‘Minds’ in ‘Homer’: A quantitative psycholinguistic comparison of the <em>Iliad</em> and <em>Odyssey</em>
Creators: name: Dedovic, Boban
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2023
Subjects: Psycholinguistics (incl. speech production and comprehension)
Latin and classical Greek languages
Latin and classical Greek literature
Computational linguistics
Applied linguistics and educational linguistics
Linguistics not elsewhere classified
Historical, comparative and typological linguistics
Philosophy of mind (excl. cognition)
Cognitive and computational psychology not elsewhere classified
Sociolinguistics
Corpus linguistics
Translation and interpretation studies
Language studies not elsewhere classified
Classical Greek and Roman history

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 <em>mind</em> in English in the above passage. However, Homer’s <em>Iliad</em> and <em>Odyssey</em> 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.