Is this supposed to mean ‘Elementary rules: placing stones, capturing, eyes, ko, counting’ ? Sorry, you can’t use the active present participle in this context. What you want is a Gerundium! Behold, the nominalised verb. It’s easy:
amare ‘to love’
amandi ‘of loving’
ad amandum ‘to the loving’
amando ‘by loving’.
There’s also a verbalised adjective called Gerundivum by German grammarians but participium necessitatis by ancient grammarians. Like an adjective it takes all cases, numbers and genders, like a verb it takes objects and dependent infinitives. Just like other participles.
amandus – amanda – amandum
amandi – amandae – amandi
amando – amandae – amando
amandum – amandam – amandum
amando – amandá – amando
and so on, like you know it from other adjectives. That’s were we’ve got Carthago delenda est from, ‘Carthage is a to-be-destroyed one’.
The Latin mind confuses them sometimes. ad Germanos subiugandos obviously means ‘for the subjugation of the Germans’, but the nominalized verb takes the form of a verbalized adjective.
So my proposal for the Elementary rules is: de calculís collocandís / de captatióne / de oculís / de kó / *de énumerátióne
When Chinese and Japanese use slightly different versions of Sumire sign just to confuse you and make it harder to look up
It’s not even obvious which version is whose, is it.
Sure, when I put it big right next to each other, it’s easy to see the difference but when you input Japanese version into Chinese website’s tiny search bar or other way around and can’t find anything, not so easy to spot a mistake.
If you want to translate a page (or more) in latin, I can typeset it for you and send it in pdf form, if you would like to have it
As my contribution in this post, I was thinking that since some of you understand and study Greek, maybe you would be interested to see/listen how the language sometimes evolves or incorporates other words in its everyday “street” usage. A great example is this dialogue from an old Greek movie :
The fellow with the crooked hat and the suit is playing an owner of a nightclub with mpouzoukia and he is coming to that address to receive payment for damages rendered by a relative of those people and some very interesting phrases appear that make the dialogue funny, along with the delivery of the lines and the inability of some of the others to understand what is being said, like:
'μέρα instead of καλημέρα (0:04)
“δεν βλέπω το πρόσωπον” instead of “δεν βλέπω τον κύριο/άτομο” (0:13)
“βουτυράτος” (0:17), a weird word that means “buttery” but implies that someone is smooth/soft like butter or from good upbringing
“τσιριμπιμ τσιριμπομ” means “strong woman”, phrase of totally unknown origins that sounds like something a toddler would say
“καθόσον δεν συχνάζουν φιόγκοι” (0:31) with the word “φιόγκοι” alluding to bow-ties, implying that “high-class dorks” do not go to his club.
“η λυπημένη θλίψης” (0:34) which is, of course, the bill
“δουλεύεις με διπλό καρμπυλατερ” impressed by how well she seems to understand his idiomatic street language he makes the analogy of a car having two double pumper carburetors O_o
“είδες τι δυνατή που είναι στο σταυρόλεξο” - “did you see how strong she is at crosswords?” (1:03)
“κοντός;” “- Στην αρχή δεν ήτανε, ύστερα τον κοντύνανε” (1:20) which means
“Was he short?” “-Not at first, but he got shortened later” meaning that he was beaten up and he “shrunk” figuretively
“Εσύ μη λες τίποτα μυρίζεις απήγανο” … απήγανος is said to be the herb used by Odysseus to counter Kirki’s spells and in general has now taken the meaning of something that is used to exorcise evil
“ε, τι θα κάνανε; θα κανελώνανε το ρυζόγαλο;” (1:41) “what would you expect them to do? Pour cinnamon on the ryzogalo” - ρυζόγαλο is a traditional candy, which is perfect with some cinnamon, so that phrase is heavily ironic in this context since it implies that no peaceful solution was possible.
“λέλεκας” (2:03) - quite the ancient word and it means the bird stork … here it means a “tall person”
“τουμπάνιασε” = he was turned into a drum = beaten up
“έδωσε κάτι άγριες που τους έκανε αλόγατα” (2:15) … αλόγατα is a weird form of the word άλογα which means horses … the whole phrase literally means that she beat them wildly and turned them into horses - weird sentence indeed
“σκονιάσανε” (2:20) = erratic form created by the word σκόνη which means dust. The word means that they “turned into dust” which here means that they were utterly defeated.
“βερεσέδια αστυνομικής υφής” - βερεσές is a turkish word which referes to “things that you owe” usually to some store and that you are going to pay later. The whole phrase means was that they had a criminal record, but the literal meaning is quite funny.
“δεν έχεις κανα αρμυρό ρε μισόμαγκα” (3:27) - something salty, meaning the small snacks accompanying drinks
“στο εντάξει” (3:39) he could have said “ok”, but that means “at ok” implying that “being ok” is a condition/situation. Very strange phrase.
“γραδάρισα” word of italian origin which originally means to measure something (I think) here turned into \verb and used as a native word.
“Γειαχαραντάν” (3:48) a word that sounds foreign but it is actually the phrase/greeting “γεια χαρά” which in itself an abreviation of the phrase “υγεία και χαρά” which means “(I wish) health and happiness (to you)” … noone knows what the “νταν/ntan” at the end is. Maybe it is there to make the rhyme, because te full “street greeting” is “Γειαχαραντάν και τα κουκιά μπαγλάν” of which the additional words mean that “the beans are banging” which standalone is insane as a phrase, if you do not know what a κομπολόι is … other believe that the “beans” that are banging according to the phrase, are the ones in our trousers, trying to make the person using the phrase to have more “weight”, but opinions on the matter vary.
by the way that word is also a good pun to insult someone …
εγχειρίδιο = something that fits in your hand. A handbook - χέρι means hand
ενχειρίδιο = fabricated word that is pronounced exactly the same, but switches the main word from hand to something that is terrible - χείρον means “the worst”
ενχoιρίδιο = another fabricated word that is pronounced exactly the same, but switches the main word with pig - χοίρος means pig
NOTE: The bolded letters should have been γ as well, but since the words are fabricated for puns, when used they are written in that “inproper” form to indicate that there is indeed deviation from the standard correct word in meaning.
Similar, and one of my favorite puns, are the words “δίστιχο” and “δύστυχο” which sound exactly the same but mean totally different things.
Δίστιχο means “a poem with two verses”
Δύστυχο means “unfortunate, misfortunate, sad”
You can imagine how fun interchanging those can be …
That’s probably alright.
You were using the active present participle every now and again in your text here.
De úniverse pugnens
Redigens
You can’t do that. This is really a participle, i.e. an adjective with some verbal powers. It must be in case-number-gender-accordance with something, you can never have it all by itself. But you are indeed talking about the action itself, i.e. the verb. As I said yesterday, this is the time to use the nd-forms.
Recently I’ve become more and more interested in handwriting.
As Western orthography, unlike Oriental tradition, has no concept of “stroke order”, it’s possible for different people to write the same letter in quite different ways. I’ve been observing the nuances of my own handwriting, which has obvious distinctive features. I don’t know why or from where I picked up these nuances, but my handwriting now seems to be fairly idiosyncratic.
I read lately about the Vindolanda tablets, a set of fragile wooden sheets recording a variety of letters sent around the Roman community of Hadrian’s Wall in the second century. They are one of the best records of Latin handwriting, including the oldest known surviving Latin text written by a woman. One notable feature is the placement of v, which is written in the top half of the “column”, near where
one would write an apostrophe.
I struggle to spell triple-voweled Francophone words like manoeuvre and bureaucrat.
Into my teenage years, I would use the incorrect spelling hastle: castle, bustle, hustle, rustle… hassle. Wiktionary suggests that hassle derives from haste, so all the more strange that there is no t. Probably because it was an “uneducated” popular coinage made in America.
Well, there is muscle which provides another exception to the -stl- “rule”.
Hmm, apparently wrastle is an “obsolete or dialectal” variation of wrassle (wrestle), wrestle itself abiding by the pattern. Note also thistle, whistle, gristle.
Argonautica, The Histories, The Aesop Romance, Meditations, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, The Alexander Romance
Hellenistic Greek
The Suda
Medieval Greek
De Agri Cultura
Old Latin
The Gallic Wars, The Civil War, The Conspiracy of Catiline
Golden Age Latin
Rerum Rusticarum, De Lingua Latina, De Architectura, Aeneid, De Brevitate Vitae, Histories of Alexander the Great, De Re Rustica, Satyricon, Epigrams, Natural History, Germania, Tacitus’ Histories and Annals, Apicius / De Re Coquinaria, The Twelve Caesars, Metamorphoses / The Golden Ass
I read something interesting just now on the Textkit Latin forum, in a discussion of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There’s apparently a structure in Latin poetry called the Golden Line, which occupies one line and has the form
ABVAB
in which V is the verb, the A words are grammatically paired with each other, and the B words with each other as well.
eg. Vir dapes consumpsit parvus magnas “(only) a small man, he (nevertheless) devoured great feasts”
Coming from the philosophical topic, a bit of history:
" It is generally held that the Latins derived their alphabet from the Etruscan alphabet. The Etruscans, in turn, derived their alphabet from the Greek colony of Cumae in Italy, who used a Western variant of the Greek alphabet, which was in turn derived from the Phoenician alphabet, itself derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters."
I put the red letter to the Euboean alphabet which the Cumae settlers used:
And just for reference this is a modern map of the “types” of dialects of modern Greek. With the red arrow I added the location of the original Cumae (Κύμη) … apparently they still have their own thing going hehe :
Edit:
About the “northern dialects” apparently the main characteristic is their love of eradicating vowels at the start and the end of the words while talking, so there is a local joke that goes like this:
"What is the only Greek word that starts with a Z and ends with an X (Ξ)?
“Zγκατάψυξ” ( “in the freezer” = στην κατάψυξη … which is flattened out into that monster word with a whole word turning into a simple Z and getting stuck in front of another word )
Fun Fact: The Tsakonians are the only ones how after all these millenia still have retained some of the original digammas that were lost in most other dialects.
