Tuesday, November 26, 2019

I ran across a reference this morning to the Gothica Bononiensia, a recently (2013-ish) discovered 7th century palimpsest MS of St Augustine's de Civitate Dei with the lower script being Gothic fragments of translated Bible passages.

The word that led me there was Gothic 𐌰𐌿𐌶𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌹𐌻 (auzandil) for Koine Greek ἑωσφόρος (heōsphóros) 'morning star, Venus': related to Hamlet's (Amleth) father's name in Saxo Grammaticus Gesta Danorum and the name Horvendile, James Branch Cabell's alter-ego in his Poictesme legendarium: from Proto-Germanic *auziwandilaz 'wandering-dawn'. The Old English cognate, ēarendel, should look familiar to Tolkien fans, Eärendil the Mariner, whose name as lifted from the Old English poem Crist.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

starting over again


Has it really been one and a half years since my last post? I guess so. After a six-month leave of absence, I have a new job at a shiny new startup where I’m learning a bunch of new-to-me technology: big data (in the cloud), analytics, search, Clojure, git, dependency injection, &c.

I am learning and getting to like Eclipse and Maven. The former is ironic, since I used to be part of the Netbeans team at the now-defunct Sun Microsystems. I remember how many of the engineers used Eclipse, because it was better-featured than Netbeans. Before Netbeans I experimented with JDeveloper mainly because I was teaching Java to Oracle DBAs, but basically I liked writing code using jEdit and building it with Ant.

I have also managed to resurrect a copy of my first blog, Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey, It’s far from perfect (e.g., all the CGI is offline), but the prose and comments are there for all to see. Was it really ten years ago I started blogging? The first version of this blog was hosted on one of my office machines, but it has since migrated to the cloud, running from some anonymous Google server.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

The other day, on BART, I remember this quotation from the Bernstein character in Citizen Kane (1941):


A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.

There I was reading Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop, when I looked up for a second, and I saw that girl, though she was dressed in blue jeans and listening to an iPod, standing about ten feet in front of me. The next time I glanced up from my book, she was standing directly in front of me, and i could hear some music coming out of her earbuds. When I got up to leave at Embarcdero Station, she sat down in my seat. Just as I exited the station by the little trolley-shaped florist stand in front of the Federal Reserve Bank building, a co-worker, Steve, said good morning and asked how I was. All I could do was ask him if he knew Bernstein’s monologue. And he did, and we walked to our office building in silence.

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Tuesday, May 3, 2011

toponymic etymology

In the news currently, Abbottabad, Pakistan, means Abbott’s city. It was named after a British army officer, James Abbott (link), three of whose brothers were major-generals.

Friday, December 24, 2010

devices for others

I finally made the decision to replace my half-broken, five year-old mobile phone with a new smartphone. As soon as I get it, I am going to create a new ringtone for it. I’m thinking Cage’s 4′33″ for when I’m in meetings or at a restaurant.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

grammatici ordinis parvuli

Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury, [ 1810–71] in his A Plea for the Queen’s English: Stray Notes on Speaking and Spelling (1881), pp.154–7. (link), champions the oft-maligned construction it is me from hordes of peevers:

192. The mention of the nominative and accusative of the personal pronoun seems not inaptly to introduce a discussion of the well-known and much controverted phrase, “It is me.” Now this is an expression which every one uses. Grammarians (of the smaller order) protest: schoolmasters (of the lower kind) prohibit and chastise; but English men, women, aud children go on saying it, and will go on saying it as long as the English language is spoken. Here is a phenomenon worth accounting for. “Not at all so,” say our censors: “don’t trouble yourself about it; it is a mere vulgarism. Leave it off yourself, and try to persuade every one else to leave it off.”

193. But, my good censors, I cannot. I did what I could. I wrote a letter inviting the chief of you to come to Canterbury and hear my third lecture. I wrote in some fear and trembling. All my adverbs were (what I should call) misplaced, that I might not offend him. But at last, I was obliged to transgress, in spite of my good resolutions. I was promising to meet him at the station, and I was going to write: “if you see on the platform ‘an old party in a shovel’ that will be I.” But my pen refused to sanction (to endorse, I believe I ought to say, but I cannot) the construction. “That will be me” came from it, in spite, as I said, of my resolve of the best possible behaviour.

194. Let us see what a real grammarian says on the matter: one who does not lay opinion, down rules only, but is anxious to ascertain on what usages are founded. Dr. Latham, in his admirable History of the English Language, p. 586, says, “We may .... call the word me a secondary nominative: inasmuch as such phrases as it is me = it is I, are common. To call such expressions incorrect English, is to assume the point. No one says that c’est moi is bad French, and c’est je is good. The fact is that, with us, the whole question is a question of degree. Has or has not the custom been sufficiently prevalent to have transferred the forms me, ye, and you, from one case to another ? Or perhaps we may say, is there any real custom at all in favour of I, except so far as the grammarians have made one? It is clear that the French analogy is against it. It is also clear that the personal pronoun as a predicate may be in a different analogy from the personal pronoun as a subject.”

195. And in another place, p. 584, he says: “What if the current objections to such expressions as it is me (which the ordinary grammarians would change into it is I), be unfounded, or rather founded upon the ignorance of this difference (the difference between the use of the pronoun as subject and as predicate)? That the present writer, defends this (so-called) vulgarism may be seen elsewhere. It may be seen elsewhere, that he finds nothing worse in it than a Frenchman finds in c’est moi, where, according to the English dogma, c’est je would be the light expression. Both constructions, the English and the French, are predicative: and when constructions are predicative, a change is what we must expect rather than be surprised at.”

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Monday, May 3, 2010

petitio quæsiti

Mark Liberman in his wonderful post over on Language Log, “Begging the Question”: We Have Answers, asks, in an aside, Some medieval translator (does anyone know who?) decided to translate Aristotle’s ‘assuming the conclusion’ into petitio principii. I thought that would make a good blog entry. Here’s what I found out.

Prior to the 19th century, it was thought that Boethius had translated the whole of Aristotle’s Organum from Greek into Latin, but it is now thought that the Analytica Priora was translated by Jacobus Clericus de Venetia in 1128. This is based on a single entry in Gesta Normannorum Ducum added by Robert de Torigni: Jacobus Clericus de Venecia transtulit de græco in latinum quosdam libros Aristotelis et commentatus est, scilicet Topica, Anal. priores et posteriores et Elenchos, quamvis antiquior translatio super eosdem libros haberetur. I found the passage in Migne‘s Patrologia Latina 54, 703.

In principio autem petere et accipere est quidem, ut in genere, sumere in eo quod non est demonstrare propositum.
Compare this with another 19th century translation by Emil Heitz (Aristotelis Omnia Opera, I, 109):
Id autem, quod in principio quæsitum erat, ut concederetur petere, tanquam concessum sumere, si in genere accipiatur, consistit in eo, si quis, quod positum est, non demonstret.

Now for Jacobus’ translation. It seems pretty straightforward. We drop the τό ‘it’; autem for the elided δή; in principio for ἠν ἀρχῇ ‘in the beginning’; petere ‘to beg, beseech’ for αἰτεῖσθαι ‘to ask, demand’; accipere for λαμβάνειν ‘to take, receive’. Heitz’ translation is more word for word literal. What is interesting is how the infinitive for petere became an abstract noun petitio ‘a requesting, beseeching’ and the prepositional phrase a simple noun in the genitive. What is stranger is how the Latin (or the Greek to be charitable) got Englished: begging the question.

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