Another gem from Laudator Temporis Acti:
Augustine, Sermons 167.4 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 38, col. 910; tr. Edmund Hill):
There is a well-known Punic proverb, which I will of course quote to you in Latin, because you don’t all know Punic. It’s an old Punic proverb: “Pestilence is begging for a penny; give it two, and let it take itself off.”
Proverbium notum est punicum, quod quidem latine vobis dicam, quia punice non omnes nostis. Punicum enim proverbium est antiquum: Nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da, et ducat se.
Cf. Ps-Augustine, Sermons 111.6 (Patrologia Latina, vol. 39, col. 1966):
pestilentia ante ostium venit et nummum quaerit; duos illi da, et ducat se.
W. Wehle, “Punisches Sprichwort bei Augustin,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 17 (1862) 638, emends Augustine, Sermons 167.4 as follows:
unum nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da et ducet se.
Veselin Čajkanovič, “Ein punisches Sprichwort bei Augustin,” Orientalistische Literaturzeitung 13.10 (October, 1910) 436-437, argues in favor of Wehle’s emendation.
H.J. Rose, “The Folklore of Saint Augustine,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 133 (Lent Term, 1926) 5-21 (at 11, footnote omitted):
[O]n one occasion he borrows a Punic proverb, which I confess I cannot explain, and would be obliged if anyone could tell me exactly what it means. He translates it, nummum quaerit pestilentia; duos illi da et ducat se.
Click through for Michael G. Cox’s attempt to reconstruct the proverb; I like and agree with Rose’s “which I confess I cannot explain, and would be obliged if anyone could tell me exactly what it means.”
Here in 2020, in the Aforismi section:
In questi giorni di crudele pandemia torna utile un proverbio africano suggerito da S. Agostino: “La peste pretende una moneta: dagliene due e sparisca” (Nummum quaerit pestilentia: duo illi da et ducat se”). Curioso che la pestilenza, altro nome per dire il diavolo, sia messa in relazione con il denaro che non è propriamente l’acquasanta tanto che la stessa pecunia è detta sterco del diavolo. Per mettere in fuga un pericolo esiziale, è lecito dunque pagare un prezzo anche doppio rispetto a quello preteso. [bolding added by Ed]
Opporre alla pericolosità della pandemia “la potenza di fuoco” del danaro per il salvataggio dell’Europa: è quanto si chiede. “Il nemico se puoi pagalo”, dice un altro proverbio (sardo). Covid-19 non saprà mai quanto è costato.
dagliene due
There’s that “-ne” again. This was explained here a few years back, but I’ve of course forgotten and can’t find the post.
If you look at the full paragraph in an English translation and see where Augustine is going after the quoted proverb, you can kind of reverse-engineer what he thought it meant or wished his audience to think it meant.
“There is a well-known Punic proverb, which I will of course quote to you in Latin, because you don’t all know Punic. It’s an old Punic proverb: “Pestilence is begging for a penny; give it two, and let it take itself off.” Doesn’t this proverb appear to have been born of the gospel? After all, what else did the Lord say but Redeeming the time, when he said, If anyone wants to go to law with you and take away your shirt, let him have your coat as well (Mt 5:40). He wants to go to law with you and take your shirt, he wants to distract you with lawsuits from your God; you won’t have tranquillity in your heart, you won’t have a quiet mind, your thoughts will be all upside down, you’re exasperated against this opponent of yours. Just look, you see, you’ve lost, you’ve wasted, time. So how
much better it is to lose cash, and redeem, buy back time!”
Reading more context before and after the paragraph (which I haven’t bothered to do …) probably couldn’t hurt.
There’s that “-ne” again. This was explained here a few years back, but I’ve of course forgotten and can’t find the post.
Here you go. (Just last October — how time flies!)
Yes, thanks to Etienne back then, quoting a teacher in Québec: “NE is just like French EN, despite being spelled backwards”. Hell’s bells, no wonder I couldn’t remember.
Maybe I can keep this version in mind: “se ne andarono” corresponds morpheme-by-morpheme to French “(ils) s’en allèrent”.
Matthew 5:41 RSV, and if any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
Punic saying intention or not.
In those days gasoline prices must have been extremely high. I can’t think of any other reason why someone would force me to drive him a mile down the road. Oh wait: maybe he missed his bus to the aggro rehab clinic.
One of Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts: If someone asks you to walk a mile in his shoes, you should do it. Because you’ll be a mile away from the guy, plus you’ll have a new pair of shoes.
Surely the Punic saying is about medicine. A unit of money was a unit of weight was a unit of volume was a measure of medicine. If the pestilence demands a shekel, give it two and see it go.
Edit: Which of course is pretty boring. For Augustine to find it worth mystifying for a bigger audience, there must have been metaphorical layers as well.
Did pestilentia have a metaphorical meaning then?
Here’s an interesting essay on Punic in Augustine’s works:
https://mideasti.blogspot.com/2013/07/did-punic-survive-until-advent-of.html
I note that it is third of a series on Punic.
Part 2 has an old cite from (languagehat commentator and language blogger) Lameen
https://mideasti.blogspot.com/2013/07/did-spoken-punic-survive-until-advent_26.html
Cox’s full paper on Punic is freely downloadable:
https://journal.fi/store/article/view/49737
Not only Lameen, but also Bulbul.
The pestilence is obviously not a Dane, or it would take the two and come back next year for four.
I think the general sense of the proverb is similar to that of the Kusaal
Kikirig ya’a mɔr bʋʋdɛ, fʋn tis o ka o lɛbig o mɔɔgʋn.
“When the (hostile) bush spirit has a point, agree with it so it will go home to the bush.”
Just a little note here -there is a substantial scholarly literature having as its focus the question of whether Augustine, when writing about LINGUA PUNICA, meant “Punic” (i.e. the transplanted dialect of Phoenician spoken in Carthage and neighboring areas) or a language ancestral to (or closely related to) modern varieties of Berber (If the latter interpretation is true, then I am afraid Michael G. Cox’s attempts at reconstructing the original proverb are a waste of time).
It might therefore be wiser, because of this uncertainty, to render “Proverbium punicum” as “North African proverb”.
Peter Brown (who seems to have read everything, including W. M. Green, unavailable in the OP), in Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine (2007) 279ff, which reprints Christianity and Local Culture in Late Roman Africa, J. of Roman Studies LVIII 1968, 85-95, discussed languages,
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Religion_and_Society_in_the_Age_of_St_Au/f-pJAwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=punic+intitle:augustine+inauthor:peter+inauthor:brown&printsec=frontcover
scroll or search Punic
The three blog posts (here’s the third) actually go into some detail on why the language really is Punic. The example words are Semitic, and Augustine actually mentioned a “Libyan” language spoken mainly outside the empire.
David: The fact that the example words are “Semitic” is part of the problem: All could be Hebrew/Aramaic words, and indeed of the Semitic words given by Augustine not a single one is unambiguously or even probably Punic -indeed, one is unambiguously…Berber! Nor is a single one of these Semitic words presented in a context where the LINGUA PUNICA is presented as a living language.
If you (or indeed any other interested hatter) feel up to reading Catalan, I strongly suggest pages 623 to 671 of Volume One of this fine dissertation (which I know well, having re-read it obsessively a couple of years ago: As a result I now have a much better reading knowledge of Catalan and know much more about the linguistic history of North Africa, a double win really), where the author concludes that on balance, LINGUA PUNICA probably meant (some kind of older) Berber rather than Punic:
https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/1724#page=20
The claim is that every Semitic term that Augustine referenced was a Berber borrowing from Hebrew/Aramaic? And Augustine honestly thought that Berber+Hebrew/Aramaic loans was actually Punic, and that Berbers would claim to be Canaanites?
Well, it would not be a priori impossible that the language of the Punic farmers shifted to Berber while they kept their ethnic self-perception, or that Berbers took on Canaanite as their self-designation; after all, if the Greeks could be Romans, why wouldn’t Berbers be able to be Phoenicians?
Is there Punic epigraphy in Tunisia / Algeria from Roman times comparable to that in Tripolitania?
…but why would salus “three” be borrowed?
Phoenician loanwords in documented Berber languages are hard to find; the known languages are definitely not descended from anything that had such intense contact with Phoenician.
…not tonight, in this weather. We’re having around 428 ppm CO₂ in the air, and it shows.
Yes, there are. Here is a page of Neopunic inscriptions in Tunisia.
The Jongling/Kerr book is a better source, but the google preview I got ended with the first Ain Zakkar inscription.
I took a stab at the Catalan, but that’s a 1000+ page dissertation with 170 pages on Zeugitania/Byzacena, which turned out not to be the right chapter, and then my in-document search for August- turned up only English in footnotes, and Agost- very little at all, before I realized I didn’t know how to spell Augustine in Catalan… I think it’s beyond me.
I got the sense OwlMirror’s unfriendly summary is not inaccurate.
It’s also worth noting Josephine Quinn’s objection that one would not ask Quid sint=What are they in Latin, and that if the answer Chanani is in Punic, it is singular, and thus she believes the Augustinian text was corrupted and should read Quid sit=What is it? I.e.the language not the people.
She wrote a book on “the Phoenicians”, a prime point of which is that Phoenicians/Punics had no such sense of identity, but rather thought of themselves as Tyrians, Sidonians, Carthaginians or whatever.
Phoenicians/Punics had no such sense of identity, but rather thought of themselves as Tyrians, Sidonians, Carthaginians or whatever.
That’s what I’ve always thought, but based on what I don’t know.
The thesis has more than 1000 pages split across 3 volumes, but it also has a very nice table of contents, with each chapter and subchapter/subsection titled. Even without knowing Catalan, one can see that chapter 10 is titled “La qüestió punica, id est afra“, and 10.2.1 is titled “Les referències d’Agustí a la lingua punica” (which presumably addresses the question of spelling Augustine in Catalan). 10.4 is titled “Conclusions”, and 10.4.2 is “Lingua punica no equival a ‘llengua púnica’”.
So one can easily see where the topic is discussed.
Chapter 10 begins on the page labeled 623, but the PDF numbering has that as 653 of the total.
Yeah, I did eventually find it but my momentum was killed. I made the mistake of reading the intro material that listed the first 8 or 9 chapters organized by geography without (at least immediately) mentioning the rest, and assuming that this would be dealt with in the Zeug./Byc. chapter. Trying to skim for organization in a language you only know by cognates is like trying to read an underwater sign from above the choppy surface.
Since I brought up this (part of the) thesis I suppose I should be the one to sum up its arguments in bullet points:
(Parenthetical comments are mine, not the thesis author’s)-
-The belief that PUNICA referred specifically to “Punic” was the default belief over much of the twentieth century.
-The two things that caused some scholars to turn against this consensus were the observed facts that 1-“punicus” in earlier Latin writers definitely was used with a broad meaning of “North African”, and not a specifically “Punic/Carthaginian” meaning, and 2-Contemporary non-Latin inscriptions in the region of Augustine’s birth are overwhelmingly NOT in Punic but in Libyco-Berber or Libyco-Latin (The underlying language may or may not be ancestral to Modern Berber, but even if it is not it is certainly a close relative).
-Augustine refers to LINGUA PUNICA as a written language, comparable to Latin, Greek and Hebrew, but since the last of these three was probably no longer an L1 in Augustine’s time nothing guarantees that LINGUA PUNICA, *even if* this referred to Punic, was still a living language in his day.
-Augustine’s reference to Punic books (LIBRI PUNICI) seems to have been lifted from the writings of Sallust, who tellingly referred to such books as having been written long before his day. Tellingly, nowhere does Augustine refer to such books as written in his time, or indeed to his ever having read a single one.
-Now, when Augustine refers to the LINGUA PUNICA as a living language, with substantial numbers of monolingual speakers, he actually does refer to regions where it is spoken…which somehow seem to correspond to regions where Lybico-Latin or Lybico-Berber inscriptions are abundant, but inscriptions in Punic are rare or wholly non-existent.
-Oh, and the claim that peasants in the region called themselves “Chanani”? The French historian Gabriel Camps had already shown that the story is Biblical in origin and thus quite unreliable as a guide to ethnolinguistic self-perception and autonyms in Augustine’s day.
-Crucially, the belief that the inhabitants of North Africa ALL had ancestry in the Levant may have been believed by Augustine, who might thus have seen Hebrew/Aramaic and “Lingua Punica” as closely related if not the same…no matter what actual language “Lingua Punica” refers to!
-The “Punic” words he discusses are ALL explicable as Biblical commentaries on individual Hebrew + Aramaic words.
-On the other hand, of the local words and place-names mentioned in his writings, some are clearly Berber-like, but not one can be explained via Punic.
-Crucially, the same is true of other Latin-language writers: whenever they use non-Classical words or place-names, these can often be connected to Berber, never to Punic. Crucially, one of the most unambiguously Berber-like words is actually called PUNICUS, confirming that PUNICUS meant “North African”, not “Punic”.
In the hope that the above summary will be of some small use to at least some hatters.
> one of the most unambiguously Berber-like words is actually called PUNICUS
Which one?
Also, what is the explanation for Augustine’s “Libyan” language spoken beyond the frontier? A different Berber relative, something unattested, or something from another branch of Semitic or even a fully African language family? Not saying that an answer is necessary or even possible, but if you just view this particular part of the puzzle, Ockham seems to point to Berber extra muros and Punic within.
One Berber with extra muros, one Punic hold the muros.
I’m not sure whether the supposedly clearly Berber word that Augustine labeled Punic is “dellas”, a type of grass (the dissertation says carex, but wiki says it’s a grass The dissertation labels it that way, but I didn’t look at every word analyzed there.
If so, it’s not the clincher that it seems. Ampelodesmus mauretanica is a grass that only grows in the western and central Mediterranean basin, a perfect candidate for a word that would have been loaned into Punic, likely having no Phoenician or even Semitic antecedent, and with no particular importance, it’s not surprising that we would have no other citations than Augustine for the Berber-derived Punic etymon.
A loan in this direction seems much more likely than a dialect of (pre)Berber picking up the Punic word for three.
Berber languages willingly (if not eagerly) borrow Arabic numerals. (Of course the implications for Punic-Berber situation are unclear:)).
Sure, but that goes along with a thick layer (or several) of other Arabic vocabulary, complete with loanword phonemes and some loaned grammar. No attested or reconstructed Berber variety has such an amount of Punic influence.
Apart from all the lexical evidence, Augustine talks about Punic books. We have no evidence that anyone in or before his time had written any books in Libyco-Berber, but plenty of evidence that books in Punic existed.
@DM, interestingly some Berber numerals can be Semitic loans. From Kossmann (The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber):
Drasvi: Since no other evidence for a non-Punic language, pre-Arabic Semitic language spoken in North Africa exists, it seems to me that a simpler assumption is that the Berber numerals 1-10 which are similar to Semitic ones are genuine Berber-Semitic cognates, with the others (1, 3, 4) being specifically Berber innovations.
Lameen: If I may repeat one of the points of my summary of C. M. Sanchez’s argument, Augustine’s discussion of “North African books” (LIBRI PUNICI) comes from Sallust, who himself was speaking of the past: I grant that it indeed referred to books in Punic, but it has no bearing on what Augustine meant by the word, and I think C. M. Sanchez has indeed made a powerful argument in favor of the view that Augustine, when using the word PUNICUS, meant “Berber” when discussing the living language of his time: things are murkier when Augustine is referring to the past.
Etienne,
Is dellas the word you were referring to — the clearly Berber word that Augustine called Punic?
Finally got around to checking the relevant section of Murcia’s thesis, and I remain fairly convinced that Augustine spoke Punic, not Berber. Dellas is indeed of Berber origin, but that has no relevant implications. The author of Ars sancti Augustini explicitly says it was used, as a “barbarism”, in local Latin, just as it would later be in local Arabic, directly confirming its easy borrowability; we should almost certainly assume Punic speakers would have used it as well (a possibility Murcia admits in later work). No Berber language preserves the trace of any borrowing of numbers from Punic, and, unlike Jerome, Augustine cites the expected Punic reflex salus, not Hebrew salos (as he would have had to write it). For edom “blood”, no Berber language uses a singular with a round vowel (the closest is Kabyle idim “drop of blood”), and Hebrew has dam; only Punic has an expected reflex with the right vowel, dom. Even in Baalsamen, while the proper name may be Aramaic, its form is not; one would expect *Baelsamin or the like. A Punic-speaker’s parsing of the word would make it easier to explain the e.
I do agree that it’s odd that Punic should have prevailed in an area which at an earlier period furnished some of the densest concentrations of Libyco-Berber inscriptions; but perhaps the same factors that encouraged the adoption on an unusual scale here of what must originally have been the foreign custom of funerary epigraphy also sped up language shift over the next couple of centuries, or perhaps the social chasm between Roman elites like Augustine’s father and Libyco-Berber speakers was simply much greater than that between Roman elites and Punic speakers.
I was confused about the phrase “Biblical in origin” — to the best of my knowledge, nothing in the bible touches with anything as far west as the region in question.
However, after tracing through the references to the bibliography, I see that the work in question is online: (CAMPS 1993f = Gabriel CAMPS, “Chenani (Cananéens)”, Encyclopédie Berbère 12, 1993, pp. 1893-1895.)
So, Camps seems to be relying on a claim offered by Procopius (who was born about 7 decades after Augustine died) in The Vandal War, and later, a claim by Ibn Khaldun (nearly a thousand years after Augustine) in his History of the Berbers (or rather, Histoire des Berbères; there may be no English translation as yet).
The thesis also mentions Jewish stories about Canaanites in North Africa, and digging into some Talmudic/Midrashic resources finds some of those. More research is needed.
Getting back to my original problem with the term “biblical” — as a point of terminology, I would call these stories and other traditions and mentions “extra-biblical”, or “apocryphal”, not biblical per se.
I was confused about the phrase “Biblical in origin” …
So was I, so thank you @Owlmirror for your diligent reference-chasing. The scriptures themselves are unreliable enough as ‘history’. Chucking in anything vaguely pre-Dark Ages[**] North-African as “Biblical” is … errm … unhelpful.
[**] That’s what they were called when I were a lad. I get it why the term is now out of favour.
“No Berber language preserves the trace of any borrowing of numbers from Punic,” – jsut for clarity (for those who did not read the thesis): Múrcia’s argument is different (see below). “Berber borrowing from Punic” only appears in this thread. GT:
But that makes no sense as a refutation. This isn’t like Trump telling an audience “many people are saying.” Augustine couldn’t invent a Bishop for a sermon. Bishops were/are celebrities. And he can’t put fake quotes in the mouth of a named Bishop.
And it’s not like he offered sone random string of letters for which we need arcane sound change rules. We know the Punic word for three was very close to the word Augustine reported.
Though I’m not sure if absence of Punic numerals in modern Berber is so important.
Can we say that it can’t be Phoenicean “because no one in the region speaks it today”?
Then how the argument that it can’t be Phoenicised Berber “because no one in the region speaks it today” is different?
I think it is not different. At all.
Does the fact that someone elsewhere speaks Berber with a modest amount of Phoenician loans (in which modest amount linguists usually include exactly those words that you expect to spread far from Carthage rather than to be used by Berbers in close contact with Phoenician – like agadir) change or mean anything? More than say, (hypothetically) preservation of Hebrew among local Jews would change and mean for Phoenician?
“celebrities” – it seems GT’s “an anecdote of a completely unknown Punic character (bishop Valerius)” is a mistranslation of “d’una anècdota d’un personatge del tot ignot del púnic (el bisbe Valeri)”. Dictionaries (the ones I checked) translate “ignot” as “unknown” but Valerius (the bishop of Hippo who ordained Augustine to the priesthood and then made him a coadjutor bishop of Hippo) is not “unknown” so it must be “ignorant of” here. I suppose.
The original: Un sol cas, tan sols un, ha estat adduït que aparegui en un context d’oralitat —no llibresc, doncs, com tots els altres— de la Numídia d’Hipona; es tracta del mot salus ‘tria‘. Però, encara que es pugui explicar a partir del cananeu aquest šālōš ‘tres’, en primer lloc, prové d’una anècdota d’un personatge del tot ignot del púnic (el bisbe Valeri), no pas d’Agustí mateix; en segon lloc, pot no ser més que una paronomàsia usada per a “provar” l’universalisme del misteri de la trinitat, per associació amb la salvació (salus); i en tercer lloc, el “punicisme” ja apareix com a salos en un comentari biblic de… Jeroni[4399]
Drasvi: I think you are quite correct when it comes to the Google translate error. I found an on-line source which rendered “ignot de” as “unaware of”, which matches the context much better and corresponds to your hunch “ignorant of”.
Actually, I think this has to be a typo in the original. ‘…del tot ignorant de…’ makes much more sense.
Yeah, the word ignot means only “No conegut, dit especialment d’una terra.” (It’s pronounced /iŋˈnɔt/.)
Jewish stories about Canaanites in North Africa, and digging into some Talmudic/Midrashic resources finds some of those
not to bring us back to the welsh and the slavs, but this has me wondering whether these are canaanites as in people from the eastern mediterranean littoral, or canaanites as in enslaved people or peoples understood as targets of enslaving raids (as in the multilayered pun that labeled the pre-yiddish jewish world of praha, kviv, etc as “knaan”).
“ignot” – if it is a typo then a strange one, because Latin ignot- and greek agnost- do mean “ignorant”.
Greek is irrelevant; so is Latin, really, because this is a Catalan word, but the basic meaning of Latin ignōtus is ‘unknown, unfamiliar, strange.’ It was used a few times in the sense ‘lacking knowledge, ignorant,’ but this did not remain in the daughter languages: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and of course Catalan (see above).
canaanites as in people from the eastern mediterranean littoral, or canaanites as in enslaved people or peoples understood as targets of enslaving raids
In Procopius, the story is all about refugees escaping “the robber Joshua son of Nun”, without any hint of slavery. But the defeat of the Moors that he describes at the end of the volume would presumably have fed the slave markets like any other Roman victory. I wonder how old the story is in Jewish contexts.
@LH, yes, of course. That’s why I say “strange”:) If dictionaries were not so insisting I’d just have assumed that this usage is unremarkable for learned registers of Romance and wouldn’t have thought “strange”:) And sorry, I did not mean that this meaning is the main for the Latin word (as for Greek, I think the Latin meaning is not independent from Greek… (Perhpas I also was thinking of the dissertation’s title: La llengua amaziga a l’antiguitat a partir de les fonts gregues i llatines. Could bathing in greek and latin fountains have affected Múrcia’s language?))
Anyway, Ryan is right, the argument itself is more like “it’s just a tale from some stupid bishop” (emphasised by GT).
It is possible fo course, that someone has confused something, e.g. that someone (not necessarily Valerius) saw or heard Hebrew SaloS (S for sibilant) in Jerome or elsewhere. When we retell stories of our friends of how they met someone and heard something and it impressed them we often (very often) confuse who they met and what she told and why and how it impressed our friends. This sort of confusion strongly implies that Augistine did not know numerals of speakers of local languages.
>This sort of confusion strongly implies that Augustine did not know numerals of speakers of local languages.
Yes, the way he tells the story also suggests his audience wouldn’t have known the numbers either, or there would be no need to mention Valerius, the Punic speaker or any of the narrative, really. You’d just point out the double meaning and its correspondence with your theology.
I’m trying to think of the kind of person in Chicago who would tell the story of some friend of theirs who had once run into a Spanish speaker, and had never before realized that their word for 3 could be mistaken for an English word…
Makes me think Punic wasn’t a very lively language in the days of St. A.
On the history of the Canaanite myth of Berber origins in Jewish contexts, this seems illuminating: The origin of the Berbers according to medieval Muslim and Jewish authors. If some of the rabbinical citations are to be believed, this myth could go back to the end of the Second Temple period; but I suspect it’s not so simple.
@Ryan, Muscovites hear Uzbek and Tajik every day and to my great surprise we simply never disccuss or mention the fact (I can remember one (!) such conversation: my ex-wife described code-switching):-/
It is obvious that Uzbek is no French (not as fashionable), but you’d expect to hear at least something at least once a year… So I honestly don’t know what to predict for Augustine etc. I would not be able to predict our own reaction.
The Green paper in the Popper Festscrift, for this 75th birthday, 75 years ago, may add some details relevant to the bigger Punic picture, which might warrant a trip to the library. But from the three copies in GB, with varying metadata, it is possible to snippet out all it says about the proverb.
Just realised what all this bilingual sermonising reminds me of: the Arabic-monolingual Taleb in Tabelbala (may he rest in peace) who was sitting with me as I elicited Tamazight words from an elderly man, some 15 years ago now. I asked: how do you say Arabic? He said: taɛṛaft. The Taleb piped up: Quite right, because Arabic is the language of knowledge (know = 3rf عرف). The ability to make such etymologically spurious but mnemonically effective connections is no doubt a useful talent for anyone with the job of giving weekly sermons.
Why /f/ (taɛṛaFt)?
(perhaps a stupid question).
As it turns out, I have full access to the paper where Quinn discusses this:
Quinn, Josephine Crawley, Neil McLynn, Robert M. Kerr, and Daniel Hadas. “Augustine’s Canaanites.” Papers of the British School at Rome 82 (2014): 175–97. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24780081
And the paper has the full context where the quote appears, in Latin (Augustine, Epistulae ad Romanos inchoata expositio 13.5, as printed in Divjak, 197 (Divjak, J. (1971) Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epístola ad Romanos; Epistolae ad Galatas expositionis liber unus; Epistolae ad Romanos inchoata expositio (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 84 sect 4 part 1). Vienna, Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky.)), and translated into English
Note that the point of the paper is that the Latin text itself should be taken cum grano salis ¹ — there are multiple variant manuscripts of this particular work of Augustine’s. There is an appendix at the end with a table showing that 15 of 18 manuscripts have “quid sit” rather than “quid sint”. There are also multiple variant spellings of what the “rustics” supposedly say, and what is supposedly one letter different. Some manuscripts have a reduplication of the same word, eg: “chanani” and “chanani”, as confusing as that may be,
=____________________________________________________________
1: ⇒ cum grano salus ⇒ cum grano tria — “pass the salt” secretly means you want the Trinity . . . !! I are awe sum theololgian. ²
2: I may be far less witty than I pretend, but then, so too are other theololgians.
Some of you may wonder, as I did — Does the Canaanite woman ask for “salus”? No, she does not (as the paper itself notes). She asks Jesus for help, “βοήθει μοι” (Vulgate: “adjuva me”).
.
https://biblehub.com/interlinear/matthew/15.htm
https://biblehub.com/vul/matthew/15.htm
Of course, the help that she wants is for her daughter to be healed; health (salus), by interpolation. Health == salvation == three == the Trinity!
The English translation of Augustine’s text is interspersed with commentary, and they note that the last line seems to be Augustine saying not to take the argument too seriously.
cum grano salus ⇒ cum grano tria — “pass the salt” secretly means you want the Trinity
I LOL’d, or at least chuckled! I’m glad Augustine backed off a bit from that terminally stupid argument.
“As it turns out, I have full access to the paper where Quinn discusses this:”
Oops. So it is the same paper I read on researchgate and remember as “Kerr’s”.
Why /f/ (taɛṛaFt)?
(perhaps a stupid question).
A very sensible question. It would make sense as anticipatory devoicing of a spirantised b (v) – but southern Atlas Tamazight, unlike Kabyle, doesn’t actually have a spirant allophone of b, at least not today. Maybe it used to.
“pass the salt” secretly means you want the Trinity . . .
Must have been Browning’s inspiration:
I the Trinity illustrate,
Sipping watered orange pulp;
In three sips the Arian frustrate
While he drains his at one gulp!
terminally stupid argument
Depends on your premises. Bear in mind that Augustine had no idea of how languages were actually related (or not); it’s not stupid to see the hand of God in the coincidence that Phoenician “three” happens to sound like Latin “health”; it’s a way of looking at things which makes no sense in terms of modern linguistics, but modern linguistics hadn’t been born yet. And it’s hardly as if Augustine makes a big deal of it: he is specifically careful not to.
And as Lameen says, “the ability to make such etymologically spurious but mnemonically effective connections is no doubt a useful talent for anyone with the job of giving weekly sermons.” I’ve heard much more ludicrous things (alas) in the pulpit from modern preachers who don’t have the excuse that the relevant science hasn’t been invented yet.
Lameen, are there other borrowed words where the /b/ comes out as /f/?
@DE, I don’t think linguistical knowlege can in principle contradict the interpretation by Valerius:-)
And we also have no idea how languages are related or not (beyond 5-10 ky).
Also Valerius’s amazement is understandable. But what follows (about the woman etc.) is definitely strange.
Lameen, thanks! /bt/ > [ft] (or rather [fθ]) looks like something from the north but I don’t remember this word transcribed this way even in Riffian (but maybe they still say it so).
doesn’t actually have a spirant allophone of b – so f is phonemic here I suppose (/ft/ [fθ~ft]).
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What is the most surprising in the paper Astronomy among the Ayt Xebbac for me is the distinction between “Venus (Morning Star)” and “Venus (Evening Star)”. I only know the Russian word for it from dictionaries and it is ambiguous (lit. “dawn-er” with feminine “-er”, but the root I translate as “dawn” can also describe evening sky). Normally I just think Venera.
I wonder if people who say and think “morning star” and “evening star” think of them as two different objects or one object and two phenomena.
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just discovered that Sanskrit śukrá and Arabic (az-)zuh(a)ra both can mean “brightness” and “Venus” (but not only). To a Russian ear these two words even sound very similar, hḥḫ being mere flavours of /x/ – when h is not a flavour of ɦ, an allophone of /g/. For an Arabic ear less so.
Depends on your premises. Bear in mind that Augustine had no idea of how languages were actually related (or not); it’s not stupid to see the hand of God in the coincidence that Phoenician “three” happens to sound like Latin “health”; it’s a way of looking at things which makes no sense in terms of modern linguistics, but modern linguistics hadn’t been born yet.
Quite right, and I’m well aware that I’m being unfair when I say things like that. But I am a cantankerous old coot and there’s nowt to be done about it.
Some (imprecise) context (for others): if I remember correctly,
– Berber speakers are more likely to spirantise closer to the Mediterranean. But this is more like my impression, I haven’t seen maps.
– there is an hierarchy: velars>dentals>labials (some of those who spirantise velars also spirantise dentals etc.)
– when there is variation, there can be something like minimal pairs: a sequence can be more likely to be spirantised than another identical sequence. But I don’t know if Arabic loans are specifically resistant.
– I have no idea how regressive voice assimilation is distributed
“are there other borrowed words where the /b/ comes out as /f/?” – again I can think of examples of /b/ [f] from the north, e.g. Jenia Gutova’s Senhaja polylectal dissertation (the proper names are names of “tribes“):
the distinction between “Venus (Morning Star)” and “Venus (Evening Star)”
Looking back, I wonder if this was just an artefact of elicitation; he only gives an Arabic term for “Morning Star”, so maybe he just wasn’t sure what I was asking about. But I’ve certainly met English speakers who had heard of the two terms but didn’t realise they referred to the same celestial body.
velars>dentals>labials
Ayt Atta Tamazight only spirantises the velars, in fact.
I was always taught, at least, that the Greeks thought Phosphoros and Hesperos were two things, until someone charted it out.
I didn’t notice any reference to this in the articles referenced above, but the two coins buying peace reminded me of the following Aramaic saying from the Babylonian Talmud, apparently proverbial (see Meg 18a 11 here on the Sefaria site), with a makeshift transcription:
‘If a word is worth one selaʿ-coin [here, tetradrachm?], silence is worth two’.