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.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?).
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.
"He's as close to invisible as I've ever seen!"That is all.
Αἵδε μὲν ἡμέραι εἰσὶν ἐπιχθονίοις μέγ' ὄνειαρ·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):
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.
ἵναἐχθρόξενος ναύτῃσι, μητρυιὰ νεῶν.
...where
Salmydessa is, the jagged jaw of the sea,
A hateful host for sailors, the stepmther of ships.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until now.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...
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?
and Cameron: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).
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.
Savage...Boreas?Warlocks and MorlocksDon't grok door locks.
| to grok [sl.] (Amer.) | verstehen | verstand, verstanden | |
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.
The parallel does not seem unreasonable, although I cannot say it was my intuitive reaction to the bill.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.
