Laudator Temporis Acti

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018), Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), page number unknown (chapter 1):

There is one other thing that I recall about Yiddish. Many languages have some sort of suffix, added at the end of a word, for a variety of purposes—smallness, affection, intimacy, etc. In English we use only two: -let and -kin (e.g., booklet, lambkin) and both sparingly. German makes much more extensive use of -lein and -chen (e.g., fraülein, mädchen). Italian has a wide range, notably -ino, -etto, -ello and, to magnify rather than reduce, -one. A similar effect is achieved in Arabic not by adding a suffix, but by a change of vowels—from Hassan to Husayn, from ‘Abd to ‘Ubayd, as in the names ‘Abdallah and ‘Ubaydallah. Yiddish has a wide range of such suffixes, but one in particular, -inyu, caught my attention. It is attached to three words and to no others. The three words are father (tatinyu), mother (maminyu) and God (Gottinyu). Clearly, these are not diminutives—the message is not diminution but intimacy. I thought this remarkable. The same theological attitude of intimacy is expressed in a familiar Jewish joke about the hard-up businessman who prays, “Oh God, you help complete strangers! Why can’t you help me?”

Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), Letters of Obscure Men II, LXIII (tr. Francis Griffin Stokes):

Then was I sore afraid, and fell into such a pickle that I savoured ill in the nostrils of those who stood by.

Tunc fui ita perterritus quod perminxi et permerdavi me, quod omnes nasum praetenebant.

Note the euphemism. A more accurate translation is:

Then I was so very afraid that I thoroughly pissed and shat myself, so that all were holding their noses.

Related posts:

• The Smell of Fear
• An Effect of Fear
• Thin Soup
• An Effect of Fear in Cellini's Autobiography

Labels: noctes scatologicae

Corpus Parisinum 25 = Basil, Homiliae in Hexaemeron 8.4 (tr. Denis Searby):

The people's lack of judgment has often put the worst man in office.

πολλάκις γὰρ ἀκρισία δήµου τὸν χείριστον εἰς ἀρχὴν προεστήσατο.

Poem by Rudaki (c. 858-940/941), tr. Bernard Lewis in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 95:

This is wine—if the merest driblet falls in the Nile,
its scent makes the sober crocodile drunk without end.
If the deer on the plain drinks but a single drop,
he becomes a roaring lion, fearing no tiger.

Related posts:

• Some Effects of Wine
• Praise of Dionysus
• Wine
• The Power of Wine
• Effects of Wine
• Effects of Drinking Wine

Philemon, fragment 18 Kassel and Austin (tr. James Maxwell Edmonds):

You save yourself, and I'll save myself.

σῶζε σαυτόν, ἐγὼ δ' ἐμέ.

Corpus Parisinum 20 (tr. Denis Searby):

As vultures are attracted to foul-smelling things, flying over many meadows and many fair and sweet-smelling places, and as flies, passing over what is healthy, are drawn to a sore, so too malicious characters do not even glance at splendid achievements or great accomplishments in life but dedicate themselves to the rot and the decay.

Ὥσπερ δὲ οἱ γῦπες πρὸς τὰ δυσώδη φέρονται, πολλοὺς µὲν λειµῶνας, πολλοὺς δὲ ἡδεῖς καὶ εὐώδεις τόπους ὑπεριπτάµενoι, καὶ αἱ µυῖαι τὸ µὲν ὑγιαῖνον παρατρέχουσιν, πρὸς δὲ τὸ ἕλκος ἐπείγονται, οὕτως οἱ βάσκανοι τὰς µὲν τοῦ βίου λαµπρότητας καὶ τὰ µεγέθη τῶν κατορθουµένων οὐδὲ προσβλέπουσι, τοῖς δὲ σαθροῖς ἐπιτίθενται.

Euripides, fragment 610 (tr. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp):

Get lost! You can do nothing—you can only talk.

φθείρου· τὸ γὰρ δρᾶν οὐκ ἔχων λόγους ἔχεις.

Poem by Al-Mutanabbi (915–965), tr. Bernard Lewis in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 68:

Tastier than old wine,
sweeter than the passing of winecups
is the play of swords and lances,
the clash of armies at my command.
To face death in battle is my life,
for life is what fulfils the soul.

Related post: A Stirrer-Up of Strife.

My friend and fellow pedant, Eric Thomson, detected a howler on the very first page of a book on pedantry — Arnoud S. Q. Visser, On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025), p. 1:

Despite the warnings of those around her, Dorothea married him, thus embarking on a short-lived, unhappy wedded life in a gloomy parsonage filled with books and silence.

Mr. Casaubon, however, didn't live in a parsonage. See George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book 1, chapter 5:

Before he left the next day it had been decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks. Why not? Mr. Casaubon's house was ready. It was not a parsonage, but a considerable mansion, with much land attached to it. The parsonage was inhabited by the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the morning sermon.

Id., Book 1, chapter 9:

Mr. Casaubon's home was the manor-house. Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church, with the old parsonage opposite.

Labels: typographical and other errors

Poem by Abū al-ʻAtāhiyya (748–828), tr. Bernard Lewis in Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 59:

Your life is a sum of counted breaths.
With each breath that passes
a part of life is lost.
That which gives life brings death every moment nearer,
and your caravan is led by one
who will not jest with you.

Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (1980; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1989), p. 3: Not Horace, but Juvenal (7.51-52: tenet insanabile multos / scribendi cacoethes). Drogin also misspelled insanabile as insanibile.

This post was inspired by my granddaughter, who is learning about medieval writing in second grade. When I asked her where medieval monks did their writing, she correctly answered, "In a scriptorium."

Labels: typographical and other errors

Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), Letters of Obscure Men I, XV (tr. Francis Griffin Stokes):

For every one should cleave to his own business, and none should put his sickle into another man's corn. Because a cobbler is a cobbler, and a tailor is a tailor, and a smith is a smith; and it would go ill with a tailor who tried to make shoes and slippers.

Quia unusquisque debet manere in facultate sua, et non debet mittere falcem in messem alterius. Quia sutor est sutor et sartor est sartor, et faber est faber. Et non staret bene si unus sartor vellet facere calceos vel stamulta.

This is the only passage cited for stamultum by Du Cange, who defines it as "calceamenti species." There is a discussion of the word in Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 18 (1983) 287, but I don't have access to it.

Related posts:

• Outside My Area of Expertise
• Let the Cobbler Stick to His Last
• Sutor Ne Ultra Crepidam