erzjan' kel'

The Russian Orthodox Church has its 16th patriarch, Kiril I (né Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev; Wikipedia; Novinite). According to the Wikipedia article he is of Erzya-Mordvin ethnic origin. Erzya (Эрзянь кель) is a Finno-Ugric language with about half a million speakers. Reading up on Erzya led me to the Finno-Ugric Electronic Library (link). (The English interface has some problems, but for those who read Russian it’s a good resource.)

rope butt

More than three years ago, Languagehat had an entry on the Suidas On Line project. Suda (‘fortress’) is a huge 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedic lexicon of the Classical world. I browsed around it at the time, but had pretty much forgotten it until today, when on a logophiliac forum (Word Origins), a thread was started regarding rich people getting into heaven and camels threading through the eye of a needle (cf. Matth. XIX.24: et iterum dico vobis facilius est camelum per foramen acus transire quam divitem intrare in regnum caelorum). One of the standard interpretations (from rich hermeneuts, no doubt) is that kamēlon ‘camel’ is an error for kamilon ‘rope’. Others argue lectio difficilior lectio potior (‘the more difficult reading is the more probable one’). Others point out that a similar bit of hyperbole exists in the Talmud (Berachos 55b and Bava Metzia 38b) where it is an elephant going through the eye of a needle. (Interestingly, in the second citation, Rabbi Rava [ca.270–352 CE] asks Are you from Pumbedita, where they make an elephant pass through the eye of a needle?; Pumbedita, a center of Babylonian Talmudic scholarship, is the modern-day Fallujah.) It is interesting to note that camel is associated with the letter ג (gimel or g) in Hebrew and eye of the needle with the letter ק (qoph or q), and that the former is a voiced velar stop and that the latter is a voiceless uvular one. Least you think it’s only of concern to theology students, let me point out that kamelos occurs in Aristophanes’ The Wasps (l.1035) where one reads of prōkton de kamēlou (‘the arse of a camel’), besides the stench of a seal and the unwashed balls of a Lamia.

right ahead

I have been enjoying The Comics Curmudgeon and what he has to say about our daily dose of the world’s unfunniest comic strips, especially Gil Thorp. During my all-too-short, though year-long, stint as a film critic on a local college radio station, I learned that the easiest reviews to write were for the best and the worst movies. Unfortunately, the bulging bell curve contains mostly mediocre ones, and those are near impossible to write about. So, I appreciate that the Comics Curmudgeon has Pluggers, Family Circle, and Archie and Jughead to write about. I was not really familiar with Coach Gil and his boys, but a quick Wikipedia session took care of that. The biggest bit of factoid which I gleaned from the article was that Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the infamous Left Behind series of books, had written the strip, sometimes with his son, Chad, from 1996 (when Jack Berrill, the original author died) to 2004.

padlocks

One day in Srirangam, Sandhya took me on a tour of the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. She used to live with an aunt in the complex. It is the largest (functioning) Hindu temple in the world, covering 156 acres. This was the only Vaishnavite temple we visited, because Krishnan’s family is Shaivite. Walking along, I noticed this small shrine festooned with a bunch of padlocks.