'Minds' in 'Homer': A quantitative psycholinguistic comparison of the Iliad and Odyssey
Creators: name: Dedovic, Boban
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Homer
Iliad
Odyssey
psycholinguistics
mental language
computational linguistics

description: “My child, why do you weep? What grief has come upon your <em>phrenes</em> (φρένες)? Speak— conceal not in <em>noos</em> (νόος) in order that we both may know,” so speaks Achilles’ mother Thetis as the fierce warrior weeps tears of wrath on the beaches of Troy (<em>Il.</em> 1.362-363). To be sure, <em>noos</em> likely translates as mind in English in the above passage. However, Homer’s <em>Iliad</em> and Odyssey include a total of eight such words that may be rendered as mind, heart, or spirit: <em>noos</em> (νόος), <em>thymos</em> (θυμός), <em>psykhe</em> (ψυχή), <em>phrenes</em> (φρένες), <em>prapides</em> (πρᾰπῐ́δες), <em>kardia</em> (κᾰρδῐ́ᾱ), <em>kradie</em> (κρᾰδῐ́η), <em>ker</em> (κῆρ), and <em>etor</em> (ἦτορ). This complicated situation with Greek translations of mind is at the heart of this study’s empirical investigation. To wit, what is mind in the <em>Il.</em> compared to the <em>Od.</em>? The present investigation sought to quantify and compare the use of mental language in the Homeric epics by means of computational linguistics. Prior scholarly investigations have been mostly qualitative; the few quantitative studies conducted utilized miniscule sample sizes of English translations. Two studies were conducted. 17 translators who translated both the <em>Il.</em> and <em>Od.</em> into English were selected (within-subjects design). The texts were sanitized and compiled for lexical frequency analyses in <em>Voyant</em>, a digital linguistic analysis tool. Study 1 compared how often mental language terms appeared in both works. Results showed that total word density of mental language increased significantly from the <em>Il.</em> to the <em>Od.</em> in both English translations as well as in the original Greek version. Study 2 compiled an English glossary of mental language terms and counted the frequencies for the 34 total works. A paired samples <em>t</em>-test was conducted to compare the mean mental language densities of the <em>Il.</em> and <em>Od.</em> across 17 translators. There was a significant difference in the mean densities for the <em>Il.</em> (<em>M</em> = 68.2, <em>SD</em> = 8.9) and <em>Od.</em> (<em>M</em> = 91.9, <em>SD</em> = 11.6) conditions; <em>t</em>(16) = -17.798, <em>N</em> = 17, <em>p </em>&lt; .001, <em>d</em> = -4.317. Further correlational tests as well as ANCOVA were conducted in order to determine if various factors could explain the large effect size. No significant results were observed or relevant. All hypotheses were supported. These data suggest that the <em>Od.</em> contains much more mental language than the <em>Il.</em> Implications and limitations are discussed.
description: Boban Dedović (Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4528-7239; Academia.edu: https://chicago.academia.edu/BobanDedovic) is now at the Department of Humanities at the University of Chicago. Data for this study were collected between March 2019 and May 2020. This work underwent double-blind peer review in order to be presented at the International Conference on the Mental Lexicon in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, from October 11–14, 2022. Submitted May 15, 2022. Accepted June 10, 2022. Partial funding for the publication of this article was provided by the OMNIKA Foundation (Las Vegas, NV), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity whose mission is to organize and make freely available all the world's mythological stories. Website: https://omnika.conscious.ai Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Boban Dedović. Email: boban@uchicago.edu