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Vicensima.

Cicero, Ad Atticum 2.16.1:

Portoriis Italiæ sublatis, agro Campano diviso, quod vectigal superest domesticum præter vicensimam?

With the Italian tariffs lifted and the field of Campania all parceled out, what domestic revenue is left besides the vicesima?

I suppose the only thing I don’t like about this one is leaving vicensima untranslated.  But I think it has to be done, because to do otherwise would require wordy paraphrase—the Perseus translation, for example, has “the five per cent. on manumissions”, which is considerably less punchy.

I get the feeling that there was a stylistic choice in starting out with the long phrases  portoriis Italiae sublatis and agro Campano diviso and letting vicensima sit on its own, clearly not heavy enough to balance the comparison.   Vicensima as I’ve seen it, though literally just a descriptor meaning ‘one-twentieth’, seems to act more as the specific name of the tax (even though there were a couple of taxes so called) so I don’t feel too bad about leaving it as is.

[For vicesima.]

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2011 03 21 Muke Latin Comments (0) Permalink

Scyllas in Ovid.

Ovid, Ars Amatoria 1.331-2:

Fīlĭă | pūrpŭrĕ|ōs Nī|sō fū|rātă că|pīllōs
pūbĕ prĕ|mīt răbĭ|dōs || īnguĭnĭ|būsquĕ că|nēs.

The daughter who stole the purple hair from Nisus now pushes down rabid dogs with her crotch and groin.

This one’s a bit weird on its own.  The woman being spoken of is Scylla—or rather, two women named Scylla; one Scylla was the monster with dogs growing from her waist, and the other Scylla was a princess of Megara, daughter of a king whose lock of purple hair made him invincible.

According to some, Ovid has just confused the two Scyllas; other sources suggest both were mentioned, and some lines are missing.

I’m entirely unhappy with pube premit … inguinibusque and its rendering, though I’m not sure what would make the translation better.

[For Nisus.]

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2011 03 18 Muke Latin Comments (1) Permalink

Atlantic word of the moment.

ganÉ›. (É¡É‘Ì€.nÉ™) adj.

  1. Deadly, poisonous, dangerous, noxious, baneful.

[Âdlantki *gani. Kirumb *ganos, Proto-Indo-European *gÊ·hn- ‘to slay’.]

I don’t know how late this formation was, but Pokorny doesn’t show any cognates  that would have been built from the pattern *gÊ·hn-no- as this would be.  Most of the derivatives of this root refer to the act of slaying or the thing being slain, but in Kirumb *-no- became a productive suffix to create nouns and adjectives referring to the doer of an action.  GanÉ› is thus literally ‘that which kills’, though it may also be used for things that are only gravely damaging as well.

This word was the last I needed to translate the first phrase of the Iliad:

Æ©uyirÉ”
sing.IMPERAT
Ê’evÉ›,
goddess
emne
anger
ganÉ›
deadly
adÉ™
ACC
Axille’f
Achilles.GEN
Pele’f
Peleus.GEN
sing, O Goddess, the deadly wrath of Achilles son of Peleus
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2011 03 03 Muke Nother Comments (0) Permalink

Acentetum.

Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia 37.10, on quartz crystals:

Quæ vero sine vitio sint, pura esse malunt, acenteta appellantes, nec spumei coloris, sed limpidæ aquæ.

Those which are in fact flawless are preferred uncut and are called acenteta; and they are not cloudy in color, but of the color of clear water.

Acentetum is from the Greek άκέντητος, meaning ‘unpricked’ or possibly ‘unembroidered’.  Lewis and Short give the Latin meaning as ‘without points or spots’, presumably in reference to the clarity of the crystal, but it might just as well be ‘without engraving’; as Pliny states, quartz was usually decorated by engraving to hide or deemphasize the imperfections in the crystal, but acenteta didn’t get this treatment, but were preferred pura.

 

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2011 03 02 Muke Latin Comments (0) Permalink

The letter śádí.

So the other day I was working on a page for the Kirumb Alphabet on FrathWiki.  There are a few things here that I’d forgotten, and it took comparing a few other files to work out the details, but one thing everything seemed to have in common is that the standard Kirumb dialect had one superfluous letter in its alphabet, called śádí /sɑːˈdiː/ ~ /ʃɑːˈdiː/.

As the transliteration—which appears to be derived from Etruscan practice—suggests, it was a sibilant, and as standard Kirumb had fewer sibilants than the Semitic alphabet from which it borrowed its letters, this letter (a descendant of á¹£ade)ended up being the odd man out.   I have down that there were dialects that used śádí for a sibilant separate from but ‘intermediate to’ /s/ and /ʃ/ and not present in standard Kirumb.  In the standard language they merged variously with s and Å¡, and some not using such a dialect would use the letter indiscriminately with either value.

The shape of the letter is similar to its relative, the Greek σάν (Ϻ) but unlike that letter, did not fall out of use in later stages of the language;  instead, it came to refer to many sibilants that were not felt to match /s/ or /ʃ/, such as the Drake /ç/and the sibilant in Spanish ”ch”.    (/ç/ became the standard pronunciation of the letter’s sound.)

A lot of this I had no idea about when I came back to the Kirumb alphabet, but I had very little left to make up when I did get around to reading my notes, which I suppose is  a good hint that you want not only to write everything down but make sure a copy of everything is handy, as nearly anything can be forgotten.

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2011 02 10 Muke Nother Comments (0) Permalink

The Ibran vowel inventory.

Went through my list of Ibran sound changes to try and produce a canonical set of vowel phonemes in the language.

Not entirely sure that this is complete or correct—a quick glance through the vocab I’ve generated so far showed one or two things I’d overlooked, both in the vocab and in the rules, but this is a step towards that official list.

Anyway, there are eleven plain vowels.  In the examples below, the phonemic transcriptions of the vowels are more certain than the consonantal ones.

  • /É‘/ as in larc /lÉ‘rk/  “wide”
  • /a/ as in maillér /maˈjer/ “wife”
  • /É›/ as in bechuol /bəˈcçuːl/ “animal”
  • /e/ as in siéc /ʝek/ “dry”
  • /Å“/ as in squeupir /Ê°kʲœˈpir/ “to spit”
  • /i/ as in riÿr /riˈjir/ “to laugh”
  • /y/ as in tular /tyˈlÉ‘r/ “to kill”
  • /É™/ as in abominazón /É‘ËŒbo.mi.nəˈʃon/ “abomination”
  • /É”/ as in filosof /viˈlÉ”.zÉ”f/ “philosopher”
  • /o/ as in córt /kʲort/ “short”
  • /u/ as in uont /ũt/ “where”

The last is a doubtful case; I’m not entirely sure /u/ occurs plain.  (A rule generates it from Old Ibran */wo/, but I don’t think there is a rule that would generate this /wo/.)  Most of these vowels also have nasal, long, and long nasal variants.

Both rising and falling diphthongs occur.  A diphthong may have an onglide in /w/ (as in cuerz /kʷɛrtʃ/, “[tree] bark”) or in /j/ (as in vientr /vjɛ̃tr/ “belly”).   However, apparently only /j/ can be an offglide, as in coill /kʲœj/ “neck”.   Diphthongal nuclei include /e/, /œ/, /ɛ/, /øː/, and /i/.   (/øː/ is not listed above, as it only appears long—if it can appear at all; it doesn’t appear in the wordlist so far…)

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2011 01 18 Muke Piataia Comments (0) Permalink

Potestas – Cicero

Cicero, Ad Atticum 6.1:

Illud quidem fatebitur Scaptius, me ius dicente sibi omnem pecuniam ex edicto meo auferendi potestatem fuisse.

Scaptius will admit this at least—that when I was judge he had the opportunity to carry off all the money from my edict.

I don’t think ‘when I was judge’ is exactly the best translation here; ius dicere appears to be a technical term.

Also, I’m not sure the best way to handle omnem pecuniam ex edicto meo without introducing words I don’t want to introduce. The reference translation I used added ‘allowed’ (“the whole sum allowed by my edict”).

[For potestas.]

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2011 01 11 Muke Latin Comments (0) Permalink

‘Buzz’ in Âdlantki

I wanted something cognate to Latin bombīre when I started working on this word, but all the other cognates seemed a little too European; I ended up going with the PIE root *bhrem- instead (so the word is related to the Âdlantki word for ‘bee’, vormi.)

The root gives an unattested Kirumb normal stem *brim-, aorist *brís-, and stative *bórsk-, where in the latter two *m disappears before the derivational endings.

The Âdlantki reflexes of these would be bremvi “I am buzzing” and bris “I buzzed”; the last one, vusku “I buzz”, illustrates probably a few of the reasons why the last stem (along with stative stems in general) does not survive into modern Atlantic.

Still, it’s the one I need for the example sentence:

Vormis vuskuâŋt.
/wɔ̀rmis wùskuəŋ(k)t/

“Bees buzz.”

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2011 01 10 Muke Nother Comments (2) Permalink

Vergo – Cicero

Cicero, Ad Atticum 16.6:

Sed tamen perspice quo ista vergant mihique aut scribe aut, quod multo malim, adfer ipse.

But anyway, look into which way things are leaning and either write me or, what I’d much prefer, let me know in person.

Haven’t done one of these in a while.  Will try to post more often.

[For vergo.]

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2011 01 03 Muke Latin Comments (0) Permalink

Words that ROT-13 into anagrams of themselves

All right, so the list of words that ROT-13 into their reverse is already known.

Makyo mentioned this afternoon that ‘arena’ is almost an anagram of itself in ROT-13 (it’s neran) and of course I was struck with the urge to find out which and how many words actually are rearrangements of themselves after ROT-13 is applied. Forty-five minutes later I had a little Ruby script up and cooking over /usr/share/dict/words, and it came back with 73 results.

The longest result it found is tangantangan (a vernacular name for Leucaena leucocephala, an invasive species of tree), which ROT-13s as ‘gnatnagnatna’.

Other polysyllables are banovina (→ onabivan) and emblazonry (→ rzoynmbael); some less esoteric examples are nearly (→ arneyl), regret (→ erterg), and paunch (→ cnhapu).

Most of the results are not meaningful in their ROT-13ed form, with some exceptions which may be cheating (Anna = naan, vina = Ivan).

The full list is here.

Edit: A 2008 thread in uk.rec.sheds calls these “perfect ROTs”. Darin Franklin had also found tangantangan among other such examples by 2004. For some reason Google didn’t show me all this before I did the work…

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2010 09 06 Muke English Comments (0) Permalink