By Karim Attia.  Intro to an essay written at university: 'And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.' Now, though man’s unity has long since crumbled, modern ‘linguisticians’ pursue the dream of one day creating their own monolithic grammar from what is today a disparate babel of human tongues.  The generation of a so-called universal grammar – a finite set of linguistic rules applicable to all languages – has led linguisticians to develop an array of analytical tools with which to pare away at the body of a language so that the fundamental organs of its functioning may be revealed. Four of the primary organs thus far identified are labelled: Phonology (-the sound system of a language and the rules for their combination and pronunciation), Morphology (-the study of the structure of words; the rules of word formation), Syntax (-the rules of sentence formation) and Semantics (-the study of the linguistic meaning of words and sentences).  The penultimate of these shall be the focus of my essay, the others appearing in support where appropriate. All languages share a common problem: how, given that people wish to communicate, and given that a virtually infinite range of possible human experiences needs to ...

by Karim Attia. Another essay I wrote for my ‘Homer’ module...based on a close reading of Homer, The Iliad (translated by Robert Fitzgerald; OUP 1998) probably the best English-language translation of the Iliad. Vaguely inspired by my interest in both Achilles and Hector, I was drawn to this, the twenty-first book of the Iliad, by the sudden realisation of just how peculiar Homer’s treatment of the encounter between his leading men was.  In pursuing an answer as to why this should be, I have discovered, what is to me, a whole new Iliad. To treat the ideas and themes in this book bit by bit and, perhaps, out of order, would detract from the organic progression originally intended by Homer’s organisation and introduction of them in his composition.  To lose, or diminish, the drama is, I feel, too great a sacrifice of both the impact and effectiveness of the sequential analysis which follows. An analysis, which focuses so predominantly on one book of the Iliad, must be especially careful to extract itself from the pages to which it has been confined.  Our experience of the Iliad is wildly different from the experience of those for whom it was originally composed and these differences will, ...

by Karim Attia. The following is a procedural essay I wrote (1998?) at university for my 'Homer' module.  By no means earth-shattering and not one of my best crafted works, but the content may still be of interest/use. When did Homer compose the epics? According to tradition Homer was a blind bard responsible for composing both the Iliad and the Odyssey.  When he did this is uncertain, but a combination of references from various sources [1]  narrows the date down to sometime between 750-650BC. What period was he writing about? Hesiod states that the Iliad recounts a story from the ‘Heroic Age’ which he located after the ‘Bronze Age’ and before the ‘Iron Age’.  From an analysis of Thukydides a date of no later than 1196BC is derived.  Analysis of Herodotos gives a date of c.1250BC while scrutiny of his genealogies gives a date between 1126-1240BC.  Scholars during the Classical period believed the Trojan wars occurred between 1350-1100BC. From what period or periods do the epics actually derive? Two approaches are used to ascertain this.  One is by cross-referencing places, people and things mentioned in the epics with archaeological evidence and the other is linguistic analysis of the Greek used by Homer. Linguistic analysis tentatively suggests the inclusion ...