Paraclausithyron (natural-historical)

Paraclausithyron (natural-historical)

Will you leave me, my Lydia, here on my knees,
And like a barbarian’s bride,
Who drinks from the Don under flowerless trees
While she gnaws at her bear-flesh and aurochsen-cheese,
See your lover a prey to the snowbringing breeze
And disdain to admit him inside?

But if you can conceive of the aeons that passed
In the ocean so tediously
Ere a tentacled nautilus opened at last
The first cameral eye, and forthwith was aghast
To see, and to see himself nearly caught fast
By a nautilus bigger than he;

And conceive how the purulent prostitute Earth
Bore each animal after its kind:
The centipedes swollen to hideous girth,
The wasps that infested live toads to give birth,
All sensible neither to sorrow nor mirth
But to pain, though the Earth didn’t mind;

And reflect that we’re only less wretched than they
By impossible kindness of fate,
Which has not made us eyeless, or ugly, or grey,
For this moment at least—can you turn me away?

Less you love me, what gain to have scaped from the fray
Of Creation? Oh open this gate.

Arma virumque

Here are sixteen lines from the Aeneid:

I.1 Arma virumque cano Troiæ qui primus ab oris
I.119 Arma virûm tabulæque et Troïa gaza per undas
II.668 Arma viri ferte arma; vocat lux ultima victos
IV.495 Erige, et arma viri thalamo quæ fixa reliquit
VI.233 Imponit suaque arma viro remumque tubamque
VI.489–90 Phalanges / ut videre virum fulgentiaque arma per umbras
VI.651 Arma procul currusque virûm miratur inanis
VI.814–5 Tullus in arma viros et iam desueta triumphis / agmina
IX.56–7 Non obvia ferre / arma viros sed castra fovere
IX.462–3 Turnus in arma viros armis circumdatus ipse /suscitat
IX.620 Sinite arma viris et cedite ferro
IX.777 Semper equos atque arma virûm pugnasque canebat
X.423 Hæc arma exuviasque viri tua quercus habebit
XI.696–8 Tum validam perque arma viro perque ossa securim … congeminat
XI.746–7 Volat igneus æquore Tarchon / arma virumque ferens
XII.425–6 ‘Arma citi properate viro, quid statis?’ Iapyx / conclamat

Arma virum is a catchphrase in the Aeneid; no-one could deny that. It occurs very frequently, and to the complete exclusion of synonymous equivalents. Nevertheless it is not a formula, like τὸν δ᾽ ἀπαμειβόμενος προσέφη or pius Æneas. There is no fixed grammatical relationship between arma and virum. Sometimes, for instance, it’s arma virum, ‘arms [and a] man’, and sometimes it’s arma virûm ‘the men’s arms’. And sometimes arma and virum seem to be completely unrelated, as at VI.651, which I think is to be translated ‘he wonders at the far-off arms and the chariots empty of men’. These words are not joined by any consistent logical or grammatical relationship, but by the mere fact of their frequently appearing in each other’s company. 

To this we can contrast the Catullan æquora–vectum formula, which appears twelve times in Vergil. (It was described by Robert Schmiel, ‘A Vergilian Formula’, Vergilius XXV [1979]: pp. 37–40). Here there is a consistent grammatical relationship between the two words. One is always carried across the seas, whether one is trans æquora vectus, per æquora vectus, or simply æquora vectus. And because the basis of this formula is grammatical rather than lexical, the word æquora can even be swapped out for metrical equivalents like maria or tot vada without making the formula any less recognizable. The collocation arma virum is not like this: it depends for its existence on the very words it is made up of, and not on their syntactical relationship to each other, or the sense which they jointly express.

The equivalent to arma virum in medieval and modern poetry is the epic rhyme. Lyric poets like Marot and Housman were usually capable of avoiding stock rhymes, just as ancient lyric poets tended to avoid repeated collocations. In a lyric poem you sometimes even get the sense that some lines were chosen for their prettiness before the sense of the poem itself was determined. (For instance, maybe Leuconoë was only a made a woman in order to allow for the words credula postero). But you can’t achieve such minute elegance in a long and narrative poem, where a certain pre-determined story must be told; and so Chaucer wrote day and lay, honour and conquerour, wyf and lyf etc. whenever it helped him move his tale along. The words wyf and lyf bear no consistent relationship to each other in grammar or sense, but they make a harmonious jangle.

Now, Vergil’s epic diction has certain lyric tendencies that distinguish it from Homer’s. Lest any two lines be exactly alike he used fixed formulæ in much greater moderation. Still, in a long narrative poem there was no reaching the studied uniqueness of Horace’s lyric lines, or even of Horace’s wandering hexameters. In the Aeneid Vergil had a pre-ordained story to tell. So at certain junctures he sacrificed lyric preciousness to the requirements of that story, and resorted to his toolbox of collocations that could be guaranteed to be both metrical and elegant. 

Titulus

Speakers of Latin generally say titulus to mean the name of a book. This is not completely unfounded, but the much preferable word is inscriptio. (As far as verbs go, titulo and intitulo are late barbarisms, but it’s good Latin to say ‘liber inscribitur ___’ or ‘librum suum ___ inscripsit’.)

Titulus means, in the first place, a label written on hard material, like a tombstone or a statue. In Augustun period, it could refer to a book or chapter’s name: but even here, I think, the word almost always referred to the physical heading itself, and not the book or chapter’s name in the abstract. Thus Ovid wrote ‘nec titulus minio, nec cedro charta notetur’, and Martial:

Addita per titulos sua nomina rebus habebis;
Prætereas, si quid non facit ad stomachum.

Or else it had a slightly negative connotation, and referred to the book’s heading as an extraneous disguise of the book itself, just like we talk of judging a book by its cover. ‘Me non pænitet nullum festiviorem excogitasse titulum’, wrote Pliny, and I think there was a hint of disdain in his word titulum, by which he meant a pompous decoration which he had chosen not to put onto his book. Titulus was not used even in this sense by Cicero, who always used inscriptio for the name of a book . Estienne Dolet noticed this, and in his Commentarii linguæ latinæ (1536), under the entry Inscriptio, he wrote: ‘inscriptio est, quod vulgò titulus dicitur, & planè Barbarè marca.’ (1) ‘An inscriptio is what is popularly called a titulus, and utterly barbarously a marca.’ This is one of many places where we should obey the great master.

***

(1) Vol. I., col. 1272.

Theory of Dagesh

 There are two kinds of dagesh, lene and forte. Their identity in form is one of the defects of the Masoretic system of punctuation, because they have two completely different functions. Dagesh forte, which corresponds exactly to Arabic shaddah ( ّ ), doubles the consonant in question:

וַנֵּלֶךְ vanneleχ, אֶשָּׂא ʾessā, אֵלֶּה ʾēlle מִמֶּנּוּ mimmennū

The presence or absence of a dagesh forte is phonemic, not determined by the context, and integral to the meaning of the word. It would be like writing haṁock for hammock, or piḷow for pillow. Dagesh lene, meanwhile, indicates a stop (hard) rather than a fricative (soft) pronunciation of the letters בגדכפת. Not all of these distinctions are realized in all pronunciations of Hebrew, but here they are in their ideal form:

בָּהָר bāhār vs. וּבֵין ūβēin

גֵּרוֹ gērō vs. וְגַם veɣam

דְּרֹשׁ deroš vs. עַד ʿað

כִּי kī vs. לָכֶם lāχem

פֶּן pen vs. לִפְנֵי liɸnēi

תֶּשִׁי tešī vs. אֹתוֹ ʾoθō

Unlike dagesh forte, dagesh lene has no phonemic relevance, and its presence or absence is almost always predictable from the surrounding phonetic context. The rule is: if a בגדכפת letter is preceded by a vowel (even sometimes across a word boundary), then it does not get a dagesh lene. And if it is preceded by nothing, a consonant, or a mute schewa, then it does.

These two phenomena should really have been designated by different signs. This is because the בגדכפת letters themselves are theoretically susceptible to taking either a dagesh lene or a dagesh forte, or both. Unlike the letters אהחער, which cannot take a dagesh forte except under the rarest of circumstances, there is no reason, phonetic or otherwise, why בגדכפת cannot be doubled.

Thus there is a distinction, not marked in the Masoretic orthography, between בגדכפת letters that have a dagesh lene and the ones that have both a dagesh forte and a dagesh lene. (There is no such thing as a letter that has only a dagesh forte, for a reason that will be clear shortly.) In the six examples I listed above—בָּהָר, גֵּרו ,דְּרֹשׁ, כִּי and תֶּשִׁי—the בגדכפת letters only have a dagesh lene.

But here are some words with a double-dagesh:

כַּבֵּד
הַגּוֹי
מִדַּם
מִכֶּם
אַפּוֹ
עַתָּה

And here is my question: how are these to be pronounced? A grammar of Hebrew will tell you to pronounce a geminated version of the ‘hard’ variant of the consonant. Thus kabbeð, haggōi, middam, mikkem, ʾappō, ʿattā. And this is, as far as I know, the pronunciation of every attested Jewish tradition, both modern and medieval. 

But it does not follow from the rules of dagesh-placement in Masoretic Hebrew. Consider what is actually taking place when a letter is carrying a dagesh forte. It can be resolved into two like this:

ַטַּ—>טְט

The first of the geminate pair bears a mute schewa, and the second carries the vowel that the written consonant had been punctuated with. It's really no different to Italian giammai or latte; or English midday, in that it’s just a case of two identical consonants succeeding each other with no intervening vowel. Soo far so good; now let’s resolve a geminate בגדכפת letter:  

ַּדַּ—>דְד

Remember that a dagesh lene cannot exist unless it is called for by the absence of a foregoing vowel. Therefore, as the first of these two consonants is presumably preceded by a vowel, it has a soft pronunciation. But the second consonant, preceded by a mute schewa, must take a dagesh lene, just like any בגדכפת letter that appears after a mute schewa. It is to be pronounced hard.

Thus we should ideally pronounce: כַּבֵּד kaβbed, הַגּוֹי haɣgōi, מִדַּם miðdam, מִכֶּם miχkem, אַפּוֹ ʾaɸpō, עַתָּה ʿaθtā.