Excessive, annoying, definite articles

[strnbrg]

I'm going to sound like a total yahoo for this, but I find all Greek other than Homer annoyingly wordy. I hate stuff like "toutoi toi kourioi autou...". Everywhere it's ho, he, to etc. Why, why, why?
Is there anything other than Homer that I can read, and not get annoyed like this?

[mwh]

Latin.

[Paul Derouda]

Why would anyone want to read anything other that Homer?

If you really must, you have Hesiod.

[daivid]

I'm going to sound like a total yahoo for this, but I find all Greek other than Homer annoyingly wordy. I hate stuff like "toutoi toi kourioi autou...". Everywhere it's ho, he, to etc. Why, why, why?
Is there anything other than Homer that I can read, and not get annoyed like this?

I know, but, as telling them what bad style they are using isn't likely to change their habits, it is best to find away to look on the bright side - those articles are a great help in telling you the case and gender of those nouns and adjectives which have declensions with which your aren't familiar with.

[klewlis]

Latin.

[strnbrg]

Latin.

That's funny but it also raises a serious question. In Latin's classical heyday, a sparing use of prepositions (to say nothing of articles) was a hallmark of high style, when the spoken language was already on its way to the articleful, prepositionful pattern of the Romance languages. (I think Suetonius somewhere praises one of the emperors for making a small concession to readability and comprehension, by tossing in a few helpful prepositions in his writing.)

And so to return to Greek, was something similar going on? That is, what do we know about the spoken Greek of Homer's (or Homer's transcribers') time? Is the article-poor style in Homer an affectation?

[Qimmik]

The definite article emerged in Greek from a demonstrative adjective. There are occasional glimpses of this process in Homer, but the language of the Homeric poems reflects a pre-article stage of Greek. The Homeric language was an artificial language that had no other function than as a medium for poetry and was never used conversationally. It was an amalgam of elements from various dialects and various stages of the language extending over a very long time period, possibly as long as a millenium or more, and it evolved over this entire period alongside the spoken language until the Homeric poems themselves were composed.

"Affectation" is not the best way to describe the Homeric language. The original audiences of the Homeric poems would have been shocked to hear the type of poetry represented by the Homeric poems in anything other than the Homeric language, and individuals composing this type of poetry would have been incapable of composing it in anything other than the Homeric language.

The date of the Homeric poems' origins continues to be controversial--somewhere from the ninth to the sixth centuries BCE in various estimations. The article had fully emerged in speech and writing by the fifth century, and probably the earliest audiences for the Homeric poems themselves were already using the articles in everyday speech if the poems date to the seventh century. But they would have been used to hearing poetry sung in the pre-article Homeric language.

[mwh]

deleted; crossed with Qimmik. I'm serving no useful purpose here.

Edit: On 2nd thoughts I'll restore what I'd posted, since it's not entirely redundant:

Fair enough. We have no direct access to spoken Greek in Homeric times (whenever that was), but there’s evidence to show that the ὁ ἡ τό system was in use from the very beginning. In Homer it normally has demonstrative function, as you’ll know, and that may still be true of its use in at least Ionic Greek of the period (though Homeric usage will be some, possibly considerable, distance behind contemporary), whereas in later Greek, Attic and subsequent, it had evolved into what we know as the definite article, a function it sometimes seems to assume already in Homer.

If you really want to avoid definite articles you’ll have to stick to high poetry, of any era (i.e. lyric or epic, and to a lesser extent tragic dialogue)—or, as I suggested only semi-frivolously, to Latin, for in Greek they're everywhere. But you might bear in mind that they were not found excessive or annoying by native speakers, nor by most modern readers of ancient Greek; nor, of course, by Romance language speakers; and it's easy enough to understand why. So your dislike of them is purely personal.

Use of prepositions, on the other hand, is ubiquitous in every genre and period of Greek. The Romance languages (not to mention modern Greek) compensate for the loss of inflected forms by slightly widening their scope (while at the same time reducing their number?).

[Markos]

If you really want to torture yourself and see what Homer looks like with the articles added, check out Gaza's paraphrase of the Iliad.

http://books.google.com/books?id=QSE-AAAAcAAJ

[strnbrg]

Heh, cute. It's a pretty loose paraphrase though; for extra points he should have tried to render it in verse.