Howl.

No, not that way, Ginsberg fans.

I’ve subtitled this blog “Photography, Greek, queer thinking,” and there hasn’t been so much of the middle term. Here’s a little treat from the LSJ (now online at the thesaurus linguae graecae—this has been making my life so deliciously easy).

φθέγγομαι [phthengomai], Od.10.228: utter a sound or voice, esp. speak loud or clear … properly of all animals that have lungs.

I find this word at once ugly and fascinating. Phthengomai: it’s hardly a comely sound. And yet from what I can gather it’s nearly unique among Greek verbs of vocalization—and there are a number; the Greeks were chatty—for terms that can apply both to animal and to human sound. LSJ records that in context of a horse, it means to whinny; of an eagle, scream; of a raven, croak; of a fawn, cry. But it can also mean to speak clearly, as in Homer above. The suggestion, I’d like to think, is to connote sound before it becomes speech—compareφημί/phemi, “I say,” “I declare”; its frequentative form φάσκω/phasko, “I assert”; λέγω “say, speak, mean”; ἀγορεύω “I address, speak publicly.”  φθέγγομαι is pure sound, an animal howl.