Milli mála - 01.01.2010, Page 206

with the advent of silent reading7), but they have no real justifica-
tion in spoken language. Our understanding of the love-affair
between alcaeus and Sappho hangs amongst other things on a text
– which alcaeus may or may not have uttered—which looks some-
thing like this in Haephastion’s metrics, some 800 years after the
event:
ioplokagnamellikhomeidesapphoi8
We can translate fairly confidently up to the last word in this verse:
‘violet-haired, holy, sweetly-smiling …’ but then we get into diffi-
culties, for the unspoken mystique of word-division is, to borrow
generative terminology, “underlying” in classical greek. This cru-
cial text is ambiguous, for it can have two different spoken inter-
pretations:
mellikhomeide sapphoi ‘sweetly-smiling Sappho’
mellikhomeides apphoi ‘sweetly-smiling darling’
Thus the question of whether alcaeus and Sappho even so much as
knew each other hangs not on an underlying linguistic structure but
on an inadequate scribal convention. In the same way the intro-
duction of indices into our text:
She1 is washing her1 hands
like the introduction of vowels and word-spaces and italics and
question marks and the like, is simply the projection on to the flat
and finite space of printed textuality of the sort of information that
hangs much more eloquently on our lips. The so-called ambiguity
of our sentence rests only on inadequate reportage: the lack of con-
text and the lack of written indices. Sentences without context do
not occur, unless on the pages of textbooks in syntax. In reality
their contexts have always occurred earlier in the text:
THuMBIng THrOugH THE InDEX
206
7 See especially Saenger pp. 273–276.
8 Campbell, D.a. (ed.), Greek Lyric I: Sappho and Alcaeus, ed. D.a. Campbell, The Loeb
Classical Library, Cambridge Massachusetts, and London, England: Harvard university
Press, 1990, p. 405.
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