Why all the pushing and shoving?

Since I feel I don't have enough people hating on me, I thought I'd talk about something that Merry asked long ago: What's the origin of the conflict between the Greeks and their neighbours to the east?

This subject is really delicate, to put it mildly. So since I'm only talking about the origins, I'll stick to the ancient stuff and ignore all the modern incidents (of which there are enough to fill a book). This is also, quite obviously, Gary's interpretation of events.

It's not true, by the way, to say the conflict has been between only Turks and Greeks. The Greek world has been in conflict with almost every culture and people who've controlled the land which today we call Turkey. The west coast of Turkey, which is really the area of conflict, was known in those days as Asia Minor. I'm going to call it Asia Minor from now on.

The first record of conflict between the Greeks and people of Asia Minor is the Iliad, by a guy called Homer. Since that's the oldest book in the Western world, this has obviously been going on for some time.

The people of Troy have no genetic or cultural relationship to modern Turks, so whether the Trojan War counts as the origin of the current long-lasting conflict is doubtful. It would be hard to say Greeks and Turks hate each other today because Helen had it off with Paris 3,000 years ago. Also, after the Trojan War, things quietened down a lot. For a few hundred years there was nothing between the sides but the usual raids, pillaging, rape and murder which is the stuff of everyday life.

It didn't really get official again until a rather interesting incident in about 508BC. By this time the Persian Empire, which had its origin far to the east, had expanded until it controlled everything all the way to the coast of Asia Minor. In the same period the ever-growing Greek population had expanded and placed colony cities all up and down...you guessed it...the coast of Asia Minor.

The Greek cities of Asia Minor were therefore under Persian rule. Now, Greek culture is highly individualistic, but the Persians were simply stronger, the Greeks were nothing if not realists, and in any case Persian rule was relatively light. As long as the Persians didn't rip off too much in tribute, the situation was semi-stable.

Athens at this time had recently overthrown the last of the Tyrants, and there was a bitter power struggle between factions for control of the city, a struggle in which Sparta decided to lend a hand to put their own man in charge. The Spartans sent an army. No one had ever beaten the Spartans in battle.

When the Athenians heard a Spartan army was on the way, they at once sent an embassy to the Satrap at Sardis. A Satrap was the Persian term for the governor of a province, and the city of Sardis was at that time the effective capital of Asia Minor. The Satrap of Sardis was a guy called Artaphernes. A Satrap is a powerful man at the best of times, but this Artaphernes also happened to be the brother of the Great King.

The Athenians asked Artaphernes for protection against the Spartans. Artaphernes said that was fine, as long as the Athenians offered earth and water. To offer earth and water is Persian-Speak for submitting to the Great King, and thus become a client state of Persia.

The Athenian embassy said...yes. (!)

The desperate Athenians handed over earth and water on the spot. At that moment, Athens and all of Attica became a part of the Persian Empire.

The Athenian embassy returned to Athens, secure in the knowledge that Athens was safe from Sparta, only to discover the crisis with Sparta was over, and Athens no longer needed protection.

Woops.

The ambassadors got into huge trouble for offering earth and water. Whether or not this was fair is not clear. Greek sources claim the ambassadors acted without authority, but then, they would say that, wouldn't they?

The Athenians decided to...er..."forget" that embarrassing little incident had ever happened. The Persians had better memories.

The Persian leadership, which had not really noticed the Greeks before, suddenly realised they had some irritating people on their western flank. What's more, in Persian culture, to lie was a terrible thing. Persian boys were taught only three things: to ride the horse, to shoot the bow, and to abjure the lie. The Athenian embassay had, in effect, lied in the face of the brother of the Great King.

It was all downhill from here. The Greek cities in Asia Minor revolted against the Persians, and the Athenians heavily supported the revolt, which ended with the Greeks getting their asses whipped.

The Persians decided to fix the problem by putting one of the old Tyrants back in control of Athens. That caused the Battle of Marathon, which ended with the Persians getting their asses whipped.

Artaphernes later sent ambassadors to Sparta, demanding earth and water. The Spartans tossed the ambassadors down a well, saying they'd find plenty of earth and water down there. Diplomacy in those days did tend to be robust.

The next Great King decided to do the job properly, with the Persian Wars.

And so it has gone on. If you're looking for the start of the long term conflict, I think the Athenian embassy to Artaphernes is it. There've been odd moments when one empire or another has controlled both sides of the Aegean Sea, such as the Roman and Byzantine, and at those times it's been quiet. There've also been periods when one side of the other has been too poor to make much trouble. But for those moments, there's been pushing and shoving ever since 508BC.

The ultimate issue is who gets control of Asia Minor. The natural balance of force lies along the coastline, so that the Greeks get all the islands and whoever's on the other side gets the Asian land. From time to time during history, one side or the other has been able to push across, but it always ends with a return to the natural border, which is what we more or less have today.

Pronouncing Ancient Greek

It's much easier to pronounce Ancient Greek words than it looks at first. The funny alphabet is a bit off-putting, but really, once you've got the idea, it's straightforward.

The exact soundings as you would have heard them on the streets of Classical Athens have been lost. Greek is a living language which evolved! There are different theories about the ancient pronounciation and (surprise!) they don't entirely agree with each other. Fortunately, none of us are likely to fall through a time vortex into the ancient past, so if we stuff it up, no one who matters will ever know.

There were a zillion different dialects of Ancient Greek. If you lived back then, you could probably have spotted someone's city the moment they opened their mouths. We're going to ignore all the dialects but one: Attic -- the dialect of Athens. Attic Greek is the language of Pericles and Socrates and Nicolaos and Diotima and Plato and Euripides and Sophocles.

Attic Greek became the trading language of the Mediterranean. As it spread, it evolved rapidly, and became known as koine. The koine dialect is hugely important to this day, because it just happens to be the language in which the Bible was written. It's also the ancestor of Modern Greek.

The sound variations between dialects are real, but not big enough to worry someone who only wants to read Ancient Greek words in a book. So I'll ignore them all and give you a single sound system which works.

My Ancient Greek is very limited, by the way, and there are people reading this blog who are practically fluent. If you are one of those clever people I sincerely hope you'll correct any errors in comments. I'd like to learn something too! So with that caveat, here goes...

Α, α	a	father	alpha
Β, β	b	bob	beta
Γ, γ	g	got	gamma
Δ, δ	d	dad	delta
Ε, ε	e	get	epsilon
Ζ, ζ	z	adze	zeta
Η, η	ê	fête	eta
Θ, θ	th	thoth	theta
Ι, ι	i	hit or ski (take your choice)	iota
Κ, κ	k	kit kat	kappa
Λ, λ	l	let	lambda
Μ, μ	m	met	mu
Ν, ν	n	net	nu
Ξ, ξ	x	box	xi
Ο, ο	o	okay	omikron
Π, π	p	pop	pi
Ρ, ρ	r	rat	rho
Σ, σ, ς	s	sat	sigma
Τ, τ	t	sat	tau
Υ, υ	y	oops!	upsilon
Φ, φ	ph	phone	phi
Χ, χ	ch	khaki	chi
Ψ, ψ	ps	pssst!	psi
Ω, ω	ô	note or saw (take your choice)	omega

There were also these diphthongs (vowels which combined to form a single sound):

ai as in aisle
ei as in fate
oi as in oil (very important to me because it's used for plurals)
ay as in cow (recall the y transliteration makes an oo sound)
ey as in feud
oy as in soup

Notice there are two letters for the different o sounds, where we have one to handle both.

Also there are effectively three letters for our e & i sounds.

The ch of Greek is much like the ch of German. Which means try to say a k while clearing your throat. No sane English speaker wants to do this. You can get away with a kh.

The z, too, is like a German z, which is a tz or a dz sound. Take your pick.

There is no j sound at all. This means Janet is safe from me making her a character.

Loretta asked in the comments of a previous post how to pronounce Phaedo (the title of a book by Plato). That's a fantastic question, because it opens up a small can of worms. An awful lot of Greek stuff comes to us via the Romans. The Romans spoke Latin, obviously, but all educated Romans spoke Greek too. Koine, in fact. But they mangled Greek names just like the Greeks mangled Persian names. And many Greek texts come to us via Latin translations. Here is the name of Plato's book Phaedo, in Greek:

Φαίδων

Try your newly acquired transliteration skills on this word. Notice anything odd?

That's right, the Romans dropped the final n. The "correct" transliteration is Phaidon, and since the ai is a diphthong as per above, the "correct" pronounciation is

FIDE - OWN

The reality is, though, when you're reading a book you really should pronounce the funny words however you feel like. It's not like the historical Phaidon is going to sue you for mispronouncing his name, and it's far more important that you're comfortable. I put a character list at the start of my first book, in which I gave suggested pronounciations for the characters. I didn't even bother looking at my own transliteration chart when I wrote it; I just put in what I thought would be easiest for modern readers to say.

But! If you're looking for something that sounds "accurate". This chart will do the job.

Comment #1,000 has been made

The 1,000th reader comment has been made on this blog! That 1,000 does not include any of my own replies, only comments made by you, dear readers.

We've reached this milestone together - you, after all, wrote all the comments. To each and every one of you, friends and readers, thanks for being here.

I was quite sure comment #1,000 would come from one of the regular writers. In fact commenter 1,000 is first time visitor Judith Engracia, who recently began as an intern at certain literary agencies called FinePrint & Nancy Coffey. Welcome Judith!

It's all right (but not alright) to use a trailing apostrophe in the classical genetive

Carrying on from the previous post, the copyedit style guide did resolve two of the greatest mysteries of the universe.

I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago asking whether ancient Greek and Roman names should have 's or only the trailing apostrophe in the possessive. This turned out to be quite controversial. The definitive answer is in the style guide, which says:

ancient classical names ending in "s" are set with a single apostrophe to form the possessive.

i.e. the correct possessive form is: Pericles' scroll

There you are; St Martin's Press says it, so it must be true. So now everything's all right, but it's not alright.

My long term readers will be amused to hear Copyeditor meticulously replaced every alright with all right.

I'll have to admit defeat on that front. I promise to write only all right from now on. But I'm going to sob quietly as I do the global replace on books 2 and 3.

The debut author's guide to copyedit reviews

If you think writing a book is hard, try reviewing the copyedits.

An innocent-looking package arrived by courier at my home 2 weeks ago. I instantly tore it open to reveal:


The copyedits for my first book! Yay!

But there was a minor problem. When this thing arrived, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Clearly I had to check the copyedits, but what were all those funny marks in green pencil?

Now I know, thanks to lots of help from my friends, and guidance from my ever-supportive agent. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only debut author to have no idea what to do with a copyedit, so herewith is Gary's Guide To Reading A Copyedit.

Here's the first page of my ms:


I'm afraid it's a bit unclear in blogger. You might need to click on it for the details. You'll notice by the way the working title is still in the top left corner. The real title is The Pericles Commission, and it's fixed on the title page.

Everyone who touches the ms uses a different color pencil. Copyeditor used green, so I picked blue. Copyeditor also used red for various instructions to the printer. The CN means Chapter Number, as in, it would be nice to have one here. The 1-13 is the page number, since there is stuff which comes before. Copyeditor has meticulously counted out the starting pages. Earlier sections have FHM which mean Front Header Matter - stuff which comes before the actual story.

But you, Bedazzled Author, can ignore everything in red. It's the stuff in green that matters. Notice the arcs joining face down. That means make it a single word. The arrow coming up underneath left means put a comma there. Have a look at CHAPTER ONE. The triple line under the leading letters means make them caps. The up-and-across lines over the rest of each word means make them lowercase.

Notice the word knelt. There's a tiny but discernible strike through the lt. The strike means what you think it means. The arc followed by eled means join the surviving kne to eled to form kneeled.

Now for the most important lesson in copyedit review that you, Dear Author, need to know. Allow me to introduce you to the word STET.

When I saw this abomination called kneeled I did what any right-thinking author would do: I whinged to my agent. Janet managed to stay calm in the face of my unutterably black ignorance, and told me of the magic word STET. The magic word undoes whatever the copyeditor had done. So my blue magic nullified the green magic, leaving behind only the original text.

There are piles of these interesting green marks. Here's another example:


The lines in the ellipsis mean make the dots evenly spaced. There are zillions of marks like that throughout and they're for the printers, not me. The underline beneath him means make it italics. Using italics in the text isn't sufficient, so again, Copyeditor has laboriously placed printer instructions all over the place.

The question in the box is interesting. Copyeditor wants to change the text, ever so slightly. The =b means print a dash and a small b instead of the B. Apparently the Chicago Manual of Style, which I have never read, calls for it here. But since this changes the text, Copyeditor asks nicely if this is okay with me.

Here's a final one with some lovely exotic marks. The 1 m combination means this is an em-dash. The upper arc means the whole string of characters is joined together. Note Copyeditor spotted the endquote was the wrong way round. OMG. What attention to detail!

The weird symbol through the dash on the second line means delete. The under-arc closes up, and the triple underline means capitalize. All according to the style manual.

There're piles more of this, but you get the idea.

Once I knew about STET, I began to do something stupid: I over-stetted. It took me a while to realize Copyeditor is right far more often than I am. Which is why when I sent back the ms there were lots of faint blue STETs which I'd rubbed out.

I think the basic rule is, Copyeditor is always right about formatting, almost always right about spelling, usually right about usage, and almost never right about word substitution.

A few times Copyeditor wanted to change a phrase. Usually the substitute suggestion damaged the prose rhythm. But equally, in each case Copyeditor had clearly found a phrase that wasn't working. In just about every case I crossed out Copyeditor's text, crossed out my own text, and wrote something else.

The page you see on top in the first picture is the style guide. This is the set of rules for formatting, grammar etc. Copyeditor has applied these rules across the entire ms.

The style guide rules are followed by any unusual words and a complete list of characters. There are 3 pages of style guide. In the top picture you see the rules and the beginning of the unusual words. (I blurred a few terms to avoid spoilers.)

There are 55 characters in my book. I know because Copyeditor counted every one. And listed the page on which each first appears. And listed every variant by which each character is known. Copyeditor found minor characters I'd forgotten even existed. When I went through the list I twice read names that caused me to say, "Who in Hades is that?" Then I turned to the page listed for first appearance and said, "Oh yes! I'd forgotten all about him!" (It may be a bad sign I can't remember characters in my own book, but believe me, when you're writing the third, cameo appearances in the first evaporate from the brain cells.)

I am simply amazed at what Copyeditor did for me.

Copyeditor has read every single word, every single punctuation mark, every single reference, and has made sure everything is right.

Copyeditor has saved me from some embarrassing errors:

• At some point I must have used global replace to turn every "armour" into "amour". I obviously meant to turn armour from its UK spelling to the US spelling armor. Thank you Copyeditor for saving me from looking like a complete idiot.
  

• There are 8 places where I totally failed to type a necessary word! As in, the word just wasn't there. OMG. Copyeditor saved me.
  

• I wrote "ordnances" where it should have been "ordinances". I'm amazed Copyeditor spotted that one!

I could go on, but you get the idea.

The mechanics of reviewing a copyedit turn out to be simple, even if some of the decisions can be tricky, and it's sort of fun in a bizarre, perverse, masochistic kind of way. While I wouldn't recommend copyedits as a good way to relax, there's no question the copyeditor turns your book into a better book.

There is no way I could possibly have got through the copyedit review without lots of help from my good friends on twitter. The moment I saw the funny marks I was asking questions, and where my North American friends were particularly useful was in helping me with American usage. The nuances are quite amazing when you get into it. I want to save that for another post though, 'cause this one is already way too long, but I do want to say a massively huge THANK YOU to all the kind people who got me through this!

And there's another thank you to be made. I don't know who Copyeditor is, by the way. Editor Kathleen intermediates. I've asked to send on a thank you note because Copyeditor did an excellent job. If by any chance Copyeditor is reading this, thank you so much!