Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry

Review of Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry, by Jennifer Neville (Cambridge UP, 1999).

Structural Integrity of the Greek Key Motif in beta gamma-Crystallins Is Vital for Central Eye Lens Transparency

Background: We highlight an unrecognized physiological role for the Greek key motif, an evolutionarily conserved super-secondary structural topology of the beta gamma-crystallins. These proteins constitute the bulk of the human eye lens, packed at very high concentrations in a compact, globular, short-range order, generating transparency. Congenital cataract (affecting 400,000 newborns yearly worldwide), associated with 54 mutations in beta gamma-crystallins, occurs in two major phenotypes nuclear cataract, which blocks the central visual axis, hampering the development of the growing eye and demanding earliest intervention, and the milder peripheral progressive cataract where surgery can wait. In order to understand this phenotypic dichotomy at the molecular level, we have studied the structural and aggregation features of representative mutations. Methods: Wild type and several representative mutant proteins were cloned, expressed and purified and their secondary and tertiary structural details, as well as structural stability, were compared in solution, using spectroscopy. Their tendencies to aggregate in vitro and in cellulo were also compared. In addition, we analyzed their structural differences by molecular modeling in silico. Results: Based on their properties, mutants are seen to fall into two classes. Mutants A36P, L45PL54P, R140X, and G165fs display lowered solubility and structural stability, expose several buried residues to the surface, aggregate in vitro and in cellulo, and disturb/distort the Greek key motif. And they are associated with nuclear cataract. In contrast, mutants P24T and R77S, associated with peripheral cataract, behave quite similar to the wild type molecule, and do not affect the Greek key topology. Conclusion: When a mutation distorts even one of the four Greek key motifs, the protein readily self-aggregates and precipitates, consistent with the phenotype of nuclear cataract, while mutations not affecting the motif display `native state aggregation', leading to peripheral cataract, thus offering a protein structural rationale for the cataract phenotypic dichotomy ``distort motif, lose central vision''.

Space and Gender in the Ancient Greek Novel

The plots of the five Greek novels of "love and Adventures" are set in two differentent spaces. First, a macrospace, a gigantic stage which mainly includes Eastern cities of the Roman Empire, where the protagonists live the so-called adventures. And second, the microspaces, depicted in Longus' novel and occasionally in the other novels. The love ideology is clearly conservative, and it has a specific practical purpose among the Hellenized higher classes in the Eastern Empire.

El vino de los héroes homéricos

(ES) El vino tiene un importante papel en el mundo idealizado de los héroes homéricos. El poeta ofrece las primeras descripciones de vinos griegos, principalmente procedentes del norte del Egeo, situándolos en contextos muy variados, como centro del banquete, bebida reconstituyente, elemento imprescindible en plegarias y juramentos e incluso símbolo de honor que distingue a los personajes más destacados.

La alimentación en la época arcaica según la elegía y el yambo

[ES] La lírica arcaica ocupa un lugar especial en la historia de la literatura griega, pero es también al mismo tiempo un documento importantísimo para conocer aspectos de la vida diaria de esta época, entre ellos el relacionado con la alimentación. La elegía y el yambo dejan entrever una dieta vegetariana, complementada con carnes de animales domésticos y caza y con el vino como bebida fundamental, una dieta no muy diferente de la que nos mostrarán otros autores griegos a lo largo de toda la antigüedad.

Hacia los orígenes de la literatura gastronómica: el calendario de Ananio (fr. 5 West)

[ES] El fragmento 5 West de Ananio, un yambógrafo del siglo VI a.C., es probablemente el primer ejemplo de literatura gastronómica en Grecia. En él se mencionan diversos alimentos indicando el mejor momento del año para su consumo, lo que lo convierte en un verdadero calendario gastronómico. Este tema será después particularmente importante en la medicina dietética, reapareciendo también en el personaje del cocinero-médico en la comedia.

Parodia épica y gastronomía: el Ἀττικὸν Δεῖπνον de Matrón de Pítane

[ES] En la antigua Grecia existió una floreciente literatura de tema gastronómico, poco conocida porque sólo se ha conservado una pequeña parte de ella. Uno de los escasos ejemplos que conservamos es el Ἀττικὸν Δεῖπνον de Matrón de Pítane, que, por medio de la parodia de los poemas homéricos, describe un pantagruélico banquete en el que predominan los platos de pescado. El anfitrión, los comensales, incluso los alimentos servidos adoptan las maneras de los héroes y los dioses, creándose un profundo contraste entre la forma seria y el contenido ligero, con el único propósito de divertir.

Charles I : unhero of royalist poetry

During the English Civil War, Charles I appeared as a character in Royalist poetry, both directly and allegorically. These depictions drew on ancient Roman epic poems, particularly Lucan’s De Bello Civili, in their treatment of the subject matter of civil war and Charles as an epic hero. Though the authors of these poems supported Charles, their depictions of him and his reign reveal anxiety about his weakness as a ruler. In comparison to the cults of personality surrounding his predecessors and the heroes of De Bello Civili, his cult appears bland and forced. The lack of enthusiasm surrounding Charles I may help to explain his downfall at the hands of his Parliamentarian opponents.  

El héroe Odiseo en la poesía neohelénica

[ES] El destino del héroe de "La Odisea" ha servido de inspiración en diferentes manifestaciones artísticas de la cultura occidental. Los avatares de Odiseo han dado lugar a desarrollos literarios muy diversos con una gran variedad de interpretaciones de la figura del protagonista del poema. Ha sido, asimismo, fuente permanente de inspiración para los escritores neohelénicos, quienes han descubierto en Homero el maestro que fue para sus antepasados. Entre muchos otros poetas griegos, el que quizá se ha sentido más fuertemente atraído por la figura del héroe ha sido Nikos Kasantsakis, que lo ha inmortalizado en dos de sus obras sobre todo: la tragedia "Odiseo" y el magnífico e impresionante poema "La Odisea".

El mapa de Hecateo

[EN] The work of Hecataeus has not been sufficiently recogniced in its scientifical and symbolical importance. The elaboration of the map is in the origin of the theory of proportions, which is essential to the Greek mathematics, origin this that has not been never in mind of the investigators of the Greek mathematics. Its «Genealogies» break the cyclical experience of time of that archaic society. And the scientifical prose, of which he is one of the beginners, opens to new experiences of time, too, introduces a new type of privacy and exploits the potential rationality of the ordinary language, that the sacred poetry obstructed to manifest.

A review of length-weight relationships of fishes from Greek marine waters

This paper presents 649 length-weight relationships gathered from literature pertaining to 83 fish species, belonging to 34 families, throughout Greek marine waters. The value of the slope b ranged from 1.667 for Cepola macrophthalma to 3.707 for Mullus barbatus. The mean value of b was 2.989 (SD=0.339) and did not differ significantly from 3(t-test, p<0.05). The median value of b was 3.058 and 50% of the b values ranged between 2.900 and 3.186.

Biological parameters, body length-weight and length-height relationships for various species in Greek waters

Biological/fisheries parameters (L sub(oo) M, F) are presented for four fish species (Gadiculus argenteus; Gaidropsarus mediterraneous; Symphurus ligulatus; Lepidorhombus boscii) as well as body length-weight and length-height relationships for 11 and 12 fish species, respectively, estimated from trawl samples collected using three different cod-ends (stretched mesh size: 14 mm and 20 mm diamond-shaped and 20 mm square-shaped) during 1993-1994, in the western Aegean and North Euboikos Gulf, Greece. The fisheries paramaters, estimated from length-frequency using the ELEFAN approach and software, are discussed in the light of recent information on the selectivity of the presently used trawl cod-end (14 mm diamond shaped)

Rule-based grapheme-to-phoneme method for the Greek

This paper describes a trainable method for generating letter to sound rules for the Greek language, for producing the pronunciation of out-of-vocabulary words. Several approaches have been adopted over the years for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, such as hand-seeded rules, finite state transducers, neural networks, HMMs etc, nevertheless it has been proved that the most reliable method is a rule-based one. Our approach is based on a semi-automatically pre-transcribed lexicon, from which we derived rules for automatic transcription. The efficiency and robustness of our method are proved by experiments on out-of-vocabulary words which resulted in over than 98% accuracy on a word-base criterion.