reveals significant aspects of the Histories that relate to ancient ideas about ethnicity, cultural interaction, and conflict. I suggest that language also plays an important role in Herodotus’ historical methodology and literary techniques. Language in the Histories functions not just as a marker between traditional categories like Greek and barbarian or human and animal, but as a heuristic device to examine some of these traditional categories, reinforcing them in some places but also questioning them in others. Herodotus also uses this device to explore beyond these categories, such as when he makes arguments about events in the distant past or relationships between different non-Greek cultures by incorporating linguistic evidence. The first chapter examines the connection between language and ethnicity in the Histories. Language, I argue, plays a key role in Herodotus’ critical engagement with the contested subject of identity. For example, despite the Athenians’ talk about a shared language uniting the Greeks, Herodotus highlights the Caunians’ ethnic distinction from the Carians despite their linguistic similarity to them (1.142.2–4). Emphasizing the role of language over other factors in ethnogenesis, as well as the mutability of language, provides a counterpoint to ancient views which treated ethnicity as fixed. The second chapter investigates Herodotus’ observations about language contact. More specifically, the chapter examines the relationship these observations bear to modern theories about these phenomena. Not only does Herodotus appear (if sometimes vaguely) to describe real phenomena, but there is frequently also external evidence for language contact in the geographic and cultural areas that he describes. He does not present language contact monolithically, but in situation-specific terms. Although these terms cannot usually be easily mapped onto modern categories, they are specific enough to invite comparison. I apply six concepts from contact linguistics to Herodotus’ linguistic descriptions: imperfect learning, diglossia, convergence, mixed languages, borrowing (specifically, loanwords), and language death. The third chapter focuses on animal and divine language in the Histories. Herodotus’ conception of language is not limited specifically to human beings. I argue that Herodotus’ views on nonhuman language reveal a great deal about the ways he thinks language is learned and how he conceptualizes the origins of language. In the end, Herodotus’ treatment of human and animal language falls into a larger pattern in which the author makes distinctions between human, animal, and divine speech that both echo and diverge from earlier and later Greek cultural assumptions. The fourth chapter covers translation and interpreters. I argue that the presence of interpreters is not meaningless, but generally serves to support broader themes relating to cultural difference. Herodotus plays the role of interpreter at various points in his narrative, telling us accurately what the Egyptian word for “crocodile” or “gentleman” is and providing some questionable etymologies for the names of Persian kings (Hdt. 2.69.3, 2.143.3, 5.98.3). Interpreters and translation emphasize distance, both physical and metaphorical. This distance is not merely that of exotic situations, but it may also increase dramatic tension or lend emphasis. Still, it is through translation and interpreters that these differences are sometimes overcome, revealing a common humanity. In the process, interpreters help Herodotus comment on geography, ethnicity, and the vicissitudes of all human life.