Hungarian

Magyar is Turkic

2012-04-06

The traditional etymology of the Hungarian self-appellation magyar derives the word from the same Proto-Ugric root as the ethnonym Mańsi, perhaps as a compound with a second word *er of uncertain meaning. However, it is recognized that some of the other Hungarian tribal names during the period of migration into the Carpathian Basin are of Turkic origin, and Árpád Berta shows evidence that magyar is Turkic as well. In a 1998 paper ultimately collected in the memorial volume Studies in Turkic Etymology ed. Lars Johanson and András Róna-Tas (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), Berta suggests that it is a compound of West Old Turkic *ban ‘big’ (cf. Chuvash măn(ă)) and *ǰer ‘place’.

Such an original meaning for this ethnonym acts neatly as the keystone for a series of relationships built up by the other tribal names with Turkic etymologies:

Lastly, let us consider the pattern of meanings that will emerge on the assumption that all Hungarian tribal names are of Turkic origin: ‘Hedge’ (Nyék) – a tribe of guardsmen who, in earlier times, patrolled the borders of the tribal confederation; ‘Chief Place’ (Megyer) – the Chief Tribe after the change of dynasties; ‘Abreast–Behind’ (Kürtgyarmat) – formerly the vanguard and rear guard of the Megyer tribe, merged to protect the new Chief Tribe after the change of dynasties; ‘Tarxan’ (Tarján) – the new Chief Tribe; ‘Little Flank/Face’ (Jenő) – the flank or vanguard of the new Chief Tribe; ‘Back; the Last’ (Kér) – the rear guard of the new Chief Tribe; ‘Fragment’ (Keszi) – the remnant of a former major tribe. (p. 184)

That bit is somewhat speculative. However, the evidence for a Turkic origin of the name that Berta presents is strong and I’d like to see this paper get more attention.

Chuvash 2 comments

The Chuvash have no epics

2012-04-03

The Kyrgyz have their Manas and the Tatars a variety of ambitious poetic forms, but the following bit from László Vikár and Gabor Bereczki’s book Chuvash Folksongs (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1979) underscores just how thematically limited Chuvash (and Mari) traditional music is.

As with the Cheremis, the short lyrical song is the characteristic genre of Chuvash folk-poetry. There are, however, Chuvash scholars who state that the great peasant-movements of the seventeen century were associated with the production of historical epic also, but that these became extinct as a result of reprisals on the part of state authorities. (М. Я. Сироткин, Чувашский фольклор, Чебоксары. 1965. стр. 91.)

Certain songs survive that tell of Chuvash peasants migrating towards the East, of the death of Pugachov, of the Napoleonic war of 1812, and of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 (cf. ibid., pp. 92–99). Nevertheless, such songs must have been isolated phenomena in the past, as they are in the present. Collecting has been undertaken by H. Paasonen and Mészáros in those Chuvash regions where pagan beliefs remain intact, and it might be expected that they would have met there with an epic tradition, or at least with traces thereof. Neighbouring peoples, Russian, Mordvinian, and Tatar, possess considerable amounts of epic poetry. Why should similar traditions have perished among Chuvash living under identical conditions? It seems to be more plausible that what little they have has been borrowed from the Russians or Tatars.

[...]

As with epic songs, the ballad-genre is also missing in Chuvash folklore. In the category of lyrical songs, we found no traces either of cradle songs or children’s songs. Older collections, however, include specimens of the latter.

The lyrical songs can be divided into two classes that embrace (with scarcely any exceptions) the entire field of the genre: 1. songs performed on festive days; 2. those connected with family events, customs, and tradition. Frequently enough, the words of a song do not refer to a particular feast; only the singer reveals the implicit connection.

Linguistics publications No comments yet

Brill doesn’t get it

2012-03-13

It only recently came to my attention that renowned Australian linguist R. M. W. Dixon wrote a book entitled I am a Linguist that appeared just over a year ago. Here’s what publisher Brill’s website has to say:

I am a Linguist provides a fascinating account of the academic adventures of multi-faceted linguist, R.M.W. (Bob) Dixon. There is fieldwork (and lengthy grammars) on Dyirbal, Yidiñ and other Aboriginal languages of Australia, the Boumaa dialect of Fijian, and Jarawara from the dense jungles of Amazonia. Theoretical studies include adjective classes, ergativity and complement clauses. There are also detective novels, science fiction stories, and pioneering work on blues and gospel discography. Interspersed with the autobiographical narrative are explanations of how linguistics is a scientific discipline, of the development of universities, of diminishing academic standards, and of the treatment of Aboriginal people in Australia. The book is written in an easy, accessible style with numerous illustrative anecdotes. It will be an inspiration to young linguists and of interest to the general reader curious about what a scientific linguist does.

Dixon’s stories should have as much appeal to a wide audience as anything that Crystal or Deutscher have written, if not more with the recent phenomenon of publishing on adventurous fieldwork efforts like those of K. David Harrison. I too would like to read the book, and it is unavailable from my university library. But instead of making this book accessible to that wide audience, Brill has published it as a hardcover and sells it for US$175 (125€). I feel that this publisher is so stuck in its high-priced small-audience ways that it just doesn’t know how to get a popular book to a popular audience. Too bad Dixon couldn’t get this book out through, for example, Penguin instead.

Germanic languages, Indo-Iranian 1 comment

Substrate speculations

2012-02-22

Just two briefly mention two substrate hypotheses which I’ve come across in the last 24 hours:

  1. Theo Vennemann posits a Semitic substrate for Proto-Germanic, an encounter made possible by Phoenician colonization of the North Sea area. Among the supposed loanwords are the names of the Germanic gods Pol and Baldur, none other than the Semitic god Baal. Vennemann’s vast work on Semitic and Basque substrates in Europe seems to be politely tolerated but generally ignored by IEists, and I heard of this hypothesis from the popular press: John McWhorter’s Our Magnificient Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English. McWorther does mention that there are serious objections to this theory, but in my opinion, even bringing it up at all risks leading impressionable laymen astray.
  2. Alexander Lubotsky’s article ‘The Indo-Iranian Substratum’ in Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations ed. Carpelan et al. (Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society, 2001) notes that the phonological peculiarities of non-Indo-European words in Indo-Iranian are the same for loanwords in Indo-Aryan specifically. The author writes, In order to account for this fact, we are bound to assume that the language of the original population of the towns of Central Asia, where the Indo-Iranians must have arrived in the second millennium BCE, on the one hand, and the language spoken in Punjab, the homeland of the Indo-Aryans, on the other, were intimately related.
Mari No comments yet

New dictionary of Mari dialects

2012-02-09

The Valerian Vasil’ev Institute for Mari Language, Literature and History has published the Словарь марийских говоров Татарстана и Удмуртии (Dictionary of Mari Dialects of Tatarstan and Udmurtia).

The new publication has been compiled by Valerij Vershinin, a senior fellow in the language department.

This dictionary is the first effort to document the lexicon of Mari dialects in Tatarstan and Udmurtia. The editor collected the data over numerous fieldwork journeys. It has over 5000 entries with translation into Russian.

The dictionary serves linguists, ethnologists, historians, scholars on the region, students and all who are interested in the Mari language. Its publication was supported by the Russian Fund for Humanities.

The book is available at the research library of the Institute for Mari Language, Literature and History in Yoshkar-Ola at ul. Krasnoarmejskaja 44, tel. (+7-8362) 565 937.

(Source: MariUver, who also link to a PDF catalogue of publications available from the Research Institute.)

Romani 1 comment

Romani exonyms

2012-02-06

In Romani: a linguistic introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2005), Yaron Matras gives several examples of how the Roma people have been very inventive with names for the countries and people encountered on their westward migration (pp. 26–27):

Characteristic of Romani is – alongside replications of nations’ self-ascription (e.g. sasitko ‘German’, njamco ‘German’, valšo ‘French’) – the widespread use of inherited or internal names for nations. Thus we find das ‘Slavs’ (cf. OIA dāsa- ‘slave’), a word play based on Greek sklavos; xoraxaj/koraxaj of unclear etymology, in the Balkans generally ‘Muslim, Turk’ and elsewhere ‘foreigner’ or ‘non-Rom’; gadžo ‘non-Rom’. Other inherited words for non-Rom include xalo (‘meagre, shabby’), also in the diminutive xaloro ‘Jew’, balamo and goro ‘Greek, non-Gypsy’; biboldo ‘Jew’ (‘unbaptised’), chindo ‘Jew’ (‘cut’ = ‘circumcised’), trušulo ‘Christian’ (cf. trušul ‘cross’), džut ‘Jew’ (possibly Iranian). Names attached to foreign countries by individual Romani groups often refer to incomprehensible speech, based on either lal- ‘dumb’ or čhib ‘tongue’: lallaro-temmen ‘Finland’ and lalero them ‘Bohemia’ (= ‘dumb land’), lalero ‘Lithuanian’, čibalo/čivalo meaning ‘Albania’ among Balkan Rom, ‘Bavaria’ among German Rom, and ‘Germany’ among Yugoslav Rom. More recently, barvale thema (lit. ‘rich countries’) has emerged as a designation for ‘western Europe’, lole thema (lit. ‘red countries’) for ‘eastern, communist Europe’.

Internal creations of place names are common mostly among the northwestern dialects of Romani. They are frequently either translations, or semantic or sound associations based on the original place names: nevo foro lit. ‘new town’ for ‘Neustadt’, xačerdino them lit. ‘burned country’ for ‘Brandenburg’, čovaxanjakro them lit. ‘witches’ country’ for ‘Hessen’ (German Hexen ‘witches’), kiralengro them lit. ‘cheese country’ for ‘Switzerland’, u baro rašaj lit. ‘the big priest’ for ‘Rome’, lulo piro lit. ‘red foot’ for ‘Redford’, baro foro lit. ‘big town’ for capital cities of various countries (Helsinki, Stockholm, Belgrade).

I remember thinking how it cool it was that the Chuvash coined the name чул хула ‘stone city’ for Nižnyj Novgorod, once the closest large Russian settlement, and how disappointed I was to hear that it was no longer in use. I wonder how many of these Romani examples are still current.

Language preservation, Linguistics publications 1 comment

A reading list for language death

2012-01-31

Since the turn of the millennium there have been a number of books dealing with language death and the problem of protecting the world’s diversity of languages from the forces of globalization. Some of these are meant for undergraduates, while others want to communicate the problem to the man on the street. Here I’ve compiled a list of the ones that I’ve read. I’ve reviewed them all at Amazon if you want to see my detailed impressions of each book.

  • David Crystal, Language Death (Cambridge University Press, 2002) ISBN 0521012716. This is meant for an educated audience with some prior training in linguistics.
  • Daniel Nettle & Suzanne Romaine, Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (Oxford University Press, 2000) ISBN 0195152468. This is meant for undergraduates with only a basic linguistics background.
  • Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages (Mariner Books, 2005) ISBN 0618565833. This is written for a mass audience. Unfortunately, the author seems to have no formal training in linguistics and the book contains numerous errors and misunderstandings of the field.
  • K. David Harrison, When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2008) ISBN 0195372069. Here the author describes the problem and his work for an educated readership with some passion for the subject, but no more than basic undergraduate linguistics. In writing this book, the author draws on his personal experience with Siberian Turkic languages.
  • K. David Harrison, The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages (National Geographic, 2010) ISBN 1426204612. This one is targeted towards the general public. It revisits many of the same topics as Harrison’s earlier book, but depicts the author and his peers as almost Indiana Jones-type figures in an attempt to get the layman’s attention.
  • Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) ISBN 0631233067. The author hoped to reach a mass audience with this book, but the jargon and transcription choices will probably scare off most people and it looks like another book most suitable for assigned reading for undergraduates. Examples are drawn mostly from the Australian indigenous languages.

There’s a couple of other books that I’m aware of but haven’t yet read:

So that’s eight books in the last 12 years, and I’m sure there’s more I’ve not discovered yet. Whether they are popular or academic, each of them has competition, and the same general background is repeated across them all. Therefore the readership must be larger than I imagine if publishers are willing to put out another such book.

Besides these grim discussions of the threat to language diversity, there are also a surprising amount of general introductions to the subject of language revitalization, which I may list in a future post.

Finno-Ugric, Komi, Uralic 1 comment

IFUSCO used for propaganda

2011-10-23

The Finno-Ugrian student conference IFUSCO was held in Russia’s Perm Krai in 2010. Madis Tuuder, a student at the Estonian Art Academy, reported her impressions and subsequently a Finnish translation by Sonja Laitinen appeared in the University of Helsinki’s Alkukoti magazine (2010 no. 12, online version here). Here follows my English translation of a report that explains well why I no longer go to academic conferences in Russia.

IFUSCO (the International Finno-Ugrian Student Conference) is turning into a state propaganda event. This claim is based on multiple indicators from the conferences of recent years. This year’s academic event for Finno-Ugrian linguists and others interested in Finno-Ugrian affairs – which IFUSCO ought to be – was held from May 14 to 16 in the Perm Krai of Russia, in the cities of Perm and Kudymkar.

The Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug district was combined several years ago with Perm Oblast to form Perm Krai. Now there’s a Finno-Ugrian façade over the whole region, but what lies behind it is something different. The Komi-Permyak Autonomous Okrug was the only area in Russia where a Finno-Ugrian people made up over half of the population. Now the Komi Permjaks’ share in the population of the region is only 3.7%.

In their opening speeches, local officials took every opportunity to boast that Perm Krai belongs to the family of Finno-Ugrian regions; it would certainly be strange to hear claims to the contrary in this sort of conference.

The choice of Perm, a city with a million inhabitants, as the second conference venue might be due to aspirations to put the city on the Finno-Ugrian world map. We were told, however, that Kudymkar, which is little more than a large village, couldn’t organize such an event on its own. That claim is hard to understand, since the entire conference – except for the public opening ceremonies – took place precisely in Kudymkar.

It has become a sad trend that in recent years the opening ceremonies have sung the praises of local officials. The same happened this year, as can be seen from who was on the organizing committee: of the organizers, three were local ministers. The Finno-Ugrian youth organization MAFUN came last in the list of organizers. The opening speeches dealt with Perm Krai’s economical and social progress, with an emphasis on transport.

One theme emerged at the end of the opening ceremony. Alevtina Lobanova, a lecturer at Perm Pedagogical University, spoke passionately and sensibly on the shrinking role of Finno-Ugrian languages in the social life of their titular regions. Her views and arguments were virtually the opposite of what the officials had said before her. The audience applauded Lobanova’s courage and outspokenness several times.

One local historian’s presentation on ‘societal-social modernization’ attracted some interest, as it ought to have dealt with the development of Komi Permyak identity. The historian however criticized the national policies of the Baltic countries (the only example he gave outside Russia) and recommended that they take Russia’s Finno-Ugrians as a model, for whom the policy cultivated in the Baltic countries would not be suitable and wouldn’t even be considered due to its oppressive and discriminative nature. He compared the state of the Baltic countries to the situation prevailing in Chechnya and called on those two areas to solve their national problems in radical ways.

In their presentations officials praised, besides economic progress, the synergy and neighbourliness of the nationalities in the area. According to them, everything is being done to maintain a diversity of languages and identities. Of course, nobody talked about what hasn’t been done, like a sufficient guarantee of teaching in pupils’ native languages. At the same time that IFUSCO was held, there was a seminar for teachers of minority languages. Of Perm Krai’s many nationalities, the most successful in native-language education are the Tatars. The situation of the area’s titular nationality (we use that term with certain reservations), the Komi Permyaks, becomes worse year after year.

Around 180 students registered for this year’s IFUSCO. Estonia sent 12 people, but there were fewer rows of Finnish and Hungarian students this time. It’s unfortunate that more and more talks and abstracts are in Russian. In former years it was required that participants either speak or write abstracts in a Finno-Ugrian language (such as their native language), but now this requirement has become only a suggestion. Some students were even forbidden from using a Finno-Ugrian language in their talk or abstract.

The pathos of this conference was seasoned by plays about invented pseudo-mythological heroes, which have become an integral part of Finno-Ugrian conferences. The plays deal with historical events (which may not have ever happened) and profess the eternal brotherhood and friendship of local (and sometimes made-up) tribes.

The political tone of the conference was also visible in the fact that during Estonian-led sessions, a picture of the Bronze Soldier was projected on the big screen. However, they did allow people to make their own Powerpoint presentations.

Luckily, politics and propaganda didn’t diminish the students’ enthusiasm and happiness at meeting each other. The next IFUSCO will be held in Hungary. The choice of this venue is intended to bring the conference back on track and offer some relief from these kind of IFUSCOs which are dominated by bureaucrats and state figures.

I was frustrated by the IFUSCO conference in Saransk in 2007, but there state control was visible less in propaganda and more in strict control of participants’ movement. All the participants were split up into different groups depending on their nationality – as a holder of a US passport, I was not even allowed to join my fellow students from University of Helsinki – and had to remain with the group at all times, a minder ensuring that no one wandered off alone. The arrival times of each group at events were staggered, and everyone was marched straight into the lecture halls, so that they could not mingle outside. Unfortunately, it seems that some Western students have contact with Russia’s Finno-Ugrians only at these conferences, and I’d recommend that everyone spend their time and money in travelling independently to Russia instead.

Hindi, Indic, Sanskrit 2 comments

Classical philology is dead in India

2011-10-15

Sheldon Pollock, one of the most prominent scholars of Sanskrit literature today, has contributed a jeremiad entitled ‘Crisis in the Classics’ to the journal Social Research Vol. 78 No. 1 (Spring 2011) on the decline of classical philology in India. The article is available as a PDF and its 28 pages have so much good material that I can hardly decide what to quote here, but here’s the heart of Pollock’s observations:

Indeed, there have been no successors to any of the pre-independence generation of Sanskrit scholars, the sort who mastered their discipline and thought conceptually about it and wrote for an international audience: S. N. Dasgupta, S. K. De, Mysore Hiriyanna, P. V. Kane, S. Radhakrishnan, Venkata Raghavan, C. Kunhan Raja, V. S. Sukthankar, are the first in a long and distinguished list from across India (I leave aside the loss of the great tradition of pandit learning, which is now virtually extinct). There have been no major Sanskrit projects in India since the completion of the critical edition of the Ramayana at Baroda more than 30 years ago. All the great classical series (such as Anandasrama, Trivandrum, Gaekwad, Madras) have been more or less discontinued, and as a result the manuscripts in those collections are no longer being published. Indeed, there have been few new Indian editions of complex Sanskrit texts at all from among the scores of important manuscripts that lie unpublished in archives. In the area of hermeneutics (Mimamsa), for example, I know of no one in India today capable of editing works like those edited just a generation ago by P. N. Pattabhirama Sastry or S. Subrahmanya Sastry. (The same holds for many other areas of classical studies; with the death of A. N. Upadhye in 1975 and H. C. Bhayani in 2000, the editing of Prakrit and Apabhramsha works seems to have died too.) I have not encountered a single PhD dissertation on Sanskrit in India—and I have seen many—worthy of publication by a Western university press.

The situation is no different in the other classical languages, as I learned in the late 1990s when I organized a project on the histories of South Asian literary cultures (Pollock 2003). Our core group of colleagues was looking for others to join us who possessed a deep historical understanding of a regional language, conceptual skills, and the capacity to communicate their knowledge effectively. We were able to locate only four qualified scholars in India, and identified no one for a host of languages, including Assamese, Marathi, Newari, Oriya, and Panjabi.

I suspected as much when I visited university bookshops in India: almost no publications from the last 30 years, and heaps of decaying old editions that evidently no one wanted to buy. Online language discussions are so often overrun by Hindu fundamentalist claims that Sanskrit is a divine language and India’s literature the oldest and wisest in the world, but for all the prominence of such views on the internet, this heritage is neglected in India.

Greek No comments yet

Gospel of John in Homeric Greek

2011-10-14

During the evening service on Easter (the so-called Agape Vespers), the Orthodox Church has a tradition of reading the gospel passage for that day (John 20:19–25) in many different languages. In Greece, one of the versions sung is a rendering by St Nicodemus the Hagiorite (1749–1809) which casts the passage in the Homeric Greek and dactylic hexameter of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Ὄφρακε νωιτέροισιν ἐν οὔασι πάγχυ βάλωμεν
θέσφατον, ἱμερόεσσαν, ἁγνὴν Εὐάγγελον ὄππα
μειλίξωμεν Ἄνακτα Θεὸν μέγαν, οὐρανίωνα.
Ἰθυγενεῖς. Σοφίη. Εὐαγγελίοιο κλύωμεν.

Εἰρήνη χαρίεσσ’ ἐπ’ ἀπείρονα δῆμον ἐσεῖται.

Ἐκ δ’ ἄρ’ Ἰωάννοιο τόδ’ ἔστι βροντογόνοιο.

Ἄλλ’ ἄγετ’ ἀτρεμέσι χρησμοὺς λεύσωμεν ὀπωπαῖς.

Εὖτε δὴ ἠέλιος φαέθων ἐπὶ ἕσπερον ἦλθε
καὶ σκιόωντο ἀγυιαὶ ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρῃ,
ἥματι ἐν πρώτῳ, ὅτε τύμβου ἆλτο Σαωτήρ,
κλῃισταὶ δὲ ἔσαν θυρίδες πυκινῶς ἀραρεῖαι,
βλῆντο δὲ πάντες ὀχῆες ἐυσταθέος μεγάροιο,
ἔνθα Μαθηταὶ ὁμοῦ τε ἀολλέες ἠγερέθοντο
μυρόμενοι θανάτῳ ἐπ’ ἀεικέι Χριστοῦ Ἄνακτος
καὶ χόλον ἀφραίνοντα Ἰουδαίων τρομέοντες,
ἤλυθε δὴ τότε Χριστὸς Ἄναξ θεοειδέι μορφῇ,
ἔστη δ’ ἐν μεσάτῳ ἀναφανδὸν καὶ φάτο μῦθον·
Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν φίλη, ἡσυχίη τ’ ἐρατεινή.
Ὡς εἰπὼν ἐπέδειξεν ἑὴν πλευρὴν ἠδὲ χεῖρας.
Γήθησαν δὲ Μαθηταὶ ἐπεὶ ἴδον Εὐρυμέδοντα.

Τοὺς δ’ αὖτις προσέειπεν Ἰησοῦς οὐρανοφοίτης·
Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν φίλη, ἡσυχίη τ’ ἐρατεινή.
Ὡς ἐμὲ πέμψε Πατὴρ ὅς ὑπέρτατα δώματα ναίει,
ῳδ’ ἐγὼ ὑμέας ἐς χθόνα πέμπω εὐρυόδειαν.
Ὡς ἄρα φωνήσας Μύσταις ἔμπνευσ’ ἀγορεύων·
Πνεῦμα δέχνυσθ’ Ἅγιον, φαεσίμβροτον, ὑψιθόωκον·
Ὧν μὲν ἀτασθαλίας θνητῶν ἀφέητ’ ἐπὶ γαῖαν,
τοῖσι νύπου ἀφίενται ἐς οὐρανὸν ἀστερόεντα·
ὧν δ’ ἄρ’ ἐπεσβολίας ὑππερφιάλων κρατέητε,
τοῖσιν ἁλυκτοπέδῃς κεῖναι σθεναρῇς κρατέονται.

Θωμᾶς δ’ ῳ ἐπίκλησις ἅπασι Δίδυμος ἀκούειν
οὐχ ἅμα τοῖς ἄλλοις Μύσταις πρὶν ὁμώροφος ἔσκε
Ἰησοῦς ὅτ’ ἔβη εἴσω μελάθροιο ἑταίρων.
Ἴαχον οὖν ἄλλοι τούτῳ ἐρίηρες ἑταῖροι·
Εἴδομεν ὀφθαλμοῖσιν Ἰησοῦν παγκρατέοντα.
Τοὺς δ’ ἀπαμειβόμενος Θωμᾶς προσέφησεν ἀτειρής·
Ἴχνια ἤν μὴ ἴδω μετὰ χείρεσιν ἡλατορήτῃς,
δάκτυλον ἐμβάλλω τε ἐκείνου ἔνδοθι χειρός,
χεῖρα τ’ ἐμὴν εἴσω πλευρῆς οἷ ρεῖα βαλοίμην,
οὔποτε ὑμετέροισι λόγοις κεφαλῇ κατανεύσω.

Like the Latin translation of the Kalevala by Tuomo Pekkanen, this could only have been made by someone with a great love of epic and a lot of time on their hands.