'A' faciendum

The 'A' must be made

Apparently, approximately 3/5--a distinct majority--of my students believe that they 'make' their grades, e.g. "I made an 'A' on that exam."

Out of construction paper? Thin air? It must be some sort of miraculous process; would that I knew the secret of grade making. And yet somehow they are all 'making' lousy grades...

It must be a Southern thing, although it doesn't appear to be universal down here.

You are now my unfriend

Actually, that would be a new coinage. I don't believe that the adjectival nominal form has made it into the dictionary yet, but the verb "to unfriend" has been announced as Oxford's Word of the Year for 2009. Ah, the joys of Facebook neologisms. We may even need a neologism to define this specific category of neologisms. Any suggestions?

Among the others, I have seen 'sexting' cropping up with increasing frequency, but I believe my favorite is 'funemployed.' I have seen first hand the benefits of funemployment, and they seem, well, pretty fun. And "tramp stamp" is so 2004. Other favorites?

On a much less modern note, the English word 'friend' is historically interesting. It is one of the last remaining traces in Modern English of the old present participal suffix (along with 'fiend') so productive in Latin, where it appears as -ent (e.g. nom. sing. dicens [<*dic-ent-s], gen. dicentis). It comes to us through Germanic in which the suffix was largely lost. Thus it was, originally, 'the loving one.'

UPDATE: Stupid Blogger thought the above notation was a faulty HTML tag and cut my post. It has now been restored in full (though too late for GReader to pick it up, unfortunately).

What's in a paper, anyway?

Does it seem strange to non-classicists that this bizarre, five line passage (from Tacitus' Agricola, chapter 12) can serve as the basis for a 20-some page paper? Well, it does to me anyway:

fert Britannia aurum et argentum et alia metalla, pretium victoriae. gignit et Oceanus margarita, sed subfusca ac liventia. quidam artem abesse legentibus arbitrantur; nam in rubro mari viva ac spirantia saxis avelli, in Britannia, prout expulsa sint, colligi: ego facilius crediderim naturam margaritis deesse quam nobis avaritiam.

Britain bears gold and silver and other metals—the value of its conquest. The ocean also produces pearls, but they are dusky and of bluish hue. Certain men believe that some technique is absent in the collectors; for in the Indian Ocean,the pearls are pulled out of the rocks still living and breathing, whereas in Britain, are collected just as they are expelled: I, for my part, would more easily believe that the natural quality of the pearls is lacking than our greed.

Also, I am on a quest for a highly-technical, possibly extant term which, if it exists, would be the term in structural engineering for, more or less, 'the point at which the force would cause a structure to collapse in the absence of a support.' Suggestions are welcome (with credit given! hmm? hmmmm?).

Huh?

You all are watching football, because that's the only good thing to do on a Sunday afternoon (It sure beats reading Tacitus, at least). Therefore, you probably just saw the NCIS episode teaser. And heard this:

"He's as close to invisible as I've ever seen!"

That is all.

The Wicked Stepmother

We are all familiar with the wicked stepmother character in fairy-tales (Cinderella, etc.). While the Brothers Grimm, those famous collectors of tales (and linguists!), surely had some hand in it, this representation of the stepmother seems to have much wider traction.

There exists already very early in the Greek tradition the concept of a proverbially cruel stepmother. By the time of Hesiod, the stepmother (μητρυιὴ) has distilled, essentially, into a single word formula for cruelty. In the conclusion of Works & Days (822-28):

Αἵδε μὲν ἡμέραι εἰσὶν ἐπιχθονίοις μέγ' ὄνειαρ·

αἱ δ' ἄλλαι μετάδουποι, ἀκήριοι, οὔ τι φέρουσαι.

ἄλλος δ' ἀλλοίην αἰνεῖ, παῦροι δὲ ἴσασιν.

ἄλλοτε μητρυιὴ πέλει ἡμέρη, ἄλλοτε μήτηρ.

τάων εὐδαίμων τε καὶ ὄλβιος ὃς τάδε πάντα

εἰδὼς ἐργάζηται ἀναίτιος ἀθανάτοισιν,

ὄρνιθας κρίνων καὶ ὑπερβασίας ἀλεείνων.

Some days are a great benefits to men on earth,
But others are indifferent, harmless, bringing nothing at all.
Someone praises one kind of day, but few understand them.
Sometimes a day is a stepmother, sometimes a mother.
He is fortunate and blessed of men, who
knowing all these things, works on, guiltless in eyes of the gods,
discerning omens of flight and avoiding transgressions.

The juxtaposition of the mother (μήτηρ) establishes a polar relationship, i.e, cruel : caring. But this minor contextualization is unnecessary for Aeschylus in the 5th century (PB 725-27):

ἵνα

τραχεῖα πόντου Σαλμυδησσία γνάθος,

ἐχθρόξενος ναύτῃσι, μητρυιὰ νεῶν.

...where
Salmydessa is, the jagged jaw of the sea,
A hateful host for sailors, the stepmther of ships.

A pan-Indo-European theme? Even broader? I need to do some more investigating.

The Italo-Celtic Hypothesis

As I mentioned in the last post, I wrote a series of short papers--essentially exercises in comprehension and mental processing. The first concerns the proposed unity of the Celtic and Italic branches of the Indo-European language family prior to their separation into distinct language branches (cf. Indo-Iranian) This hypothesis is based on a number of shared innovations (and, perhaps, retentions), some of which are unique to Celtic and Italic. The paper is a brief examination of the evidence. An excerpt from the introduction:

The Italo-Celtic hypothesis, an Indo-European subgroup uniting Italic and Celtic into a single entity, has, since its inception in 1861 (Lottner Kuhns Beiträge 2.309 ff.), sufficiently intrigued generations of scholars as to gain a kind of cyclical immortality. This sort of immortality is not without death; on the contrary, the theory has perished many times,1 but has always been resurrected—including, notably, by Cowgill 1970 from Watkins 1966.2 The principal appeal of this and other theories of subgrouping lies in their contribution toward the resolution of a question fundamental in Indo-European studies, as framed by Watkins: “wie es eigentlich gewesen?” (1966: 29). An intermediate Italo-Celtic subgroup, existing in the vast temporal grey space between Proto-Indo-European and its relevant end-points, i.e., the daughter languages of the separate Italic and Celtic subgroups, provides valuable insight as to the process.

For the interested, the entire paper can be found here.

mutetur et resurgat

May it be changed and rise again.

My long absence from blogging has been no accident. I found the rigidity of this blog’s self-imposed form and function off-putting, and was thus disinclined from using it as it should be (and hopefully shall be) used: as an open, easily accessible record of my thoughts, usually sketched in broad and indefinite strokes as, indeed, they tend to occur.

I was nudged back to De Grypis by three episodes in particular. The first was my encounter with the reflections of Chris Blattman, Yale development economist and one of my favorite bloggers, upon his two-year blogiversary. He recalls economist Dani Rodrik’s notion of his blog as academic memory (with Google), and agrees wholeheartedly. Rodrik, in fact, wrote:

[O]ne of the unexpected scholarly benefits of having a blog is that it is like keeping an intellectual journal. You get an idea, you jot it down in your blog. Some months later, you vaguely remember having had the idea and you google your own blog to recover it. I am not kidding: I google my own blog all the time...

I can well-appreciate his sentiment. Many are the hours of frustration I have spent groping for an idea which, only just yesterday (or two hours ago, or two minutes ago) so clear and comprehensible, has slipped beyond the reach of memory, especially of late. These are, at best, wasted hours and, at worst, wasted ideas.

A second episode really brought this home. In my research on an unrelated topic, I came across a linguistic analysis of a particular speech in the Iliad which may reinforce certain suggestions I made in a paper from my undergraduate days. Now that 2007 idea was developed into a full paper (misguidedly, perhaps—it was not received warmly by the instructor). I have that paper saved on file and so, if I choose, I may reinvestigate my initial claims in light of new evidence. But there are many ideas which do not end up in the permanent record; they are jottings in the margins of texts, little notes in the recesses of notepads that, neglected until the time comes for a full-scale paper, may be at that point inaccessible. These notes will find their natural home in a blog.

The third episode consists of the recent series of short papers I have written for a general class on Indo-European languages. These assignments require one to distill complex, far-reaching concepts--often treated at length in article, monograph, or book—into a brief 3-4 page paper. The process itself is immensely helpful in understanding the material, and the ideas extracted, boiled-down to their essentials, are suddenly seem more applicable in a wide set of contexts. They have certainly facilitated the strong conceptual framework that is integral to the study of Classics and even more so, Indo-European. Since the academic necessity of such papers that are, in fact, primarily mental exercises, will soon expire, I will turn to this blog—which, I believe, is an ideal platform.

The thoughts appearing here need not be fully developed or meticulously treated; such careful attention will be rare, as they are more useful to me as material for separate projects and, as it is likely, no more interesting (or perhaps, even less so) to my readers wholly fleshed out and with an eye for the particulars. Nor will I be bound to the limited domain of Classics, or even the more extensive domain of Indo-European studies. These remain my principal interests, a fact which will show in the frequency of subjects on which I will offer my thoughts.

Yet I would add that as I continue my studies, I have found that my observations outside my discipline can often be fruitful within it; at the very least, they tend to fuel the analytic thought-processes so vital to a thorough understanding of ancient languages and literature, inter alia. Moreover, the exercise of semi-daily writing should strengthen those prose composition muscles that might otherwise atrophy in the daily grind of a reading and translation heavy course load.

Please bear with me in these motives, for though generally selfish, they are not entirely so; it is my firm belief that these oft-fleeting notes will be more interesting to you than that which came before, and much more so than nothing at all.

I’m back.

Ω Σωkρατη!

O Socrates!

Kudos to Abe for blogging this excellent meme. The entire collection is here.

And the words "meme" and "kudos" are more or less (less or more, really) directly from Greek.

(Update: My favorite.)

'malignus interpres' redux

I have just put up an updated version of my paper on Martial's malignus interpres. The Scribd introduction below:

This paper undertakes an investigation of the oft-neglected 'malignus interpres' who inhabits the preface to Martial's first book of epigrams. The study attempts first to resolve the textual problem (inscribat/scribat) that plagues the line, and moves on to explore the 'interpres' using both diachronic and comparative synchronic methods. It ultimately attempts to formulate an answer to the question--Who is the interpres?--with regard to both identity and function.

I urge you lovers of Latin poetry--the majority of my readers for sure--to go check it out.

On an encomiastic note, Scribd is incredible! It offers free access to excellent, useful (and expensive!) books like J.N. Adams's Bilingualism and the Latin Language. Classicists take note--the future is here!

hoc adfigere cunctabam...

I have been delaying posting this...for fear of it being adopted as a focal point in the ever-eloquent conservative argument against government stimulus.

The Fed's recent announcement (link with explanation by Krugman) of its new, nontraditional expansionary policy of "quantitative easing"--the functional equivalent of printing money--is an attempt to expand the monetary base with interest rates already hovering at the zero bound. Certainly conservatives have been less opposed to this measure than fiscal efforts (more often than not, on spurious grounds--the reemergence of the misguided 19th century British "Treasury View" has been the recent scourge of Brad DeLong among others); nevertheless, I though it prudent not to add ammunition, particularly as ludicrous arguments seem to dominate the discourse--even beyond Fox News.

The fact, however, illustrates an important lesson about etymology: historical context is important, at times to the extent that it is the only way of understanding a word's roots. The English words "money" and "mint" are derived from the Latin verb monere "to warn, to admonish"...

Hold the head-shaking.

"Money," in this case Roman coin, was originally "minted" at the temple of Iuno Moneta--Juno the Admonisher. The term is a transference by metonymy.

Let us hope, for the sake of an already pedantic national discourse, that I have not gravely erred.

Quis est Martialis 'malignus interpres'?

Who is Martial's 'malignus interpres'?

The mysterious malignus interpres has been received as an unwelcome intruder to Martial’s preface; he occupies vital space—the traditional domain of a declaration of poetic program—but his presence has, thus far, served only to obscure a line that is autonomously problematic. Since the early 17th century conjecture of Heinsius, critical editions of Martial have failed to reach a consensus whether to read the standard scribat or, with Heinsius, inscribat. The identity of the malignus interpres has been subsumed by this controversy and, consequently, an investigation of the enigmatic interpres has been unjustly neglected. He is hapax legomenon in Martial, and his prominent position in the preface suggests semantic marking—which necessarily implies the question: Why interpres? It is a failure of scholarship that an answer has not yet been provided...

Until now.

in nomine Patris et Filii et...huh?

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the...huh?

XKCD (via Brad DeLong)

quaestio publica

A public poll.

If someone came up to you in the street and said "Isn't it paradoxical that the Catullan Martial is not a neoteric Martial?" would you know what he/she meant?

Well...would you?

Quid est in nomine bestiarum?

What is in the name of animals?

Language Log has an interesting post concerning the formation of scientific nomenclatures which are named in honor of those who discovered them. Sally Thomason wonders why female scientists receive attribution with only the feminine genitive suffix -ae but males with -i or -ii.

The gist: non-Latin names of these biologists has been notoriously problematic, and different methods of Latinization have led to two different surface forms of the masculine genitive suffix. So while evidence of it is slim, there is no reason why femine suffixes in -iae and -ia should not be present.

However, contributions by Ben Fortson and Don Cameron are always worth reading.

Fortson:

So the reason all this is relevant is that let's say you want to Latinize a non-Latin family name. A non-Latin family name kind of corresponds to the gentilicium but also kind of corresponds to the cognomen; there's no exact equivalent either way. So one could defensibly tack on either -ius or -us to the non-Latin name to do the trick. Falling into the former camp are Latinized names like Gronovius (originally Gronov), Lipsius (-us or -ius and usually the correct one was used. This can extend to German names of ultimately Latin origin, e.g. Camerarius being the rendering of Camerer (chamberlain).

Mutatis mutandis the same issues obtain with women's last names. The names of Roman women were just feminizations of male names (Julia Greyia instead of Greya (to form the genitive greyae in Bathylagus greyae).

and Cameron:

The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (4th edition, Sec. 31.1.2) specifies one -i, but under 31.1.3, about preservation of the original spelling, both cuveri and cuverii are admissible. The trouble comes from different conventions of Latinizing modern proper names. Originally in Latin names like Marcus have genitive Marci and names like Livius have genitive Livii. So do you want to Latinize my name as Cameronus or Cameronius? You have a choice. Then the genitives would be Cameroni or Cameronii. Modern custom following the Code is to use one -i.

Check out the rest of the post here.

saevus...Boreas?

Savage...Boreas?

Yesterday, the ferocious winds that laid waste to the greater East Brunswick area led to calamity for AlmostWorthKnowing's Abe Tran. As he documents here, his car suffered the unfortunate wrong-place, wrong-time fall of a hefty tree branch on its windshield and upper hood. Our condolences go out to him and his automobile.

He attributes this unlucky turn of fate to Boreas--in Greek mythology, God of the North Wind. However, after closely consulting the modern day weather augurs, I would say that the blame more accurately belongs to Zephyrοs--the West Wind--and it suggest that Mr. Tran ought direct future propitiations to this fickle Deity.

alienus in terra aliena

Stranger in a Strange Land.

Not long ago, Brett and I finished reading Robert Heinlein's 1961 sci-fi classic Stranger in a Strange Land. Amidst the general fantastic silliness, the untranslated Martian word grok stood out as particularly ridiculous--and yet somehow, it was catchy (perhaps in the worst kind of way). Thus while the predictable plot and laughably stereotypical characters have quickly faded into hazy recollection, grok lives on in my lexicon...and apparently, in that of others as well.

It is casually used by Felix Salmon and Alex Tabarrok.

Also, while recently perusing the blogosphere, I stumbled upon this:

Warlocks and Morlocks

Don't grok door locks.

And finally, today, in my quest to determine the the identity of Martial's malignus interpres, I was seeking out a translation for German verstehen:

to grok [sl.] (Amer.)

verstehen | verstand, verstanden |

I believe I speak rightly when I say--IT'S EVERYWHERE!

Quidcumque nobis Romani fecere?

What have the Romans ever done for us?

The reminder of this classic clip comes via Chris Blattman.

ego, arbiter

I, judge.

Over at The Worst Ever, I wrote a guest review of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

συλλογισμός

A deductive argument.

And, what is worse, the reader often shares the writer's prejudices, and is far too well pleased with his conclusions to examine either his premises or his reasoning. Stand on a barrel in the streets of Bagdad, and say in a loud voice, "Twice two is four, and ginger is hot in the mouth, therefore Mohammed is the prophet of God," and your logic will probably escape criticism; or, if anyone by chance should criticise it, you could easily silence him by calling him a Christian dog.

Again, from A.E. Housman's The Application of Thought to Literary Criticism.

alea iacta est

The die is cast.*

Via Newsvine, a comparison of the passing of the most recent economic stimulus bill...with Caesar crossing the Rubicon:

It was in the winter of 49 BC that Julius Caesar lead his armies across the Rubicon river. One imagines the glint of a veiled sun off frost-sheened armor and curved shields as thousands upon thousands of legionnaires wade through waist high water in the January cold at the command of a crimson cloaked Caesar. Their destination was Rome and there was no turning back - in crossing the Rubicon they had invaded Italy, declared war upon the government they served, and cast their lots with their commander. Alea iacta est, Caesar intoned. "The die is cast."

The Republican Party crossed its own Rubicon earlier this week, its ultimate fate just as uncertain as that which faced the man-who-would-be-emperor more than 2000 years ago. Barack Obama's stimulus package passed the US House of Representatives on Wednesday without a single Republican vote. Though the plan has been derided by the Right as full of pork and insufficiently focused upon economic stimulation, the political reality is that no one will remember these critiques in a few months' time...

The Republicans have crossed the Rubicon, they march upon the nation itself and will see it in ruin before accepting anything less than the full measure of victory. From this there can be no return and no half measures. The Republican party will succeed in its opposition or be destroyed in the process. Alea iacta est.

The parallel does not seem unreasonable, although I cannot say it was my intuitive reaction to the bill.


*I prefer "The die is cast" to the perhaps more common "The die has been cast." The former translation seems to really hammer the home the traditional stative sense of the perfect, more fitting here.

Lost explicatum

Lost explained.

Chris Jones notes a Latin exchange between two characters on tonight's episode:

Just when I least expect it, this evening’s episode of the ABC Series Lost features characters speaking Latin to each other; and for the most part the actors try and duplicate a classical pronunciation.

The series is far too complicated to explain, but if you’re interested in seeing a little spoken Latin from primetime US television, you can view this evening’s episode here. The first Latin exchange is at the 14 minute mark:

Other 1: Quare non sunt vestitus eis?

Other 2: Tace!

Juliet: Cognoscitis qui sumus?

I am not a viewer, but I can offer this explanation (via Paul Kedrofsky):

PILOT: So, we have a little time and the auto-pilot’s on. How ‘bout you tell me about the island?

JACK: Well, we lived on the beach, mostly, except for the time we lived in the cave with the skeletons and the time we lived in the secret underground bunker with the lending library and the time we lived in the village built by the scientists that the people who don’t age gassed to death with the help of their leader, my third nemesis, the nebbishy con man with spine cancer, which we took over when the freighter people came to kill everybody. We ate wild boar and fish, and then the supplies stashed in the storeroom of the bunker, and then the scientists who the people who don’t age gassed to death were nice enough to replenish our food by airdrop, but only once, but that was okay, because the people who don’t age had some agriculture that we completely ignored while we stood in front of their refrigerators with the doors open. And I saw my dead dad just hanging around on the island, which I didn’t think too much about because I was preoccupied with the smoke monster and the baby stealing and the mind games with the nebbishy guy and my TOTALLY AWESOME tattoo which got my ass kicked in Thailand and the power struggle with my second nemesis, the formerly paralyzed bald survivalist mystic, who was, frankly, nuts.

PILOT: Nuts, you say?

JACK: Yeah, man of faith, thought the bunker wanted you to punch Hurley’s lotto numbers into the computer every few hours, and I was like, it’s a GAME, you lose, sucker.

PILOT: And?

JACK: So he finally came around after the shipwrecked sailor who lived in the bunker for two years told him that you had to punch the numbers, which obviously meant you didn’t have to punch the numbers. Which, come to think of it, I guess he was right in the first place. Missed the numbers, cratered the whole freaking bunker, knocked the guy who used to live there right into last Tuesday. Literally.

Oh, I forgot to mention that my dead father came back and kidnapped my secret sister.

PILOT: Um, okay. So … happy to be getting back?

JACK: Yeah, you know, I’m looking forward to having the time to grow a beard.

Mars laudetur!

Let Mars be praised!

Campus Mawrtius does not post often. That is unfortunate. Today's subject of inquiry is close to my heart--How to be a Classical Philologist. D reads Laurand's Manuel des études grecques et latines, and offers up much simple wisdom. My favorite

1. The Reading of ancient texts.
• This is too often neglected. People read about but never read Plato, for example.
• How to read (different but indispensable approaches):
  
• In-depth, slow reading (lente, pace Nietzsche)
• understanding all of the questions
• produces much fruit
• one can never read all of Plato in this way, or can read Herodotus but misses the big picture
  
• Very rapid reading
• understanding the big picture, outside connections
• ensures that you never become too narrow-minded
• You need calm, privacy, tranquility if you are to be moved by reading the great works.

Certainly check out the whole thing. He also quotes the eminently quotable A.E. Housman on the subject. From his The Application of Thought to Textual Criticism, D emphasizes:

Most men are rather stupid, and most of those who are not stupid are, consequently, rather vain; and it is hardly possible to step aside from the pursuit of truth without falling a victim either to your stupidity or else to your vanity. Stupidity will then attach you to received opinions, and you will stick in the mud; or vanity will set you hunting for novelty, and you will find mare's-nests.

That there are too few classicists like Housman, and too few blogs like Campus Mawrtius, is sad indeed.

frustra...

In vain...

I blog substantively. Nearly half the visitors to this blog over the last two days have been preteens/creepsters looking for the Sailor Moon pictures I included in this post.

Should I add other random pictures in hopes of drawing traffic? What will work best?* Perhaps something politically fresh, pop-culture retro?


Yup, I officially have no soul.


*A top result for "Obama funny picture." This is my ticket to the top, baby!

linguae antiquae discendae sunt?

Must classical languages be studied?

Via RogueClassicism, some kid from Columbia presents the case for a classical language requirement.

It starts of well enough. There is definitely substance to the formal-study-of-grammar argument, although he is not necessarily casting it in the best light. Grammar is sorely neglected outside the Classics (Consider asking a typical student of modern language X what a "subjunctive" is.), to the detriment, I think, of modern language students.

But he probably should have left it there. His stumbling world tour is a mess, although I do like this bit:

[S]tudying a classical language teaches students more about other cultures. For example, a two-year course in Greek might consist of two semesters of Greek grammar, and then a semester each of reading Plato and Homer. While the student of German is learning how to order a sandwich, his counterpart in Greek is reading the Republic.

Ich mochte ein Hamburger?

responsa

Answers.

Roy has left several comments. They are clearly intended to be funny. Since I am sure that only the most audacious (read: bored) DeGrypis readers venture into comments, I will answer them here.

Roy writes:

So scot-free is unrelated to the people of Scotland. Could it be that the English gave Scotland its name because the Scots didn't pay their scots?

Via Wikipedia*:

The name of Scotland is derived from the Latin Scoti, the term applied to Gaels. The word Scoti comes from Greek Σκωτία derived from the word Σκότος (Skotos), which means darkness and refers to the fog and long winter nights of Scotland.

Roy writes:

So what about slugs? What came first, the word slug for a slow thing or the little slimy critter?

The quality predates the animal. 'Slug' is an entity defined by slowness and heaviness (perhaps more accurately here, density). Its origins are Scandinavian cf. Swedish dial. slogga to be slow or sluggish or Norwegian dial. slugg a large heavy body, sluggje a heavy slow person. It is thus we also have, in English today, bullets referred to as 'slugs,' although by no means slow moving, or 'slug-fest,' a fight characterized by many heavy blows exchanged. 'Slug' as a 'slow, lazy fellow' is first attested, via the OED, around 1425:

c1425 Castle Persev. 2341 in Macro Plays, A, good men! be-war now all of Slugge & Slawthe,e fowle efe!

Our slimy little friends do not appear until 1704:

1704 PETIVER Gazophyl. ii. §xvii, This resembles our small Slug, and like it, is whitish below, but brownish above.

And finally, Roy writes:

You make the field sound like a subset of anthropology based on language. Presumably it's more than that?

Also, how can it be just a coincidence that the English word DAY is from a different root? If this were a TV show about a pair of investigative philologists, they would share a funny look and then dig deeper.

The technical question first. We can trace the sound changes systematically through the Germanic branch (whence English) of PIE. These changes are consistent. They rule out the possibility of PIE base *dyeu-'to shine,' from which Latin dies. They fit, however, with PIE *dhegh-, which is manifest in Sanskrit 'dah'-to burn and Lithuanian 'dagas'-"hot season," The OED notes in this Germanic branch OE. dæ, OFris. dei, dey, di, OS. dag, OHG./MHG. tac(g), G. tag, ON. dag-r, Goth. dag-s, and OTeut. *dago-z. Thus we establish this as the root. There is, then, nothing coincidental about it. In fact, it makes pretty good sense that these roots should look similar in the proto-language, as they share much in common semantically--the link between light and heat is basic.

Anthropology is the study of humanity (literally, Gk. ανθροπος- man). It is, by nature, a blanket discipline. Extraction of the study of language, the very trait which separates man and animal, from mankind is, therefore, impossible. The answer, then, is yes, but a very trivial yes. I do not think it is possible to completely separate most fields from anthropology, including linguistics-- modern or ancient (perhaps only pure science and mathematics, if that). Consider the fact that the remainder of academic disciplines lie in the social sciences or humanities.


*It is usually best not to look to Wikipedia for etymologies, as it is susceptible to the folk kind, but the multiple sources here appear sound.

SHAZAM

SHAZAM: Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, Mercury.

I have fond reminiscences of childhood hours spent watching truly terrible cartoons on VHS tapes, among them, Shazam! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the official name--perhaps the inspiration for a certain soon-to-be relic of a search engine?). But today I learned something new, browsing the legitimately LOL-worthy* cracked.com [H.T. Marginal Revolution]:

The origin of Shazam! is that young Billy Batson, a 12-year-old homeless newsboy, follows a mysterious stranger into a secret subway tunnel and boards an empty train that takes him to the lair of a wizard who gives him the secret word "Shazam!" The word is an acronym for Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury who all lend their respective powers to whoever yells the word with the least amount of shame.

Yes, you've read correctly, Captain Marvel in all of that skin-tight clothing, with his rippled muscles and dangling package is actually a 12-year-old boy who, thanks to a secret magic word he learned only by talking to strangers and following them into abandoned subway tunnels, has the amazing ability to instantly transform into the legal age of consent.

But although Mercury is included in this list, it is another hero who doth receive his gifts. This was the Sub-Mariner--also in our excellent collection--of whom Cracked writes, worthy of a quote in full:

Namor was the bastard offspring of a ship's captain and a member of a secret undersea race. We might be tempted to call him a mermaid, but the comic book insists he is technically "Homo Mermanus." A piece of advice for budding comic book writers, if you'd like to avoid cheap gay jokes at your hero's expense, perhaps including the words "homo" and "anus" in your character's scientific classification is a bad idea.

Namor has pointy Spock ears, can communicate with aquatic life, breathe underwater, possesses an enhanced physique to deal with the high pressure depths and, of course, has the obligatory tiny wings on his ankles that enable him to fly.

What's that you say? That last one seems a little out of place? Why would an aquatically themed superhero flit about on delicate little calf-wings? According to the creators: Fuck you, that's why.

*I laughed out loud, many times. Does that pardon of such a delightfully corny expression? No, no it certainly does not.

Estne serpens parvus?

Is it a small snake?

In English, we call those charming little slimy gastropods "snails." The etymology is offensively dull. Via etymonline:

snail O.E. snægl, from P.Gmc. *snagilas (cf. O.S. snegil, O.N. snigill, M.H.G. snegel, dial. Ger. Schnegel, O.H.G. snecko, Ger. Schnecke "snail"), from base *snag-, *sneg- "to crawl" (see snake). The word essentially is a dim. form of O.E. snaca "snake," lit. "creeping thing." Also formerly used of slugs. Symbolic of slowness since at least c.1000;snail's pace is attested from c.1400.

The Romans were more observant. They called a snail a coclea, identical to their word for "spiral screw." And with their observation, the Greek tradition mixed in creativity, establishing my personal favorite (via LSJ): φέροικος--literally, house-bearer.

poenam fugere

To avoid the penalty.

On James Fallows always stimulating blog, a discussion of new Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner's past tax "error" leads him to dip into his mailbag:

"Not an innocent error" dept:

1) I couldn't agree more about Geithner and after 8 years of the rankest, in-your-face demonstration of a two-tiered justice system in which every wrong doer with a white collar has gotten off scott free (who is this scott anyway?) or even been rewarded for his malfeasance I just wish we could go back to the pretense that we have a legal system that works one way for all the people.

Let me hasten to add: I'm so excited about Obama and his promise I could just about burst but this episode keeps me from bumping my nose against the ceiling.

Scott? I know Scott Free, more properly as scot-free. The expression comes from Old English sc(e)ot-a payment, contribution, ‘reckoning’; a customary tax laid on, or a contribution paid by subjects according to their ability; a custom paid to the use of a sheriff or bailiff; a local or municipal tax (OED). To go scot-free is to avoid such a tax.

pro philologo

The case for of philology...

or Why I am not an Archaeologist. Cal Watkins presents the case for me:

The evidence that archaeology can provide is limited to material remains. But human culture is not confined to material artifacts. The reconstruction of vocabulary can offer a fuller, more interesting view of the culture of a prehistoric people than archaeology precisely because it includes nonmaterial culture. Consider the case of religion. To form an idea of the religion of a people, archaeologists proceed by inference, examining temples, sanctuaries, idols, votive objects, funerary offerings, and other material remains. But these may not be forthcoming; archaeology is, for example, of little or no utility in understanding the religion of the ancient Hebrews. Yet, for the Indo-European-speaking society, we can reconstruct with certainty the word for “god,” *deiw-os, and the two-word name of the chief deity of the pantheon, *dyeu-piter, Greek Zeus pater, and Luvian Tatis Tiwaz). The forms *dyeu- and *deiw-os are both derivatives of a root dyeu-, meaning “to shine,” which appears in the word for “day” in numerous languages (Latin dies; but English DAY is from a different root). The notion of deity was therefore linked to the notion of the bright sky. The second element of the name of the chief god, *dyeu-phter-, is the general Indo-European word for FATHER, used not in the sense of father as parent but with the meaning of the adult male who is head of the household, the sense of Latin pater familias. For the Indo-Europeans the society of the gods was conceived in the image of their own society as patriarchal. The reconstructed words *deiw-os and *dyeu-phter- alone tell us more about the conceptual world of the Indo-Europeans than a roomful of graven images.

That is from his excellent introduction to the American Heritage Dictionary's Appendix of Indo-European roots.

linguae Europae indigenae

The languages of aboriginal Europe.

Don Ringe is a very, very smart guy. In his discipline, only a very smart guy writes this:

In the first place, if you want “reality-based” answers, take a scientific approach. Science may or may not reveal the existence of an objectively real world out there, but it does give results that can be replicated and answers that can be proved by anyone who knows how the system works. That’s good enough for me because I think it’s the best we can hope for. If people find specific scientific conclusions ideologically inconvenient, that’s their problem.

Thus, you should read his discussion, on LanguageLog, of the languages of Europe prior to the arrival of Indo-European and the eventual spread of our linguistic parent.

Per se

Per se--more often misused or misspelled?

This is prompted by my recent observation and acute shock at "per say," but the first is painfully common.

Odysseus et Steve Irwin

Odysseus and Steve Irwin.

What do the legendary voyager and the Crocodile Hunter have in common?

They were both fatally impaled upon a sting-ray barb. 

The September 2006 death of Steve Irwin was, perhaps, no less tragic than that of Odysseus, who according to the lost Telegony, perished at the hands of his son by the witch Circe, Telegonus. The battle between father and son, neither who recognized the other, culminated in Odysseus's death on the his son's spear point--a sting-ray barb.

That bit of Classical lore is from M.L. West's Indo-European Poetry and Myth.