A stern statement by Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.14-15) on what it takes to appreciate Vergil:
Has it been proved to you that Vergil cannot be understood by someone who is ignorant of the sound of Latin and is equally distant to one who has not drunk Greek learning deep with the fullest thirst? If I did not fear making you antsy, I could fill huge volumes with the material he translated from the most obscure Greek teachings. But these assertions are enough to support the thesis I have proposed.
probatumne vobis est Vergilium, ut ab eo intellegi non potest qui sonum Latinae vocis ignorat, ita nec ab eo posse qui Graecam non hauserit extrema satietate doctrinam? nam si fastidium facere non timerem, ingentia poteram volumina de his quae a penitissima Graecorum doctrina transtulisset implere: sed ad fidem rei propositae relata sufficient.
Yes, “these assertions are enough to support the thesis I have proposed” would get him an F in a logic class. But he’s right — you can’t appreciate great poetry without the necessary background, although you can enjoy some pleasant sounds and noble thoughts. (Also, I like “make you antsy” for fastidium facere.)
“These assertions” — that refers to pages and pages of preceding material, not just to this paragraph. Book V is all about comparing passages in the Aeneid to their Homeric sources and inspirations, sometimes finding one superior, sometimes the other. That does indeed require a deep feel for the sounds of both languages.
antsy
you can’t appreciate great poetry without the necessary background, although you can enjoy some pleasant sounds and noble thoughts.
I’m inclined to agree, but for a view that disagrees in part, Dialogist recently published one of my translations from Antonio Machado. It was one of the poems in his exposition of his fictional character Abel Martín’s philosophy, so the readers when it was published would have read a detailed background before getting to the poem. I provided a note summarizing that background for them to use if they wanted, and they decided omit that background material to give readers more conceptual space. (I don’t mind at all.) So there’s an example of people who think their readers can appreciate the poem more without the background.
Of course you could argue that Al gran pleno o conciencia Integral isn’t great poetry.
“These assertions” — that refers to pages and pages of preceding material, not just to this paragraph.
Ah! So it turns out I can’t appreciate Macrobius without the necessary background. Sorry, O Nameless One! (Wikipedia: “Macrobius’s given name (praenomen) is unrecorded as is his family name (nomen). His recorded name is a series of three surnames (cognomina), properly ordered Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius.”)
I couldn’t find an English version, but here is a French/Latin one. The passage here is on the last of the sixtyish pages of book V (p. 341, ch. XXII, by that edition’s reckoning).
We just had a thread about Belloc’s lament about the decline of referring to Marcus Tullius Cicero with the distinctively Anglicized name “Tully.” Well, the distinctively Anglicized name of Publius Vergilius Maro is “Virgil.”* The homophonic minority spelling variant “Vergil” looks kinda sorta like a hypercorrection. Although now I’m thinking that it’s curious that the English name isn’t “Virgily,” by analogy to “Ant[h]ony” for Antonius.**
*The internet advises me that he’s “Virgile” in French and “Virgilio” in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (also e.g. “Virgili” in Occitan and “Virgiliu” in Sardinian and Sicilian), so the i-for-e respelling presumably happened in Late Latin or early proto-Romance rather than being an Anglophone innovation.
**ETA Of course “Ovidius” is Ovid in English, not Ovidy, so the practice is already not uniform. I don’t know if there’s an inferrable pattern regarding when the -y does and doesn’t manifest.
Do any English speakers pronounce “Vergil” differently from “Virgil”?
No, it’s just a spelling difference, and I can never remember which one is supposed to be correct.
@Lameen, not that I’m aware of although of course it’s hazardous to make sweeping claims. I was thinking of “verger” and “virgin” as a good minimal pair (i.e. their first syllables are homophonous for me and AFAIK all Anglophones) and discovered that “virger” is a rare spelling variant (but I don’t think pronunciation variant) of “verger.” I’m not aware of “vergin” for “virgin” being extant in English although wiktionary says it’s extant in Romanian.
I can never remember which one is supposed to be correct.
Aren’t they each considered correct by the people who use them?
@J.W. Brewer: I can see calling “Vergil” pedantic, but as I understand “hypercorrection”, it means something that’s simply wrong, like “Whomever said that avocado toast is passé hasn’t tried THIS version.” (Hugh Jackman on Facebook.)
Do any English speakers pronounce “Vergil” differently from “Virgil”?
Maybe in Scotland? But I’ll be glad to be corrected.
>The homophonic minority spelling variant “Vergil” looks kinda sorta like a hypercorrection.
With my siblings and me, it’s more of an etymological interpretation stemming from our truly ancient family’s native Etruscan. Though admittedly it’s a long way from classical Etruscan. We’ve had to do a lot of calquing just to be able to discuss things, and inevitably the grammar has become more Indo-European over the centuries.
This is the canonical American expression of how to pronounce Virgil.
@Jerry Friedman, I did hedge “hypercorrection” with “kinda sorta.” It strikes me as hypercorrection-like because it results from the application of a fictitious abstract rule (“spell all English words of Latinate ancestry with the exact same letters as their Latin etymon”) to override the actual historically-evolved data of actual English orthography. It obviously suggests the same sort of would-be social-climber attitude often associated with hypercorrection in the sociolinguistics literature, as I suppose pedantry often but not invariably also does.
That said, I mean no criticism of our host, who has probably been exposed to both variants with sufficient frequency that he has gotten understandably muddled about which is correct – a victim of the “nervous cluelessness”* that bogus prescriptivism can induce in its victims.
*I think that was Geoff Pullum’s coinage or at least that’s, um, the source from whom I picked it up.
FWIW, Virgil’s name in Polish preserves the “e” of Vergilius while otherwise overriding Latin orthography in favor of local conventions to yield the rather magnificent-looking “Wergiliusz.”
Is this just a PIN-PEN unmerger, or is verger one of those things that shouldn’t have a spelling pronunciation?
I certainly *think* I pronounce them differently – they feel different in my mouth – but who knows…
WP
I’m Homer, this is my brother Vergil, and this is my other brother Virgil.
@JenInEd: I definitely don’t have a pin-pen merger. It’s something about the pre-rhotic context that makes -er and -ir homophonous (at least for non-Scots?)*: what’s sometimes called the fern–fir–fur merger.
Interestingly enough, English “verger” comes from Latin “virga” (or “uirga”) as mentioned in mollymooly’s block quote, because the i turned into an e in French before it traveled on into English – the opposite of the e-turning-into-i in Vergilius -> Virgile. The noun “verge” as in “standing on the verge of getting it on” is also from “virga” via French, but reflects some non-obvious semantic drift of fairly recent centuries. By contrast a “verger” is the fellow you will see in a formal church procession (for some sorts of church …) holding a wand-like object.
*Okay, Wells apparently says, or rather said some decades ago, that the distinction maintained by Scottish speakers was also maintained by some Irish speakers but mostly older ones in more rural areas.
@Jen in Edinburgh: Thanks for answering my question. in the American English I was taught and all I’ve ever heard, and in the British English described by the OED, “verge”, “dirge”, and “surge” rhyme exactly, or to take comprehensiveness dangerously close to pedantry, so do “herd”, “bird”, “absurd”, “heard”, “word”, “referred”, “stirred”, and “occurred”. None of them have the vowel of either “pin” or “pen”.
IIRC William Mayne’s stories about a cathedral choir school use the spelling ‘virger’. He based his fictional cathedral on Canterbury where he had been a chorister, and where they do spell it that way. https://www.facebook.com/100064348973372/posts/868329745321983/
“Macrobius’s given name (praenomen) is unrecorded as is his family name (nomen). His recorded name is a series of three surnames (cognomina), properly ordered Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius.”
is there any reason to think that he couldn’t’ve just been the 5th-century equivalent of, say, a webster thayer higginson or an alden weld longfellow (to get new england about my hypothetical multiple-surname monikers)? nothing in the WP entry seems to indicate otherwise, but i don’t know whether that kind of naming is otherwise attested for romans in the period.
In the (rhotic) AmE varieties I’m familiar with, all these -er-, -ir-, -ur- words contain a syllabic r, with no intervening vowel. So burger is [bɹ̩gɹ̩], where the blade and tip of the tongue stay in the exact same position throughout the pronunciation of the word.
Yeah, I’ve only noticed realizations with an intervening vowel in New York or Eastern New England speakers, who tend to avoid non-rhoticity in NURSE even if they have it elsewhere – e.g. [ˈbəɹ̞ɡɐ].
J.W. Brewer: I see what you’re saying about the resemblance to a hypercorrection, though I’m not sure people who write “Vergil” really follow such a rule about all Latin names, much less words. I’ll bet there are people who write “Mark Antony” (thanks to Shakes.) but “Vergil”. As the Wikipedia article quoted by mollymooly says, both spellings are acceptable, so maybe that difference from a hypercorrection (as I see it) was what your “kinda sorta like” covered.
I checked Google n-grams. Virgil has always appeared much more often than Vergil in English texts, but in general, -i- is the given name, -e- is the poet.
Virgil has always appeared much more often …
I wonder if those n-grams overly represent this dude [**]; but probably not that one.
[**] The only one I was aware of growing up in Britain. The poet appeared much later, and not at all to most of my contemporaries.
Today’s prize for somniferous impertinence goes to the executive summary of Thomson:
#
a composer of “an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment”[7] whose “expressive voice was always carefully muted” until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to “moments of real passion”.[8]
#
I think hypercorrection implies
1. hyper-: faliure to correctly guess the spelling/pronunciation.
2. -correction: the base form “A” and the target system B, the base form “A” being so natural for the speaker, that you want to describe the choice between two possible forms not as “choice” but as a movement from “A” to B (“A”), correction of pre-existing “A” to new (for this speaker) B.(“A”)
___
Specifically, when given a base form “A” and target system B you change A to A’ (assuming that “A’ ” must be B (“A”)) when in reality the word for A in B is “A”
___
And of course it is not limited to sociolinguistics.
“-correction” though may (or may not) imply that adhering to the system B is somehow “more correct”.
E.g. I won’t call incorrect derivation (by an L1 English learner of French) of the French form based on an English form “A” a hypercorrection.
But when a villager tries to speak like the university graduate Jack when talking to Jack, she mayn not actually believe that Jack speaks “properly”. She is in the situation similar to that of the aforementioned learner and she very well may think of her situation the same way.
Then what she is doing is not a “correction”, just adaptation. But Jack will snobbishly think of her as a “social climber” and call what she is doing a “hypercorrection” – based on his own belief that his speech is “more correct” but ascribing this belief to the villager (because he thinks he is so enlightened that he’s above calling anything “more correct”)
“I like “make you antsy” for fastidium facere.”
Me too. But “… and is equally distant to one who has not drunk Greek learning deep with the fullest thirst?” is strange:)
I wonder what are the author’s relationships with “the sound of Latin voice” and “Greek learning”.
Likely he believes that he’s well aquainted with both. But it sounds like either Latin is his L2 or someone else (his readers, some other people) don’t know what Latin sounds like.
As I noted before, translated Persian poetry (without Persian) and Persian poetry as read (aloud) by a certain freind of mine (without understnding a word) are “exceptionally boring crap” and “one of my brightest memories” (and one of those moments when I learned something new and important about the world).
If by “appreciate” you mean “understand”, especially “understand more or less as intended by the poet”, then sure. If you mean “find beautiful”, then very much not…
By the 5th century, a few nomina had become praenomina, but three cognomina in a row, especially with a cognomen as the nomen, still seems unlikely to me.
What a poet intended to convey (and if she intended anything like this at all) is not always obvious. People sometimes misundertand me and I sometimes misunderstand people in purely practical matters, without any art involved.
But to understand as expected you must imitate her audience, not the poet herself…
And to the above: every female Iranian I know has read me her poetry. Some read more famous poems too. I don’t know if this part about “female” reflects the actual situation. In principle it is consistent with what Lameen said about expectations from (Arab in that case) boys and girls and domination of girls in universities in gulf countires. (And compare for example numerous female poets from 19th cnetury Kokand) But I wonder if what made them so willing to read it to mewas exactly that I do NOT speak Persian:) Not going to do that horrible thing, “appreciate” i mean:)
There have been attempts to map Ultán’s four names for Saint Patrick (Magonus Succetus Patricius Cothirtiacus) onto the Roman system
It’s an odd coincidence that Cothirtiacus, according to Wiki “is taken to represent a Primitive Irish Qatrikias”. I’m not sure what that’s saying. That he was first called Qatrikias, and they added a syllable when speaking/representing it in Latin? You’d think the shorter form would be a best attempt to say in a new language a longer name from an original tongue, but that’s not the obvious meaning of “taken to represent”.
But anyway, Is there any chance Qatrikias and Patricius are the same name across a p/q Celtic boundary?
Ryan, yes, that is what they mean. Qatrikias is the intermediate form between Patricius and Cothrige.
“across a p/q”
Presumably *Patrikios in Proto-DE.
Patricius Cothirtiacus
Patrick-Schmatrick.
Ha!
others argue it’s the tribal name Cothraige, whose resemblance to Patricius is indeed coincidental.
Originally
Coincidental? A fundamental axiom of crackpot-amateur-etymology is that There Are No Coincidences.
I hesitate to ask about axioms of crackpot ptofessional etymologists.
The paper linked by mollymooly references the paper linked by me in the very beginning.
The one linked by me in turn references this one (sci-hub).
Which begins of rather detailed account of the history (up to the moment of its publication) of treatment of two groups of loans in Irish (variously called “Cothriche” and “Pádraig” e.g. in Moscow, or “Cothraige” [pronounced with spirant g I suppose] and “Pátraic” as in the author’s next publication, The so-called Cothraige and Pátraic strata of Latin loan-words in Early Irish). As it is yet another celtic dichotomy after p/q, I link it here.
I mean, first it is satem and centum, then you confuse p and q, then you invent Cothraige and Pátraic and then…I won’t tell, there can be children here.
Nateni has dropped proto-Oti-Volta *s and merged *d with *l, *g with *k, *gb with *kp, *b with *p, *v with *f, *j and *z with *y, *ɪ with *i, *ʊ with *u, all nasal vowels with oral, all velars before front vowels with palatals, and lost most distinctions of vowel length.
This is either
(a) the effect of a Danish substratum, or
(b) the result of attempting to write their language in the Pahlavi alphabet.
‘Antsy’ seems wrong. Fastidium here would mean oversatiety, to the point of feeling ill. Maybe the translator was thinking of the word’s descendants in Spanish or Italian.
Rats — I’m sure you’re right.
As I noted before, translated Persian poetry (without Persian) and Persian poetry as read (aloud) by a certain freind of mine (without understnding a word) are “exceptionally boring crap” and “one of my brightest memories” (and one of those moments when I learned something new and important about the world).
So for you, translated poetry is not even like kissing through a veil? More like a poet’s pale and severed head?
But to understand as expected you must imitate her audience, not the poet herself…
Or the audience she expected, maybe. But for translating Machado, I think the main problem is the straightforward one: he wrote what he wrote because it worked in Spanish, but that doesn’t mean it will work in English.
I was scratching my head about how to translate nam si fastidium facere non timerem, when I thought of surfeit. “For if I didn’t fear surfeiting the reader…” would be OK, and the $5 word would fit as well.
translated poetry is not even like kissing through a veil
I’d heard it as a quote by Bialik, and now I also learn that Victor Hugo used same as a simile for a compliment. Bah. Poets are all a bunch of shameless thieves.
@Jerry, once there was a long argument between LH and me. I objected to someone that while Khayyam is not the most celebrated poet in Iran he is known there (and not only as a mathematician) and LH objected that that is because of Fitz, and I found that idea weird, because he is definitely famous in Russia. I occasionaly hear people who match one’s idea of “uneducated” and normally don’t discuss poetry quote him – and he is the only such poet, Russian or translated. Russian Khayyam is definitely different from FitzGerald’s Khayyam, he’s a sage and Russian translation(s?) of the “Wilderness” rubai is poorly known.
Also it took some time and efforts of several translators to find the appropriate form (now associated with Khayyam)
It is Hafez &co, love stories and such that are unbearably boring and attract no one but Russian poets who imitated them.
No, I don’t think that is true for any poetry and I don’t have a general theory. I simply don’t know whether translating it makes any sense for readers who want to have an idea of what a poem is like or is completely futile.
I’m confdent that many translated poems are beautiful:)
I’m also confident that I should not treat poetry a paper-only genre (rather than a primarily oral genre).
>Presumably *Patrikios in Proto-DE.
I’m assuming this is proto-DavidEddyshaw, which to my understanding can be reconstructed back to the mid-1950s based on written material from the 60s. Even the earliest recordings are too late to shed much light on the pDE phase.
I’m also confident that I should not treat poetry a paper-only genre (rather than a primarily oral genre).
This is something I tend to forget; there is a lot of poetry that gains when read aloud.
Concerning Persian poetry, that reminds me of an anecdote by a Russian writer. He reports someone listening to two market stall holders in Dushanbe quoting verses at each other and, being impressed by the beauty of sound and rhythm, but not knowing Tajik, asking a local friend what the verses are about. The friend responds “they’re quarreling – the one with the turban has occupied the place belonging to someone else”.
Ryan, yes, the phase of proto-DE after the landing. There is also a Sirian phase (from Sirius, not to be confused with Syrian) but that’s an entirely different story.
Dirac Angestun Gesept.
Yar.
Spakum. Discussed here recently.
Drasvi’s link to Harvey above does well to refocus the question from Cothraige to Tirechan’s Cothirtiacus. It’s interesting that Patrick is said to have four names, three of which seem to serve the purposes of the Church – Great, victorious and fatherly. And then there is “Cothirtiacus”. It doesn’t lend itself to Cothraige, as Drasvi’s link points out. Nor to Qatrikias nor to any other route from Patricius.
Who dreamed up Cothirtiacus, and for what purpose? Why would anyone call him that? Unless it (well, some Celtic name like it) was the name he was given by his parents?
Has there ever been any effort to figure Cothirtiacus out on a Celtic basis? Tirechan says the name is based on Patrick serving four “magorum”. Harvey offers that “tech” for roof/house might be there. But he doesn’t treat it seriously enough to describe what such a Celtic name might have looked like and what sound correspondences would lead Tirechan or his source to render it as he did.
If we took Cothirtiacus seriously as a rendering of a Celtic name, and maybe Patrick’s original name, what would it be?
To me, it’s Patricius that is problemaitc. It seems likely to be something seized on by Latin-speaking churchmen as sounding a bit like Cothirtiacus when voiced by p-Celtic speakers, and providing a helpful etymology. A hagiographic nickname.
Latin Petronius and Pomponius are thought to be numeric names from p-Italic dialects. Did old Four House have a nickname based on the four root that in p-Celtic sounded something like the more useful Patricius to Latin ears?
To me, it’s Patricius that is problemaitc
It’s the only name he uses in his own writings:
As for *Qatrikias:
as is discussed in both Harvey and McManus (the second link) I think, it is not clear where the Irish c-forms including this one – if it was borrowed – were borrowed from.
If Latin, which Latin, and how conservative was its pronunciation (I believe this question already arose on languagehat). Also was *Q for /p/ substituted by analogy or it is just what /p/ sounded like to them?
I see there’s no evidence to believe he could have adopted Patrick as a religious name. That tradition doesn’t seem attested that far back. But I still wonder what Cothirtiacus is. Tirechan gives it a pagan cast, which is hard to understand as a mythologizing later addition. Was magorum ever used of Christian priests?
Whether or not the adoption of a “religious” name had become widespread in the relevant time and place, the practice has been almost invariably for the new name to be a coded-as-explicitly-Christian name, associated with a Biblical figure or later saint. Now there is a tradition of a Saint Patricius who is said to have been martyred in Bithynia under Diocletian,* but I am skeptical his fame and cultus would have made it far enough west for that to be a cromulent potential Christian name to adopt for someone in the life circumstances of the Apostle to the Irish, especially since Patricius was already a perfectly cromulent Roman-pagan name.
*He is said to have been bishop of Προῦσα, now spelled in Ataturkized Turkish (and also in English) as “Bursa.”
“especially since” – but all names of saints were Roman-pagan names.
If it were a Greek name, it would have been obvious that it is a name of a saint, but I think one expects Latin speakers who are naming someone after a saint to choose a pair “Roman-pagan name and a saint with this name”.
The question here is whether it will be “any” Roman name or a symbolic name (like all those black Muslims who took the name Bilal).
but all names of saints were Roman-pagan names
Not a bit of it. “Christopher” immediately springs to mind.
Then there are all the Hebrew-based ones, like “John” and “David.” Admittedly, they are not uniquely Christian, but they are in no sense Roman pagan names.
And all the calques on names of that kind, like Theodore. I mean, you could be a pagan called “Theodore”, but the name really took off with Christianity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_(given_name)
I don’t think that “Peter” as a given name antedates Christianity, either.
The LPGN online allows nice searches. They have only 4 imperials (before AD 200) named Petros, the earliest of those (withn the uncertainties of the dating of the source) from Gortyn on the island of Crete. From the same place you can find an Epiphanes from 300-100 BC, demonstrating that Gortyn was ripe for Christianity.
https://search.lgpn.ox.ac.uk