Jonathan Egid’s Aeon essay Forging philosophy is extraordinarily interesting, on the most basic level for introducing me to a famous-in-certain-circles work of philosophy I like the sound of, but also for the issues of authenticity it investigates. I’ll skip the introductory section in which Egid describes pseudonymous work by “Bruce Le Catt” (not actually a cat!), Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (posing as Leila Tov-Ruach), pseudo-Augustine, Kierkegaard (who wrote as Johannes Climacus, Constantin Constantius, Victorin Victorius Victor, and Johannes de Silentio, inter alia), and others, and get right to the heart of it:
But none of these examples, from philosophical felines to pseudo-Augustine or imaginary Chinese Platonists, is quite as perplexing as that of the Ḥatäta Zera Yacob. The Ḥatäta, or ‘enquiry’ (the root of which, ሐ-ተ-ተ, in the ancient Ethiopian language of Geʽez literally means ‘to investigate, examine, search’ ) is an unusual work of philosophy for a number of reasons. It is not only a philosophical treatise but also an autobiography, a religious meditation and a witness of the religious wars that plagued Ethiopia in the early 17th century; it presents a theodicy and cosmological argument apparently independent of other traditions of Christian thought; it employs a subtle philosophical vocabulary that is virtually without precursors. Finally, and most perplexingly, the progenitor of these ideas, the Zera Yacob who is the subject of the autobiography and gives his name to the title, may never have existed. […]
The troubled afterlife of the text begins when the work is ‘discovered’ in 1852 by a lonely Capuchin monk named Giusto da Urbino in the highlands of Ethiopia. Before this date, there is no mention of the text in the historical record. The work was sent off to da Urbino’s patron back in Paris, the Irish-Basque explorer, linguist and astronomer Antoine d’Abbadie, and placed in the Ethiopian collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Over the next couple of decades, scholars flocked to consult this fascinating, seemingly unprecedented text. The Ḥatäta was edited and translated into Russian and Latin, and began to gain a wider readership among European intellectuals.
Then in 1920, an Italian Orientalist named Carlo Conti Rossini published an article in the Journal Asiatique, claiming that, far from being a masterpiece of 17th-century Ethiopian thought, the Ḥatäta was in fact a forgery, composed by the man who had claimed to discover it: da Urbino. Conti Rossini had been tipped off by an Ethiopian convert to Catholicism that da Urbino had been scheming with local scholars to create ‘heretical’ and ‘masonic’ works to undermine Catholicism and Ethiopian orthodoxy alike. Conti Rossini now started seeing proof everywhere, adducing philological arguments and cultural speculations in equal measure to the conclusion that this book was written by an Italian in the 19th century, not an Ethiopian in the 17th.
Conti Rossini was the pre-eminent Ethiopianist of interwar Europe, and his arguments were eventually accepted by almost all scholars, including those who had spent so long translating and commentating upon the work. But Conti Rossini was also a colonial administrator in Italian East Africa, and a supporter of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, even going so far as to publish an article in 1935 titled ‘Ethiopia Is Incapable of Civil Progress’, arguing that the country could, indeed should, be colonised by a ‘civilising’ power, explicitly invoking his refutation of the Ḥatäta as part of his argument.
The argument has raged for more than a century now […]
The difference between the case of Leila Tov-Ruach and Zera Yacob is that the identity of the author of the Ḥatäta really seems to matter. Many Ethiopian intellectuals are understandably proud of the work, holding it up as a masterpiece of 17th-century literature and a foundation of an alternative, specifically Ethiopian path to modernity. And they are understandably furious at the idea that the writings of a fascist intellectual might deprive one of their greatest geniuses of his rightful credit.
In Europe and the United States, philosophers keen to diversify and decolonise their curriculums have seized on Zera Yacob as evidence of an ‘African Enlightenment’, as an African Descartes or Kant. As Sumner put it, the Ḥatäta demonstrates that ‘modern philosophy, in the sense of a personal rationalistic critical investigation, began in Ethiopia with Zera Yacob at the same time as in England and in France.’ If the work is a forgery, it seems that the Ḥatäta cannot fulfil this lofty role allotted to it. The implication seems to be that, if it is not written by a 17th-century Ethiopian scholar, it is not all that interesting or important after all.
So it seems that we do very much care who wrote it. But should we? The assumption on the side of both the proponents and opponents of authenticity is that either the work is totally genuine, in which case it can be used to diversify and decolonise, or else it is totally fake, a ‘mere forgery’ and of little interest, other than perhaps as a case of late-colonial cultural appropriation (or immersion, if one prefers).
But what is a ‘mere forgery’ anyway? If you forge a passport, you are creating a fake document that permits you to cross borders as if it were real. If you forge a work of art, you are creating a convincing (and therefore lucrative) fake that can be attributed to a known artist and sold as if it were genuine. But what might the forging of a work of philosophy be, beyond attributing the work to someone else, à la pseudo-Augustine or pseudo-Aristotle? If faking a painting gets you something and faking a passport gets you somewhere, what does a fake work of philosophy get you?
Presumably, what we care about most in a philosophical text are its arguments, its attempts to get at the truth and its means of getting there. If the argument is what interests us, then should the authorship matter, given that the argument is exactly the same, regardless who wrote it? Of course, historical context is important, both for understanding how the text might have come to be and what the text means. But unless this exploring of context is employed in the service of understanding and elucidating the arguments, we are treating the work as a historical curiosity rather than a source of insight. In the case of the Ḥatäta Zera Yacob, this would be a mistake, for the arguments are powerful and abidingly relevant. These arguments – about the causes of human suffering and conflict, the epistemology of disagreement and the twin temptations of relativism and blind absolutism, the relation between the world and our cognitive faculties – are precisely what tends to fall out when the discussion of the Ḥatäta focuses exclusively on the topic of authenticity.
[…] Rather than forging as deception, we might think of forgery as creation, namely as the creation of new words and, with it, new ideas. Consider that whoever wrote the Ḥatäta did so in a language, namely Geʽez, that previously quite literally did not have the words for expressing its most central ideas. Whoever wrote the Ḥatäta forged a philosophical-conceptual vocabulary.
This process of linguistic innovation, of coining new terms and adapting existing words to new meanings is by no means unique to Geʽez. It is more than 20 centuries since Cicero attempted to ‘teach philosophy to speak Latin’, not only by importing originally Greek words into Latin (dialectica, politica), but by teaching philosophy new terms (moralia, naturalis) from his native language. In a way, it takes place every time philosophy learns to ‘speak’ in a new language, including our own: we owe a great many words, both arcane (‘quiddity’, ‘apperception’) and commonplace (‘politics’, ‘nature’ and ‘self’) to the translation of philosophy into English in the 16th and 17th centuries. But rarely has it happened so suddenly, in such a concentrated way in a single text. This is impressive enough if its author is a 17th-century Ethiopian named Zera Yacob. If it’s the work of a 19th-century forger, it is an utterly astounding work of linguistic and cultural immersion.
Ultimately, the words on the page should be more philosophically interesting than the identity of the person who wrote them, and therefore the Ḥatäta (and, by extension, other such contested texts) should be judged on the philosophical quality and linguistic innovations, not on the name at the top of the page. There is a sense in which the identity of an author matters. Rorty wrote Tov-Ruach and Zhang LoShan into existence, and in doing so created two distinct philosophical voices, just as Kierkegaard conjured countless original perspectives. Plato wrote the perspectives of Glaucon, Protagoras and Thrasymachus in a way that may or may not have corresponded to their real views. Zera Yacob may be one such voice that is an unknowable mix of real historical individual and literary creation. But, then again, so is Socrates.
I don’t know where I come down on any of this. Obviously I have no qualifications to even have an opinion on the authorship question (the Wikipedia page leans toward accepting that it is the work of Zera Yacob, for what that’s worth); in general I have a strong bias towards facts and history wie es eigentlich gewesen and an equally strong revulsion for those who try to muddy the waters with things like forgery, but in this case I have to agree that the philosophical ideas are more important than whoever wrote them down. As always, I will be glad to hear from those who actually know about any of this.
I have a linguistic question. Wiktionary isn’t much use for Ge’ez; does the root ሐ-ተ-ተ have cognates elsewhere? Also, if you read Russian there’s a 1924 account of the discovery and controversy by I. Yu. Krachkovsky, “Зара-Якоб или Джусто да Урбино.”
does the root ሐ-ተ-ተ have cognates elsewhere?
Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʽez (here):
The story reminds me of the Walam Olum.
A comment on the etymology got eaten.
Wolf Leslau’s treatment of ሐ-ተ-ተ is visible here, p. 248, I hope.
(Short comment because I must go to bed.)
Thanks very much for the Leslau quote!
The story reminds me of the Walam Olum.
Yes indeed! We discussed that here.
A comment on the etymology got eaten.
Other than the Leslau one? There’s nothing in the moderation queue.
Yes, mine was eaten too for a while. Y’s had not shown up as posted yet, or I wouldn’t have posted it, since it’s the same thing.
ḥaqʷana māḥtata “make butter, make witness”
Ancient saying depicting the simple life in the monastic societies of the Ethiopian Highland.
All part of the Circle of Life.
My last comment got eaten too. Shame: it was really profound.
Leslau’s semantic connection looks weak to me. I wonder if Proto-Semitic *ḫṭṭ ‘to dig’ is a slightly better fit. Dillmann speaks of such ṭ/t alternations in Geʽez, but does not go into detail.
That looks better to me too.
“The troubled afterlife of the text begins when the work is ‘discovered’ in 1852 by a lonely Capuchin monk named Giusto da Urbino in the highlands of Ethiopia. Before this date, there is no mention of the text in the historical record. The work was sent off to da Urbino’s patron back in Paris, the Irish-Basque explorer, linguist and astronomer Antoine d’Abbadie, and placed in the Ethiopian collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Over the next couple of decades, scholars flocked to consult this fascinating, seemingly unprecedented text.”
I don’t know.
Wikipedia says it was (re)discovered not in Ethiopia but in Antoine d’Abbadie’s archive and not by a monk, but by a Russian Orientalist Turayev!
Are we sure Giusto da Urbino was real? Maybe it was sent to Abbadie by Turayev for the long con.
“the philosophical ideas are more important than whoever wrote them down” — relevant xkcd
The reality of Giusto da Urbino seems unquestionable. The Church likes record-keeping. Here’s a recent, detailed biography from the Biographical Dictionary of Italians</i
This is impressive enough if its author is a 17th-century Ethiopian named Zera Yacob. If it’s the work of a 19th-century forger, it is an utterly astounding work of linguistic and cultural immersion.
That looks quite backwards to me. The -5C philosophy of Socrates (whether rightly attributable to Socrates or to Plato) is impressive enough, but it would have been utterly astounding if it were actually the work of *So-ka-ra-te (first of the pre-Socratics) in the -15C. The 19C forger would have the whole history of philosophy from the 17C through the 19C to draw on, whereas Zera Yacob would not.
If a genius writes a world-class work of philosophy in a cave somewhere in Ethiopia, and nobody else responds to it or references it until 200 years later in Europe, is it even really part of Ethiopian tradition? There are plenty of cases of a work being better received in translation than it ever was in the original – Ibn Khaldun comes to mind – but this seems quite extreme, assuming it is genuine.
One obvious parallel question would be whether (and if so *why*) it matters whether certain poems that were much in vogue in the 18th century were original compositions by James Macpherson or (as Macpherson claimed) translations of previously unknown-in-the-wider-world Gaelic poems attributed to a previously-unknown old-timey poet named Ossian. They’re either good poems or bad poems, innit? But that’s not how most people have understood that controversy.
To Lameen’s question, consider the following hypothetical. Once upon a time in the late 19th century, a boy was born in rural Bolivia. When he was six, he emigrated with his family and never returned, and in process of time out in the wider world ended up as a lab assistant and sidekick to, oh let’s say Nikola Tesla – exactly the sort of position where you can claim he was actually a collaborator who made a valuable contribution to Tesla’s work that has been underrecognized and undercredited. One can easily imagine the sociopolitical dynamics whereby he would be in 21st century Bolivia celebrated as a Great Bolivian Scientist (due not least to the relative paucity of other candidates and the related feelings of marginality among local intelligentsia), even though he was very clearly not part of any “Bolivian Scientific Community” or “Bolivian Scientific Tradition.”
In the other direction as well. Can’t they be part of Ethiopian tradition also if they were written by an immigrant friar, in the way Joseph Conrad is part of British tradition?
Needless to say, I appreciate how much more delicate it is to think this way of a Tuscan friar in Ethiopia than a Polish sailor in Britain, in light of the subsequent history of Italian colonialism in East Africa. However, the friar in question did not even live to see the foundation of the warmongering Kingdom of Italy. He quite remarkably and repeatedly refused to join his bishop on the mission to the pagan tribes he had originally been entrusted with. He remained instead as the lone Catholic friar in an Ethiopian monastery, devoting himself to Ethiopian linguistics and literature.
The 19C forger would have the whole history of philosophy from the 17C through the 19C to draw on, whereas Zera Yacob would not.
You’re forgetting about the linguistic part. Would a fifth-century Greek have been able to forge a Mycenaean text that was convincing, let alone “a masterpiece”?
“As translators and editors, Ralph Lee and I have spent several years deep in these two texts, feeling our way, word by word, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, through their language, concerns, and styles. Mehari Worku and Jeremy R. Brown joined us later and spent many months doing the same. From these extended encounters, we are all confident that two Ethiopians named Zara Yaqob and Walda Heywat composed these two texts. In this, we stand with dozens of other scholars, including the late Getatchew Haile.”
This part of the wikipedia page is enough for me. I know from my own experience that translating a text is one of the most effective ways of exploring every aspect of it—its errors and flaws, its cleverness and beauty, and also the linguistic, stylistic, and intellectual influences on it. You discover so much that you would never discover simply by reading it (whether in translation or in the original). There is no more thorough way to investigate a text. So if four translators were all convinced, I am convinced also.
By the seventeenth century, Ethiopic had long been a dead language, used as a purely literary idiom, used like Latin in mediaeval Europe and (I believe) often much influenced by the writer’s mother tongue, usually Amharic. Writing a “classic”, as far as the linguistic side goes, might be less challenging for a forger than would otherwise have been the case; and the ability of native scholars to recognise linguistic inauthentiticy in what was to them also, a foreign language learnt by adults, may not have been as high as one might think.
There is no more thorough way to investigate a text. So if four translators were all convinced, I am convinced also.
In general, I would agree with you, but I’m not sure about so contentious a case as this; I find it hard to believe that someone could take on the work of translating such a text without having any prior opinion on its authenticity, and in fact I’m not sure you’d do it unless you were already convinced. Sure, working on the text might change your mind, but I’d say that’s not the way to bet.
DE: Good point. But still, an Italian would have to be damn good at Ge’ez to do a convincing job — and we’re not just talking about convincing random Ethiopians who had picked up a little Ge’ez in church, but people who had spent their lives immersing themselves in it.
Good point.
Zera Yacob must have existed, since his life is attested at Existential Comics!
It seems like there ought to be examples out there of missionary scholars in the 19th century (or before or after) competently composing original works in the elevated/scholarly/literary register of the language of the non-Western people they are supposed to be evangelizing, either to show off their linguistic accomplishments or, more loftily, signal a certain sort of sympathy and respect to the locals and suggest that conversion need not be accompanied by cultural assimilation to some sort of European norm.
Here, it seems that part of the mix is that da Urbino could not have published this work, if indeed it was his own composition, under his own name, because some of the ideas set forth therein (whether or not “Masonic” is a helpful label …) were in considerable tension with the institutional views of the Papacy back then (the “Syllabus of Errors” era) and would thus have been imprudent to have publicly attributed to a man with an ecclesiastical position. That said, motive and opportunity to forge (or whatever less charged verb you might wish to use for the adoption of a heteronym …) does not, by itself, prove forgery.
This piece doesn’t say anything about the physical MS or whether it’s still floating around to be examined. Although I guess the story could have been that it was a later scribal copy, not a physical MS from the 17th century, which would make it impossible to debunk by showing that the paper/ink/etc was inconsistent with a 17th century origin.
I should note that in the prior comment by “original works” I meant something more ambitious or high toned that straight catechetical materials or straight translations of Scripture or hymns or liturgical texts, of which there are of course many examples.
The link given by Giacomo Ponzetto on Giusto da Urbino’s life is interesting: he arrived in Ethiopia and began to study both Amharic and Ge’ez in 1846 (He had studied Arabic beforehand). If he really forged (instead of discovered) the Ḥatäta, which was sent to Paris in 1852, the man must have been a truly extraordinary, almost superhuman language learner: he managed to write a treatise of philosophy, with an abundance of newly-forged vocabulary, which four translators editing the text believe to be genuine. All this after studying this language (concurrently with another!) for a mere six years.
Frankly, this does not pass the smell test. Some missionaries in New France wrote that if, after five years of doing nothing except learn the indigenous language (typically an Algonquian or Iroquoian one), you could occasionally make yourself understood, you had accomplished a huge deal. We are expected to believe that a European in Ethiopia, in six years or less, mastered Ge’ez well enough to compose a sophisticated philosophical work which editors/translators believe to be authentic, i.e. to date from the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth century. One would need to be more than a prodigious language learner: one would need to also have an intimate, extraordinarily detailed knowledge of the history of Ethiopia, including its intellectual history, in order to make a credible forgery. A European who had spent fifty years (more or less) in Ethiopia learning Ge’ez? A possible culprit. One who had spent six years there? Perhaps not impossible, but phenomenally unlikely.
In short: I try to remain open-minded, but to my mind the Ḥatäta is probably authentic, and the burden of proof lies quite squarely on the shoulders of those who would claim it is a forgery.
A third possibility comes to mind: what if it was indeed written by an Ethiopian with a lifetime’s expertise in Geez, but in the 19th century, in response to the same sort of pressures that started giving rise to modernist movements all over the non-European world around that time? Not that my speculation on this is of any value, but I notice the Italian biographical entry linked above seemed to suggest this as a possibility. It just seems hard to believe that a 17th century work of this calibre wouldn’t have left a visible impact on subsequent Ethiopian writings.
Just as an example from our own literary tradition of a centuries-long gap between composition and publication/fame, virtually all of the poetry of Thomas Traherne (163?-1674) was unpublished in his lifetime and languished in complete obscurity until someone found some manuscripts circa 1896, which were then published (and almost immediately acclaimed) in the first decade of the 20th century, over 225 years after his death. Although there was independent evidence of the historical Traherne’s existence. And while Traherne’s style is in many respects original and idiosyncratic, it can be plausibly situated within broader developments in 17th-century English literature that were already well-known well before the discovery of the MSS.
@JWB, the only preserved manuscripts are :
1. da Urbino’s copy of Ḥatäta of Zärˀa Yaˁəqob
2. a copy of both hatatas (Zärˀa Yaˁəqob and Wäldä Ḥəywät) by an Ethiopian scribe.
See here:
https://www.google.ru/books/edition/The_Hatata_Inquiries/FHDeEAAAQBAJ?gbpv=1&pg=PA1894&printsec=frontcover
It is not impossible for foreigners to compose classic works in “exotic” languages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thembavani
Beschi’s commitment to Tamil culture was pretty exceptional, though.
Whence I learn of Alexander Beecroft’s list of masterpieces of worrld literature yet to be Englished. Five are here. They seem to come from his book, An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day.
I am uncomfortably reminded of the most influential thinker of present days, Catturd…
But the missionaries in New France started from scratch. Da Urbino already knew Arabic, so he already knew what kind of grammar to expect and what kind of sound system to expect. Under such conditions, six years of full immersion might do the trick for some people – though of course full immersion in one spoken language and simultaneous study of a related but distinct liturgical/classical/written language is obviously an additional level of difficulty or three.
(For starting from scratch, with full immersion among monoglots in a language that is completely different from anything you’re used to, there’s the testimony of Daniel Everett that it took him ten years to learn Pirahã reasonably well, and of course he was far from fully proficient at that point.)
Very odd that neither in the Thembavani article nor in the one on Beschi, its author, is there any hint of when the work was composed and/or published.
I am uncomfortably reminded of the most influential thinker of present days, Catturd…
But the missionaries in New France started from scratch. Da Urbino already knew Arabic, so he already knew what kind of grammar to expect and what kind of sound system to expect. Under such conditions, six years of full immersion might do the trick for some people – though of course full immersion in one spoken language and simultaneous study of a related but distinct liturgical/classical/written language is obviously an additional level of difficulty or three.
(For starting from scratch, with full immersion among monoglots in a language that is completely different from anything you’re used to, there’s the testimony of Daniel Everett that it took him ten years to learn Pirahã reasonably well, and of course he was far from fully proficient at that point.)
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test to see if this thread is cursed
Yes, the thread is cursed. It takes about 7 minutes for a comment to appear, with no option to edit it. Comments do show up immediately in the RSS feed.
If a genius writes a world-class work of philosophy in a cave somewhere in Ethiopia, and nobody else responds to it or references it until 200 years later in Europe, is it even really part of Ethiopian tradition?
Is Beowulf part of the English tradition before 1815?
Ethiopic had long been a dead language
For “Ethiopic” read “Ge’ez”. Ethiopic is either the language family or the script.
Would a fifth-century Greek have been able to forge a Mycenaean text that was convincing, let alone “a masterpiece”?
No. But if the -15C work had survived and was translated/transcribed step by step into -5C Greek (as Old Welsh works were translated into Middle Welsh by scribes), that would be another story altogether.
Really strange. Maybe it’s the ḥ.
Previously it was https://languagehat.com/negus-sawt-ḍappa/
When i posted my first comment, it took half a minute for it to apper. It got worse:(
As no one is looking I’ll bring to no one’s attention these two links:
https://www.jonathanegid.com/in-search-of-zera-yacob
https://zerayacobconference.weebly.com/podcast-recordings.html
It is a conference about Zera Yacob, but what’s unusual (sadly) is that they posted recordings of the talks. Sadly, audio (IMU in Moscow posts videos of lectures, I wish conferences did the same and can’t understand why they don’t:()
As usual, to make the “play” button work, Russians need VPN.
P.S. and as usual, I remind that informational isolation of a country you don’t like is what the militarist/hawkish faction withing the country wants, for they feed upon the idea “we’re surrounded by enemies”. If these people ruled Russia, we would have thrown at Ukraine all we have.
Basically, the first thing I discovered when I began following Russian news in 2020 was that they (the aforementioned faction) restricted informal education (prosvetitel’stvo).
For them it means “some evil people may teach western values here”.
For the scientific community who objected to it means “politicians intervene in scientific education”.
For me it means: systems like our (beautiful, actually) system of informal mathematical edcuation will never appear anymore. Because they began as DIY movements from below: some students and professors decide to teach math to kids. When a permission is needed for this, they simply won’t (obtaining permissions is a trouble). Same applies to those Western countries that too require a permission (because as my German freind said, “who knows what they will teach…”).
For “Ethiopic” read “Ge’ez”. Ethiopic is either the language family or the script.
For Ge’ez read Ge‘ez (or Geʿez, lah-dee-dah fancy). It’s a /ʕ/. It was called “Old Ethiopic”, as in Dillmann’s 1907 Ethiopic Grammar, an expanded translation of his Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache, still the most comprehensive grammar of the language (though not very enlightened).
For “Ethiopic” read “Ge’ez”. Ethiopic is either the language family or the script.
For you, perhaps: but it is neither unusual nor incorrect to call the language Classical Ethiopic. and in this context, I thought “Classical” was a bit redundant.
The best grammar is still Dillmann’s:
https://archive.org/details/grammatikdert00dill/page/n5/mode/2up
To Lameen’s comment:
I don’t know if Lameen is right or not, I don’t have a good model of such processes based on actual manuscript traditions, but I usually assume that most of what was written has been lost without a trace.
In this case it is also a heretical text. And “genius” is an ambiguous concept “for Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country”. Ramanujan is a genius. “Genius” exactly means someone who may not only offer witty solutions to questions recognised within the tradition (and especially using language and even methods recognised within the tradition) but also possibly answer questions which no one else even asks or considers worthy of being asked.
DE, well, you contrasted to Amharic (where Geez is presently classified as “North” and Amharic as “South” Ethiopic)…
Hah! Unknowingly ninja’d by Y!
(The Cursed Thread makes commenting a bit like playing Battleships.)
Needless to say, the vast scholarly literature on this authorship controversy has looked at the Ethiopic texts Giusto published as his own — potentially not fully accurately, of course.
A quick search returns Eugen Mittwoch’s (1934) Die amharische Version der Soirées de Carthage. Mit einer Einleitung: Die angeblichen abessinischen Philosophen des 17. Jahrhunderts, whose take seems to be the following—if my minimal German lets me find the right passage (p. 7).
Of course this is from 1934 and Wikipedia’s entry on Mittwoch suggests he had exceptionally strong personal reasons to be in favor with Mussolini’s regime. As an under-informed Italian I should probably just refrain from further postings on this thread …
amharische
äthiopische
So DE follows an earlier tradition where Aethiopia is Classical and Abyssinia is modern?
It did at the time: the republic is called Äthiopien, but the empire was called Abessinien (or sometimes Abyssinien).
“Wortstellung” is interesting. I wonder if actual Ethiopians writing in Ge’ez by that point tended to adopt the SOV order of Amharic etc? (It would be rather like Mediaeval Latin, with its SVO in place of classical SOV.)
It all seems a bit iffy as an argument against authenticity, though. If Zera Yacob was clever enough to have created the content, he might also have been linguistically sophisticated enough to imitate Classical Ethiopic models of sentence construction better than his contemporaries too.
On the other hand, Mittwoch may have meant something else entirely. His vagueness is itself a bit suggestive of hand-waving, mind.
@DE: Ge’ez
Et tu?
“His footnotes are exceptional, packed with page-long biographies, detailed information on locations (down to their seasons and crops), illuminating etymologies, extensive descriptions of archival sources, corrections of typos in the sources, and so on and so forth.”
Belcher in the introduction to the new translation intriguingly describes the previous publication (in Addis Ababa) as a much more impressive book!
She also cites a modern argument for European authorship, by Anaïs Wion she says… But cites works written by two people, Aïssatou Mbodj and Anaïs Wion.
They were translated in English:
https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/3154
https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/3178
https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/3188
Word order and other similar arguments DO require elaboration (or consensus, though I prefer elaboration).
It must be difficult to compose a text in Geez without: European pragmatics, semantics, metaphors, phraseology, paragraph-level structure whatever is the name for it (different for Russian and English)….
I won’t say “impossible” for someone talented and deeply immersed. But not easy.
(I’m not even speaking about expected peculiar character of grammatical errors proper).
______
Cf. the following conversation (a Russian Arabist about a course of German):
“…8) На высоких уровнях важна также культурная близость к носителям изучаемого языка. Это обнаруживается, когда язык начинают оценивать по самостоятельно написанным текстам. Оказалось, например, что тексты носителей некоторых восточных языков немцы не могут понять, просто потому что не могут понять логику, по которой они написаны….”
“…А какие восточные языки оказались непостижны немцам?…”
“Со мной училась одна очень приятная египтянка на промежуточном курсе B2-C1, посвященном написанию текстов. Ее не перевели на следующий уровень, потому что за ее тексты преподавательница не могла поставить хорошую оценку.
Но мне обычно сложнее понимать китайцев.”
“а в чем именно была проблема? в структуре или в чем-то еще? и проявлялось ли это в устной речи тоже?”
“Насколько я поняла из их разговора (который я фактически подслушала, задержавшись в класссе), в логике построения текста и предложения. Она писала бесконечные предложения, из которых было непонятно, что она хочет сказать.”
I’m failiar with this both as a reader of English texts composed by “Oriental” speakers and as an English learner.
Mittwoch elaborates in detail with a numbered list of observation, but my minimal German and inexistent Amharic prevent me from following.
The whole opuscle is readable online. I won’t try writing another link in the Cursed Thread — apparently I’m only capable of HTML tagging when the debug window is available. But if you search for the full title I’m pretty sure you’ll find the link.
drasvi’s links are (as usual) very informative, especially the third. It actually tells us more about the word order thing, which was in fact nonstandard SVO for the expected VSO, so I was wide of the mark in my guessing.
Other pertinent facts:
The suspicions about authenticity were first raised by an Ethiopian scholar.
Urbino seems indeed to have had high proficency in Ge’ez, and indeed translated a work of Catholic propaganda (Soirées de Carthage) into Ge’ez, which translation seems to have been very well received.
Urbino was a deeply troubled individual; and his accounts of the provenance of the manuscripts are at considerable variance with some of the evidence that the authors of the article uncovered.
Many African scholars have become deeply invested in the authenticity of the work for political reasons, and treat all doubts about its authenticity as being motivated by racism. The authors refer to chilling effects this had on their own research.
Mittwoch certainly has his own agenda, but it seems to have been about exposing Urbino rather than anything specifically colonialist. His actual textual arguments seem fairly weak, however. No real smoking gun, as far as I can see.
“by an Ethiopian scholar.” – looks more like rumours:
Per di più, non sentimmo buone notizie circa il padre nostro Giusto, di cui già abbiamo parlato, pel suo modo di vivere e per la sua fede, perocchè le reti del demonio sono vicine ai monaci che vivono separati gli uni dagli altri, siccome dice l’Ecclesiaste: « Guai ad uno se cade, e non vi è un altro che lo sorregga » (1). — Quando il re Teodròs e il metropolita Salama si accamparono nel luogo detto Aib Ba-Enchéb, di Beghemder, per recarsi fra i Uollo e nello Scioa, mandò il metropolita i suoi armati in Biéta Lehèm per fare venire il padre nostro Giusto (2) con tutti i suoi famigliari. Quando lo ebbero fatto stare al suo cospetto, il metropolita lo interrogò circa la sua fede, dicendo: « Una è la persona e due le nature del Nostro Signore Gesù Cristo ». Ed egli rispose dicendo: « La mia fede è che unico è il Signore e l’amore ». Inoltre gli disse il metropolita: « Non dici forse che [Gesù] dall’eccelso dei cieli discese e che da Maria nacque? ». Gli replicò dicendo: « Me lo dice il libro, ma io non lo credo, nè ho mai insegnato da quando venni sino ad ora ». In questo modo egli aveva trovato grazia presso il metropolita. Infatti, questi gli dette licenza di rimanere al suo posto; ma, preferendo egli d’andarsene al suo paese, [Salama] lo mandò verso Metemma. — Il [padre Giusto], mentre stava nel Beghemder ed aveva seco quelli che erano chiamati debterà Amarchègn e il lica cahnàt Gosciù di Biéta Lehèm, comperò un libro nel quale era la cattiva dottrina di eretici detti framansoni: ne fece fare più copie e le dette ai suoi amici. Il titolo di quel libro era Uorché (3); alcuni di quelli che videro il libro dicono che non era di Uorché, bensì che era stato scritto da lui stesso e che era stato attribuito fittiziamente a Uorché, perchè egli era assai dotto, sapeva il comento delle Scritture e la dottrina filosofica ; inoltre, aveva appreso la lingua amarica e la etiopica in breve tempo, sino a comporre degl’ inni religiosi.
In Italian and etiopico” (the word framansoni is the 4th (or 3d) line, 3d from right)
One obvious parallel question would be whether (and if so *why*) it matters whether certain poems that were much in vogue in the 18th century were original compositions by James Macpherson or (as Macpherson claimed) translations of previously unknown-in-the-wider-world Gaelic poems attributed to a previously-unknown old-timey poet named Ossian. They’re either good poems or bad poems, innit? But that’s not how most people have understood that controversy.
I also thought of Ossian first – and also of cases like the Mellaart inscription, though that’s at least controversial because it’s trying to fake up actual history.
A vaguely comparable example that did ultimately turn out to be authentic is the Lay of Igor’s Campaign – for a long time a lot of people didn’t quite believe that a work as great as this could possibly have been written in the 12th century, the original manuscript (itself merely a 15th century copy) had conveniently burned down so there were no pre-1790 copies to work with, and in the 20th century the Soviet government’s insistence that it must have been real further fanned the doubts in its authenticity. Zaliznyak’s proof seems fairly definite, though.
@ David Eddyshaw:
Peevery alert!
Urbino was and is a town in central Italy known for its Renaissance architecture. The deeply troubled friar was Giusto: Father Giusto from Urbino, né Jacopo Curtopassi (or Cortopassi).
I am ashame.
I am no better than Dan Brown.
No, Urbino is a duke from Piero della Francesca’s painting. Or at least that’s how I learned the word.
(But well, I immediately suspected that the indeclinable word after “duke” can be a city in genitive)
OK, I have taken the Cursed Letter out of the post title and replaced it with a regular godly H. We will see if this lifts the curse.
test.
I just sent a comment with a word “test” (you can delete it, by taste), it has not appeared yet. And logically it must be the URL….
Maybe it’s the Ethiopian characters in the text of the post. Did any other post ever have them?
And logically it must be the URL….
Probably, yes. Normally the post-name-to-URL function strips all diacritics, but it can’t deal with Ḥ properly so that stays in the URL, and this probably leads to all sorts of messy edge cases.
This came up once before, with a different Ethiopic-transliteration letter; link in drasvi’s comment at 6:59 pm (I’m not adding a link directly because my previous comment here, which did include links, hadn’t appeared yet).
@drasvi:
That's how it goes in England ("Gloucester"), but not in Italy as far as I can tell. The broken-nosed gentleman is Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, or in one word "Montefeltro." Hence the Piero della Francesca's altarpiece is called (among other names) the Montefeltro Altarpiece.
So, is it really the case in Italian that you cannot refer to Tommasso d’Aquino as “Aquino” or “d’Aquino” for short, and the only permissible shorter form is “Tommasso,” which is more likely to be ambiguous?
Same with San Giovanni Damasceno? I see that there is an Italian novel titled _La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro_, which suggests the availability of “Damasceno” as a freestanding given name, but things may be complicated by the fact that the novel was set in Portugal and thus perhaps is intended to represent Portuguese rather than Italian naming conventions? (The novelist was apparently a fan of Pessoa and his use of heteronyms, FWIW.)
And logically it must be the URL….
OK, I’ve changed the URL as well. Surely this…
Hey, that comment posted right away! It’s a Hanukah miracle!
!נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה שָׁם
You mean, a Ḥanukah mirac… oops!
The Ḥ in the post title (before it was replaced) is apparently unavailable in the first-choice font there of many browsers: e.g., in Safari on iPad, the page would sometimes leave a blank space there for about a second while loading, then fill it in with Ḥ from a slightly mismatched font. I never caught Firefox leaving a blank space, but the Ḥ was mismatched, slightly heavier than the surrounding letters. The same is true for the Ḍ (but not the Ś) in Negus, Śawt, Ḍäppa linked by drasvi.
That applies only to the post title, not the body text or the comment text; those don’t have any problem with Ḥ that I can see.
Now to be really sure of the diagnosis, you should put back the Ḥ in the post title, while leaving the URL in plain ASCII.
I’ve changed the URL as well.
Heh heh so now in the ‘Commented-On Language Hat Posts’ page, there’s two entries pointing to this same page. One with the underdot on the ‘H’, one without.
But any attempt I make to copy/paste the evidence strips all the diacritics (or turns it into gibberish).
It’s just pretending. Refresh the page after posting, and everything will look fine.
Quoted from Jonathan Egid:
I wondered if the OED would support that. Results:
Politics is the Anglicized form of the title of a book by Aristotle; it seems fair to credit Aristotle as the origin of all subsequent borrowings, usually via Latin. Check.
Nature arrived in English from French, reinforced by Latin, and has a huge array of senses, some of them influenced by translations on various subjects or by philosophical writing, but I can’t see how we “owe” the word to translations of philosophy. Maybe Egid was thinking specifically of the phrase “the/a state of nature” — the claim is true for that phrase, which first appears in English in a 1534 translation of Cicero’s status nātūrae, and of course its familiarity now is due to Hobbes and Locke and later commenters on them.
Self is, obviously, inherited from Germanic as an emphatic and reflexive pronoun, and there are parallels to the “Adjectival use indicating identity” in other West Germanic languages. It has a lot of uses as a pronoun, adjective, noun, and even (in Caribbean English) adverb. Maybe Egid was thinking specifically of the sense that the OED distinguishes as:
with quotations including Locke, Berkeley, and J.S. Mill, but none of the quotations under this sense are translations. Some of the quotations under other senses are translations, and some of those could be counted as translations of philosophy, but I don’t see any support for the claim that any meaning of self was actually established in English via translations of philosophy.
So two out of three English examples seem rather exaggerated and oversimplified to me.
I wonder, what are some examples of lexical innovations in the Ḥatäta, and what have translators done with them? Is “lebbuna (variously translated as ‘reason’, ‘intelligence’ and ‘understanding’)” one of them?
@J.W. Brewer:
I’d say so, yes. He can normally be referred to as Tommaso d’Aquino, San Tommaso (note the single s, with due apology for pedantry), l’Aquinate , or il Dottore Angelico.
To be fair, I cannot definitely rule out Aquino or d’Aquino, but if they’re used at all I’d bet they’re coming from English to begin with.
‘ Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, or in one word “Montefeltro.”‘
But apparently it works with Montefeltro!
__
Just in case: I think I learned that Urbino is a city soon after learning the word. My friend (…da Castelnuovo di Cattaro:-)) was (with great enthusiasm) explaining something about these paintings. I forgot what and forgot why such enthusiasm. I was in my teens, but nothing more precise.
___
I guess in English this usage (da Urbino with a substantivated nisba in mind) is somewhat more natural. It is compenstated by that the syntax is not borrowed, you can’t say “came da Urbino” or “that Italian da Urbino”, it becomes a unit and the distinction with a nisba is not borrowed either.
as Old Welsh works were translated into Middle Welsh by scribes
Indeed so; and more: parts, at least, of the Gododdin, and probably the oldest poems in the Llyfr Taliesin, are so old that they antedate Old Welsh; in fact, strictly speaking, they were not composed in Welsh at all. (The younger poems in the Book Of Taliesin merely date from the Old Welsh period.)
And here I had thought the Book of Taliesyn [sic] dated from 1968 … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Taliesyn
Wikpedia tells me that the Welsh Secretary at the time was the Rt Hon George Thomas, later first (and last) Viscount Tonypandy, who wikipedia tells me was no enthusiast for Welsh nationalism or (by implication) Brythonic languages. But perhaps he was not the member of Wilson’s cabinet charged with monitoring psychedelic rock albums, even if they had Welsh-evoking titles?
I can’t let all this talk of Urbino pass without bringing up Carlo Ginzburg’s book on Piero della Franchesca’s `Flagellation of Christ’ (for mystery fans)…
In German, the noun das Selbst is limited to philosophy/psychology, and Wikipedia says it’s an 18th-century calque from… English.
By the way: Sumner’s translation of hatata of Yaqob at https://archive.org/details/treatise-hatata-zera-yacob-1667/ – and in “The world’s foremost (i.e. only) blog devoted to Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat”:
https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/treatise-of-zera-yacob-chapter-i/
He says Moses is wrong because sex can’t be impure, Christians are wrong because of celibacy, and Muslims are wrong because monogamy is right.
no enthusiast for Welsh nationalism or (by implication) Brythonic languages
It doesn’t necessarily follow. I’m no enthusiast for Welsh nationalism myself, at least, not in its political manifestations. (Cymru am byth! A Lloegr am byth hefyd!)
Thomas seems to have been di-Gymraeg though, as far as I can tell from the WP article. He seems to have had ample reason to dislike his Welsh-speaking father.
I am unfamiliar with The Book of Taliesyn, but some of the younger poems in Llyfr Taliesin are actually pretty trippy. I can see it …
In fact, the whole Taliesin myth is pretty trippy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceridwen
He says Moses is wrong because sex can’t be impure
I wasn’t aware that Moses did say that sex was impure. Obviously the author (whoever he was) Did Not Do The Research.
@drasvi:
Good point! I reckon the question is what becomes a surname.
Many formerly noble families are named after their earliest domains. For instance the former royal family, whose living members still bear the surname di Savoia — or perhaps Savoia? I’ve never seen either their Swiss or their Italian passports and I don’t really care. Then whey they acquired grander domains they didn’t change their family name. The House of Savoy didn’t become the House of Sardinia nor the House of Italy. Likewise Montefeltro didn’t become Urbino, Este didn’t become Ferrara nor Modena nor Reggio. This is not unique to Italy, of course: the king of Spain is a Bourbon, the king of the Netherlands is from the House of Orange — is he an Orange?
To be clear, native speakers can get lost too once the title and surname become sufficiently obscure. I’ve cited here before my favorite example of Cristina [da] Barbiano née Trivulzio, princess of Belgioioso, who can be called “the princess of Belgioioso” (rather old fashioned), “Cristina Trivulzio” (arguably unhistorical), or any word salad of her two surnames plus her title. It definitely does not help that the not-so-famous princely family she married into went both by “da Barbiano” and by “Barbiano di Belgioioso.”
It’s different for monks and friars, needless to say. Father Giusto from Urbino had a name and surname, but took on another name (and no surname) as a friar.
This sheds an interesting light on Aquinas’ case, which I was unaware of. Wikipedia teaches me that he was not only from Aquino but a scion of the d’Aquino noble family. Was he surnamed d’Aquino before becoming a friar? Maybe. I wouldn’t call Saint Dominic “De Guzmán” either, and Catholic culture is strong in Italy.
It should be said that the infamous Dan Brown case is not dissimilar. Was Leonardo da Vinci, son of Piero da Vinci and uncle of Pierino da Vinci, surnamed “da Vinci?” Probably not: the family seems to have gone just by patronymics. Pierino da Vinci was more formally called Pier Francesco di Bartolomeo and his father (Leonardo’s half-brother) Bartolomeo di ser Piero d’Antonio. But as with Aquinas, it’s easy to say that calling Leonardo “Da Vinci” is unidiomatic but nowhere as easy to say it is flat-out wrong.
P.S. I’d say the Montefeltro Altarpiece is easily worth of enthusiasm from a naive hedonistic point of view before you get into learned disquisitions about Renaissance architecture or the symbolism of hanging eggs. The Montefeltro Diptych seems more of a connoisseur’s piece to me, though it is definitely an Important Work in the history of art as taught in Italian schools.
After reading J.W. Brewer’s comment on Thomas Traherne, I was primed to notice that he’s quoted in the OED under that “Chiefly Philosophy” sense of self:
That’s one of 151 quotations from Traherne! I thought wow, that’s a lot for an author who was unknown before the beginning of the 20th century, but 80% of them are not from poetry but from Christian Ethicks, which was published just after his death. Even though it wasn’t widely read, somebody must have read it for the OED First Edition, since it already contained quotes from him e.g. in the entry for baffle, v., from 1885:
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells a dramatic story of how the first publications of his poetry
@DE, yes, I’m not sure what he means (shameful, impure, evil). See (i’m not giving link to the archive, because for some reason even with %20 in place of spaces links get broken…)
Kusaal mɛŋ “self” appears to be derived etymologically from the same root as mɛn “too, as well.” I can’t quite see the semantics of this, though. There’s a derived adjective mɛŋir meaning “genuine, real.” I suppose something like “same” many be the link.
‘ “Da Vinci” is unidiomatic but nowhere as easy to say it is flat-out wrong.’
@Giacomo, do you mean that “da” (as opposed to “di”) itself does not really pose a problem?
In English it of course would be rather weird to say “yesterday I met from Moscow” where from Moscow is a name. It would also be weird to say “I met of Moscow”, but all those de and van make one thing that genitive prepositions have some natural affinity with affixes.
So I assumed that “da X” (as a name) will be less idiomatic than “di X” (but not for foreign language speakers). Was I wrong?
That particular di-versus-da issue reminds me of the odd coexistence of Messa di Requiem and Messa da Requiem. The latter troubles my peace of mind, every seventeen months or so.
(Meh, what do I know from Italian already?)
Under the previous owner, an Italian restaurant around the corner from me had on its big sign “da Mario”. I asked some Italians at the ice cream parlor 50 meters along why it was “da Mario” instead of “di Mario”, but met only with incomprehension.
More research would be needed, but I’ve removed the item from current research funding.
@stu
Da = bei (= Fr. chez) in da + forename
@David Eddyshaw, drasvi: That sex is unclean, for both participants, is the subject of Leviticus 15:16–18.
I’m not adding a link directly because my previous comment here, which did include links, hadn’t appeared yet
Still not showing up; I wonder if it was sent at all, and if so, whether it’s still around somewhere in the discard folder. Perhaps it got missed in the URL move.
(It was about further vaguely similar cases on the “why should authenticity matter” theme, expanding on J.W.Brewer’s Ossian example.)
I found it in the spam file and liberated it. No idea why it went there rather than moderation. But it’s a good thing you have a distinctive moniker I can search for; if it’s a comment by, say, Y, it’s hopeless.
Brett: per Leviticus, it’s not the sex that is unclean, it’s the semen.
vaguely similar cases on the “why should authenticity matter” theme
A Welsh parallel is the sorry tale of that serial forger Iolo Morganwg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iolo_Morganwg
The man was also ultimately responsible for some of the sillier aspects of the national Eisteddfod, Bloody archdruids. I ask you …
There is some overlap with the more respectable business of the invention of age-old traditions, at which both the English and the Japanese are also highly proficient.
@Y, Brett, well, then we need (1) Ethiopian Orthodox (2) Catholic (because that time the king adopted Catholicism and was persecuting Orthodoxes, see chronology here) interpretation of Leviticus.
But the text also has “shameful” and “evil”:/
(by the way, as I undrstand hhatata* is also how a commentary to the scripture is called)
*older European transcription of the sound, befor the dots-schmots. It is good, actually (except that geminates in semitic have consequences and this is not a geminate), that’s gives a correct idea – and unlike 7 does not reproduce the shape of an Arabic letter…
@drasvi:
No problem at all. In its entry for da the Treccani dictionary mentions explicitly (1.c) that it introduces “in passato, il luogo di nascita, di residenza o sim., che svolgeva le veci del moderno cognome, e spesso diventa tale: Leonardo da Vinci, Mino da Fiesole, Guido da Montefeltro. (in the past, the place of birth, of residence, or the like, which played the role of contemporary surnames, and has often become one).
The question is whether it had become a surname already for Leonardo. The Dizionario biografico degli italiani and the ordinary habits of Italian speakers say no. He was just Leonardo from Vinci. That’s why you say “Yesterday we discussed Leonardo da Vinci” as you could say “Yesterday I met Alexander from Moscow.” You don’t say “Yesterday we discussed da Vinci” just as you don’t say “Yesterday I met from Moscow.”
But is it provable that Leonardo had no surname? Not by me, at any rate. You certainly say “Yesterday we discussed Da Ponte,” typically referring to the Venetian-American author Lorenzo Da Ponte, who was born and raised in Ceneda and given the legal surname Da Ponte upon baptism.
@Noetica:
Conversely, I find messa da requiem more natural, though I’d normally call the musical setting un requiem and the liturgical celebration una messa per i defunti. Therein lies the source of my preposition of choice. The complement I’m expecting is one of purpose: a mass for the dead (per i defunti), for the repose of their souls (da requiem).
With delightfully old-fashioned peevery, the Treccani dictionary writes the following in its entry for da:
I’m not sure when the entry was written, but I’m pretty sure nobody spells proprî with a circumflex anymore, and I seriously wonder how many schoolteachers would still admit as allowable alternatives the unidiomatic festa di ballo, macchina per scrivere, per cucire, ago per materassi, let alone biglietto di visita.
@gp
Here is my favorite Italian typewriter.
https://www.roma.com/il-vittorianomacchina-da-scrivere-che-ne-ha-scritta-di-storia/
It would be interesting to know if the author of the Treccani article would have called it “macchina per scrivere”.
The way naming practices eventually worked out in English, surnames derived from toponyms are generally (for “native” surnames) just the bare toponym without any preposition or other marker (like the genitive -s found on some frozen patronymics). One can think of nonce medieval apparent exceptions, like John of Gaunt or Thomas a Kempis,* but those were person-specific monikers that had not yet hardened into inherited surnames. There are I suppose also some old Norman-French surnames that retain the foreign preposition, like Delancey and a bunch of others beginning De or de that feel thoroughly domesticated, although also plenty of others that lost the French preposition like de Beaufort -> Beaufort.
*Not an Englishman, and apparently known as Thomas van Kempen in the area where he spent most of his life. Wikipedia says he signed his name Thomas Kempensis, perhaps viewing “a Kempis” as a vulgarism caused by substrate influence from Romance languages that had lost proper Latin case endings.
January First-of-May: “Normally the post-name-to-URL function strips all diacritics, but it can’t deal with Ḥ properly so that stays in the URL”
Indeed the diacritic had already been successfully stripped from the ä in Ḥatäta in the URL! The same stripping can be seen at many other posts, such as:
Interview with Igor Mel’čuk.
https://languagehat.com/interview-with-igor-melcuk/
And those had no problems. Also, a lot of post titles have curly apostrophes, curly quotation marks, and other punctuation marks, which are also omitted from URLs. The problem apparently comes when the function can’t find a diacriticless version of a character and resorts to an escape code, since the other post with complaints about disappearing comments, besides the one with Ḍäppa mentioned above, was
The Adelphi Project .
https://languagehat.com/the-adelphi-project%e2%80%8a/
where the title accidentally included a trailing thinspace character. These complaints have only showed up in the last couple of years; maybe it wasn’t an issue on the old platform, before September 2021? There are older posts that have % escapes in the URLs and don’t seem to have had any problems:
Using〈em〉Wrong. (2020)
The ⋮ Key. (2019)
linʛuischtick. (2017)
Camara- , ɴbri. (2015)
The *Bʰlog. (2014)
Anybody want to try a test comment on one of those?
From the start I thought about this thread as “a-ta-ta” (Russian baby talk for beating babies).
not only from Aquino but a scion of the d’Aquino noble family
tommaso von und zu aquino?
Alexander from Moscow…[*]from Moscow
without the preposition, that more or less works as a u.s. byname. it can be a quick slide from “paul from montana” to “paul montana” (or “montana paul”, depending on subcultural standards) to just plain “montana”. i have a friend whose state of origin became his legal first name through essentially that process. (the friend i might refer to just as “moscow” however, is from teaneck; his surname is what ties him to the 3rd rome.)
A Welsh parallel is the sorry tale of that serial forger
and eponym of YOLO, presumably?
(posting it here, because this post made me read the unrelated article discussed below)
Just read this amusing discussion of Indo-European, Turkic (and maybe not only?) and Semitic:
and prepared to giggle, but it turned out to be a long, long paper and not only the author disagreed about l’incapacité de la « structure mentale », he also says:
“Que cette action de l’arabe en faveur d’un idéal sémitique soit urgente en ce moment, il suffit, pour le constater, de remarquer combien les projets, jusqu’ici élaborés de langue universelle, négligent les langues sémitiques (sans parler des autres), au profit exclusif, et presque impérialiste, des langues indo-européennes. ”
It’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Massignon, an interesting character.
I forgot the source:
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1038506/f9.item (also google books with ocr and pdf but inaccessible for Europeans without VPN. Strangely, at first it opened the book with a Dutch IP… )
P.S. he called la syntaxe des langues nègres “très rudimentaire”… I’ll comfort myself with a thought that he likely did not know African languages.
Also I think we can in turn call la syntaxe anglaise “générative”:-E
After all, generativists describe English…
@LH, Krachkovsky’s article is accessible to everyone at mathnet (i don’t know why mathematicians would upload it:)). Google’s ways are strange, and your link won’t work in Europe or in Russia without VPN. The problem is that Mittwoch did exactly what Krachkovsky requested, so later Krachkovsky agreed with him.
It seriously bothers me that serious scholars say things like:
Вывод, основанный на детальных сопоставлениях, не может быть подвергнут сомнению,….
(“The conclusion based on detailed comparisons cannot be questioned,….” – Krachkovsky)
Наконец, в сер. 70-х гг. К. Самнер с помощью методов математической лингвистики (в т. ч. частотного анализа) окончательно доказал, что трактаты, приписываемые З. Я. и его ученику, действительно написаны 2 разными людьми и что стилистически и грамматически оба они существенно отличаются от тех переводов на геэз, к-рые были выполнены Дж. да Урбино.
(“in the mid 70s C. Sumner, using methods of mathematical linguistics (including frequency analysis), finally proved…” – Frantsuzov in the Orthodox Encyclopedia)
WTF???
Les temps verbaux y sont de bonne heure devenus relatifs à la personne de l’agent, égocentriques, polythéistes.
The idea of a polytheistic verb tense is certainly striking, if confusing. I guess it’s a short step from egocentrism to auto-apotheosis.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what he means here. I don’t understand the rest either, but here I reach a deeper level of lack of understanding.
(also 1. I was wrong, the google link works in Europe 2. a few pages above the place I linked there is a coloured map of Arabisation and Islamisation. And it is coloured in google books)
Is it just a slippery slope notion? Treat linguistic truth as relative, and next thing you know you’ll be doing the same with religious truth, and everyone will be worshipping his own personal pantheon? It kind of looks that way, but nothing I’ve heard about Massignon suggests that he was that simple-minded.
My only idea was that in Indo-Eropean studies comparative linguistics co-existed with comparative mythology, and the whole idea of “proto-Indo-Europeans” is associated with both language and religion.
To this i now can add that Semites are similarly associated among (Indo-)Europeans with monotheism which the latter learned from the former. I suppose an atheist will try to trace its development in historical times (based on evolution of Mesopotamian and Egyptian religions), perhaps without a good reason – while a believer will think of it as an ancient thing (even without details like personal monotheism of various patriarchs/prophets).
Particularly from Christian perspective: first chosen people, then a global religion.
I just don’t know how to attach to this scheme tenses and egocentrism:(
French philosophical bullshit at its absolute finest. A pleasure to read if you don’t think about it too deeply. Ma-gni-fique, quoi.
The French do do this better than anyone. I think that’s because it seems more understandable than German philosophical bullshit, which is just incomprehensible from the get-go.
With German philosophical bullshit, your mind gives up almost immediately, whereas with French philosophical bullshit it ends up spinning its wheels in vain for quite some time before conceding defeat.
Anglophone philosophical bullshit is different again: it basically consists of loudly proclaiming that complex questions are actually very simple, and that if you can’t see it, it’s just your own fault. (This is our famous British pragmatism.)
he called la syntaxe des langues nègres “très rudimentaire”… I’ll comfort myself with a thought that he likely did not know African languages
Definitely knew nothing of African languages …
Seems to have been a good fellow with some deeply interesting ideas, if prone to confidently pronouncing on things he knew nothing about. He’d have been a great Hatter …
Interesting (though not surprising) that he knew Charles de Foucauld, patron saint of field linguists.
@de
There are several forms of anglophone philosophical bullshit. The form you identified is for me an anti-intellectual form most often identified with extreme right or left politics. Other forms are more about (1) the validity of concepts based not on some real world validation (past, present or future) but on uncritical acceptance (or rejection), (2) insisting on fallacious logical links between aim and policy, (3) ignoring important facts or not considering reaction/backlash to policies, (4) authoritarian approach and failure to adjust positions based on dialogue with those who have different but perhaps equally valid concerns.
With Greek philosophical bullshit, you get swept along by the sheer verve and beauty of it, until suddenly the spell breaks and you go: “But that’s just nonsense on stilts, O Socrates!”
In Babbitt, Mrs. Mudge, a New Thought proponent:
Sinclair Lewis bugs me with his self-righteousness, but he sure does good burlesque.
“Seems to have been a good fellow ”
Yes.
“…with some deeply interesting ideas, if prone to confidently pronouncing on things he knew nothing about. ”
As for Africans, even if we inevitably rely on scholarly consensus in many things, I still think it is better to check whether their grammars are “rudimentary” on your own before saying this. Time-consuming, of course. Actually the ugly problem here, is that in 19th century (but the text is not from 19th century) you maybe would not be taken seriously if you begin saying obvious nonsense like that civilisation is not better than savagery:) Lie like everyone does or your kingdom is not of this world.
As for gnomic semitic and polytheistic tenses, someone explain to me what he means first:(
And: Un certain nombre de constantes de psychologie collective enregistrées par les conditions générales de la grammaire arabe résisteront, semble-t-il, assez longtemps, à l’européanisation, non seulement dans les milieux ethniques d’origine arabe, mais même dans les milieux arabisės appartenant à des races étrangères. . He believes grammar registers certian “psychological constants”, a view common then and not so common today. I think nothing about this (I don’t think “have nothing to do with psychology” because HOW you can demonstrate that? I also don’t think “can’t be demonstrated”. I think nothing:)). But he is unwilling to call IE grammar sureriour…. at least with respect to semitic.
He doesn’t.
Mean anything, that is. He just thinks it sounds great.
Missing from Leslau’s dossier of cognates for Ge’ez ḥatata ‘search, enquire, examine’ and perhaps helpful for the semantics is Modern South Arabian. Entry for the root ḥtt from T.M. Johnstone Jibbāli Lexicon (1981):
I still think it is better to check whether their grammars are “rudimentary” on your own
To be fair, even quite good grammars of that epoch treated syntax very cursorily, if at all; so if you started with the preconception that la syntaxe des langues nègres was très rudimentaire, which, given the racism of many of the actual linguists of that time, was a fairly usual a priori assumption, even reading a bunch of actual state-of-the-art grammars wouldn’t really disabuse you of your error.
(Proud to say that of my own Kusaal grammar’s 182 pages, 93 are on syntax, though of course that only scratches the surface. When it comes to what modern professionals can do: of Schaefer and Egbokhare’s 993-page Emai grammar, all but a hundred or so pages are on syntax …)
There’s also the issue that bygone grammarians of African languages didn’t always recognise complexity when it was in front of them: they tended to think of syntactic “complexity” in terms of Latinoid things like rules for sequences of tenses rather than things like complex serial-verb constructions, logophoric pronouns, focus constructions etc. Similar errors are often made even now regarding creoles, where again the syntactic complexity seems often to be seriously underdescribed rather than absent. (Kofi Yakpo’s Pichi grammar is an example of what can be done by a linguist who doesn’t start from expecting a creole to be particularly simple.)
“Leslau’s semantic connection looks weak to me”
@Y, Leslau cites an abstract Syriac word, so maybe its semantic development can be traced? Is there anything similar in Hebrew?
As for SED, it mentions “Tigrinya ḥaṭäṭ bälä – to scratch” (where I think bälä is the conjugated part of compound verbs like fal fal bälä (translated as “to flutter”) and the citation form of “to say”) with ṭ-ṭ but scratchy semantics as ḥ-t-t.
“To be fair, even quite good grammars of that epoch treated syntax very cursorily, if at all; so if you started with the preconception that la syntaxe des langues nègres was très rudimentaire, …”
DE, yes.