I found this interesting.
mundus for Universe or World is quite alright.
Translation of the first paragraph
The “Universe” and that thing, whichever one usually calls by another name Sky, in whose around-flexing everything is dwelling, is duly believed to be a Deity, eternal, unmeasurable, never born nor ever to perish. To explore its outside is neither possible to humans, nor does a conjecture (about it) ever reach the human mind.
Second paragraph
It is holy, eternal, unmeasurable, everything inside everything, or rather, everything itself; an infinite thing, but akin to a finite thing, knowing about all things, and akin to an unknown thing; outside, inside, everything within itself folded together, and at the same time a work of the Rerum Natura (the whole complex of the laws of physics) and the Rerum Natura itself.
Paragraph C, no, Third paragraph. This one's really hard, and I don't understand how the other translator, John Bostock, comes to his result
It is folly, that some people dared to debate its measure with their mind and have published (something about it), and that others either have proclaimed multiple universes, so that we should believe there were as many Rerum Naturae; or that there are - if only one Rerum Natura gives birth to everything - so many suns and so many moons and at the same time others and uncountable stars; as if not the same questions were always occuring something something…
Wiktionary calls it Late / Medieval Latin, are they wrong?
Pliny is not the most “classical” writer. But it occurs even at Cicero.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=mundus2
It seems that he invented the word, because κόσμος means “ornaments” (think of cosmetics) and mundus means neat things. Many Latin words you use in english are Cicero’s calques of Greek words.
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Many Latin words you use in english are Cicero’s calques of Greek words
Fascinating! Any other examples?
There were plenty in De Natura Deorum… I’m gonna have a look after dinner. Maybe. I think ‘quality’ is one of them. It just means ‘howness’.
Edit: I just found aequilibrum for isonomia and providentia for pronoia. There are also others. Some may have been in use before, but Cicero coined them as translations for Greek philosophical concepts.
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Hyogaiji Hit!!
This time the theme is “the settled landscape”.
庳 馗 甬
low-built house; road; road with walls on both sides
陌 园 衖
path between paddies; park; alley
葊 宸 舘
cottage; palace; mansion
洤 湟 堭
fountain; moat; dry moat
牢 囹 圄
these all mean “prison”
The Japanese could really have boosted their writing efficiency by just picking the right kanji.
Compare:
牢 vs 獄
园 vs 園
Subtitles are still pretty bad but I’m surprised how much it gets correct.
Today’s episode.
Is it me or Japanese tutorials go generally go on slower pace than Western ones?
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I fancied doing a little sprachsbund table.
Germanic words are like this, Romantic words like this, and Slavic words like this.
| English | German | French | Spanish | Polish |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cat | Katze | chat | gato | kot |
| dog | Hund | chien | perro | pies |
| cow | Kuh | vache | vaca | krowa |
| ox | Ochse | boeuf | buey | wol |
| sheep | Schaf | mouton | oveja | owca |
| goat | Ziege | chevre | cabra | koza |
| horse | Pferd | cheval | caballo | kon |
| bird | Vogel | oiseau | pajaro | ptak |
| fish | Fisch | poisson | pez | ryba |
| frog | Frosch | grenoille | rana | zaba |
Bet you never thought Pferd was a Romance noun!
It derives from Latin paraveredus (substitute post horse).
Nice! But a Sprachbund is less about shared vocabulary than about typological stuff. Which of those languages make the passive mood with a perfect participle and an auxiliary verb? Which can do a past tense with an auxiliary have? Which ones have a /ʃ/ sound?
Ah, I just used the term loosely for convenience. I understand the distinction c:
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Let’s examine words for exotic animals. These often show greater similarity, for obvious reasons.
| A. Greek | Latin | Italian | English | Polish |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| leon | leo | leone | lion | lew |
| leopardos | leopardus | leopardo | leopard | lampart |
| panther | panthera | pantera | panther | pantera |
| huaina | hyaena | iena | hyena | hiena |
| krokodeilos | crocodilus | coccodrillo | crocodile | krokodyl |
| elephas | elephantus | elefante | elephant | slon |
| rhinokeros | rhinoceros | rinoceronte | rhinoceros | nosorozec |
| hippotamos | hippopotamus | ippopotamo | hippopotamus | hipopotam |
| kamelopardalis | camelopardis | giraffa | giraffe | zyrafa |
| pithekos | simius | scimmia | monkey | malpa |
The last example is great because it serves as a counter-example to the others.
Latin simius came from the Greek word for “snub-nosed”.
English monkey came from a character’s name in Reynard the Fox.
Polish malpa comes from a German word meaning “gaping fool”.
In Polish, an @ is also called a malpa. I might start using that term.
Monkey in Dutch is aap, like English ape. The Dutch word for ape is mensaap (human-monkey). We call @ an apenstaartje (little monkey tail).
Also different from the above:
Rhinoceros → Neushoorn. Like Polish we call it literally a “nose-horn”, and do not use a term of Greek origin.
Hippopotamus → Nijlpaard. Literally “Nile-horse”.
From your previous list of animals, Dutch is mostly like German, except for goat, which is geit and frog, which is kikker (onomatopoeic)
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Oh right: in Swiss German, we don’t use Ziege or a related word, but Geiss, which is also the Bundesgerman word for the female of most goat-like animals. Interestingly, the female deer (cervus) is a Hirschkuh, but the female capriolus is a Rehgeiss.
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I’ve been watching a lot of Erik Singer lately.
Quite enjoying the sounds of Valyrian. It’s quite Latinate (eg. its rolled Rs) and that echos its similar social status in the fantasy world.
Perhaps one day, someone will make a Valyrian dub of the whole series 
Very nice indeed.
Edit: I really like Michael’s way of speaking.
Wow, the creator of Valyrian had some really eloquent things to say:
If you look at it as success-or-failure fluency, learning a language can be very depressing – if anything less than fluent is failure, then most people fail. I don’t think that’s a useful metric. Every single language is an absolutely beautiful creation: it’s inherently interesting to see what humans are doing to solve the problem of communication.
If I remember correctly he has been voted best NHK commenter as well, so the Japanese also like his way of speaking.
Let’s read some Pliny. This is 8.44, the introduction to the section about animals.
Alexandro Magno rege inflammato cupidine animalium naturas noscendi, delegatâque hâc commentatione Aristoteli, summo in omni doctrinâ viro, aliquot milia hominum in totius Asiae Graeciaeque tractu parere iussa, omnium quos venatus, aucupia piscatusque alebant quibusque vivaria, armenta, alvaria, piscinae, aviaria in curâ erant, ne quid usquam genitum ignoraretur ab eo. quos percunctando qinquaginta ferme volumina illa praeclara de animalibus condidit. quae a me collecta in artum cum iis, quae ignoraverat, quaeso ut legentes boni consulant, in universis rerum naturae operibus medioque clarissimi regum omnium desiderio curâ nostrâ breviter peregrinantes
Commentary Lines 1-4
Line 1-2: the first few words are in a construction called “Ablativus absolutus”. Detached from the rest of the clause, nouns combined with participles, all in the ablative, act as a temporal adverbial supplement.
" WHEN King Alex the Great was burning with a desire to learn the nature of animals, and WHEN this exploration was delegated to Aristotle - an expert in every discipline…"
Line 2: aliquot milia hominum “several thousand people”. The numeral milia often takes a partitive genitive.
Asiae: Asia minor, today Anatolia.
Line 3: tractu parere iussa “ordered to obey that wish”. The participle iussa agrees with the milia.
Line 4: genitum “something born”, i.e. a living being, an animal.
The subjunctive imperfect is triggered by ne “in order not to”, the negative of “ut”. The imperfect implies an action simultaneous to the action of the main clause, which is in a past tense.
Subject of the relative clause starting with omnium quos are the different fields of agriculture. We’ll translate it with a passive to make it sound less awkward in english.
And what’s the main clause, anyway? I can’t find one!
Translation Lines 1-4
When King Alexander the Great was burning of a desire to learn the nature of animals, and delegated a research [of that field] to Aristotle, an expert in every discipline, several thousand people all over Anatolia and Greece, who were fed by hunting, bird-catching, and fishing, and had animal enclosures, herds, bee-houses, fishing-ponds and aviaries in their care, these people were ordered to obey that wish, [and work towards it] so that not a single animal escape his knowledge.
Commentary 5-7
Line 5: quos here: “these”. The construction is called a Relativer Satzanschluss in German, but it seems like English has no term for that. It’s more loosely connected to the main clause than a regular relative clause would be, so we translate it with its own sentence. The same thing again with the quae-sentence.
Line 6: legentes: that’s you, the reader.
Line 7: cura nostra “under our guidance”. “We”, that is Pliny himself.
Translation 5-7
By exploring these things, he composed almost those fifty famous books about animals. These were collected and summed up by me together with the things, he didn’t know, and I ask that the readers be good-willed, when they make a short tour with me as a guide through all works of Nature and the center of the most famous of all kings’s desire.
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I’ve enlarged my collection of language books. Perhaps, in the spirit of a library, we should start lending to one another.
My current stack contains:
- Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer (1962)
- Oxford Latin Desk Dictionary (2005)
- So You Really Want to Learn Latin, Book 1 (1999)
- " ", Answer Book (1999)
- Cambridge Latin Course Books I – IV (2000)
- " " Book 1 Student Study Book (2007)
- How to Insult, Abuse & Insinuate in Classical Latin (1998)
- A Loeb Classical Library Reader (2006)
- Natural History: A Selection (2004)
- The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives
- The History of Alexander (2001)
- Hobbitus Ille (2012) [Latin]
- The Republic (1974)
- A New Course in Reading Pali: Entering the Word of the Buddha (1998)
- The Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary (1975)
- Hawaiian Dictionary: Revised and Enlarged Edition (1986)
- A Short Synopsis of the Most Important Points in Hawaiian Grammar
- Guide to Understanding Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Cannanite and Phoenician Tablets, Slabs, Symbols, and Cuneiform Inscriptions (2016)
- Cuneiform (2015)
Anything else I should have?
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