Silenced Voices

All dictionaries of Greek list ὄσσομαι, προτιόσσομαι, ἐπιόσσομαι as derivatives of * h 3 ek w - ‘to see’. Yet the examination of the Homeric occurrences shows that this verb is the denominative of * u̯ok w - ‘voice’, and this accounts for the hiatus in * ἐπιϝόσσομαι , * προτιϝόσσομαι , as already shown by Hodot 2008. It goes back to * u̯ok w -i̯e/o -, which is also the etymon of Arm. goč‘em ‘to call, to shout’. Hodot assumes that two different verbs ὄσσομαι ‘to see’ and * ϝόσσομαι ‘to speak, to tell’ became homonymous after the loss of ϝ , and merged with the result that epic singers used the one for the other. The article reexamines the Homeric instances and argues that ὄσσομαι ‘to see’ arose from * ϝόσσομαι ‘to speak, to tell’ by a process of reinterpretation within Homeric Greek after the loss of ϝ . Accordingly, Greek only inherited * u̯ok w -i̯e/o - and there never was any * h 3 ok w -i̯e/o -. The correct interpretation of ὄσσομαι and προτιόσσομαι as a verbum dicendi is preserved in several scholia. However, the meaning ‘to tell’ was condemned by Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes and Aristarchus, whose opinion prevailed in the posterior tradition

EPIC · Interpretation (philosophy · Meaning (existential · Reinterpretation · Verb · Ancient Near East History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Linguistics and language evolution