[gothic-l] Bertil's dilemma

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Bertil wrote:
>Am sorry but sometimes I lose you in the text masses but my Latin
>´dictionary places "citrustraed" as a first alternative where thuia
>Orientalis is a second choice only. As a second  alternative late Latin is
>given, which would, I guess, be the Jordanes case, with lemon tree as only
>alternative but citrus medica.So I don't really understand all the fuss
>abút thuia, as onviously there is no real case for that option is a
>meaning in _Getica_.
~~~~~~~~~~~~


Bertil, you have a habit of changing subject headers in discussions. You
change the subject headers almost every time you answer a post. That way
you destroy the information/pointers that indicate what posts belong
together in the same post, and i waste a lot of time finding the posts to
which the topic pertains.

then you say it is "fuss", whereas in reality it is just a thread.

then you seem to be implicitly assuming that the numbers in the
dictionaries give a ranking of the different meanings assigned to a word,
in such a way that a meaning that is asigned a low number is somehow
"better" than a meaning that has been assigned a high number. But isn't
that just an illusory idea? At best you can say the meanings with the low
numbers are more frequent than the meanings with the high numbers. But then
you also have to understand that frequency could depend on the type of
text. As I see it all meanings have an equal a priori probability, and
translation choices should not be made on the basis of frequency of words
in other texts, but rather on the basis of semantics, that is on the basis
of what choice gives the best meaning in a given context. Obviously there
are no Scrithefinns in Gotland, only on the Scandinavian mainland,
therefore Jordanes cannot be talking about Gotland. That is why I observed
that there are actually two ways to read "citrus leaf" in Jordanes text,
and the a priori probabilities are equal, since it is the meaning that
counts and not word frequencies in other manuscripts. The Western part of
Scandinavia has always had extemely deep fjords, and this must have been
very notable to early visitors as well. The early descriptions of midnight
sun cannot be explained otherwise than that the classical authors had
heard, via via via, from people who had actually been there. If they noted
the midnight sun, they will of necessity also have noted the deep fjords.
If you want to describe such a coastline by means of a leaf analogy the
tuja leaf is a good choice because it too is deeply cut. But I thought I
already explained as much and it seems silly to prolong such a thread by
just repeating over and over again what has been said before. You seem to
want always to have the last word, and I have given you that on a number of
occasions, simply by stopping to read the thread after it seems that no new
arguments are forthcoming. In this contribution of yours the only argument
you contributed with was that you thought it was fuss, and then that you
thought dictionary entries with low numbers are to be preferred in
translations. Well I explained to you now with so many words why I disagree
with such a principle of translation. The african tuja was an important
tree to the romans since they used its wood for many purposes. but that is
all i know at present time. Jordanes is full of contradictions and the
passages we are discussing now seems like pastework, where different texts
have been subjected to a "cut and paste" treatment - texts that do not deal
with the same subject, but that Jordanes in his haste may have thought
dealt with the same topos. This i discovered because i saw someone
mentioning that "Gotland had the shape of a juniper leaf", but surely you
as swede must know the "enbär" or "enbusk" and you know it has no leaves,
but instaed has little needles, that prick you. However the "enbusk" is
also aromatic, like the tuja, to which it bears quite a bit of resemblance,
and my guess is that it is this aroma or fragrance of the wood that lies at
the basis of the erroneous translation. We Scandinavians know the "enbär"
has no leaves, but presumambly someone living in California wouldn't know
that, from which a possible cause for the mistranslation may be deduced.
The italians probably do know the "enbär" because I think it grows in the
alps, and probably in the appenines too. But I will leave such questions
for you to research if you are sufficiently interested. I will repeat for
you then, once again the dictionary entry that I posted before, since it is
obvious that you did not find my earlier post, where the quote is. It says:


   citrus -i, m. (1) the citrus, a kind of African
   cypress with an aromatic timber used in
   making furniture: Luc., Plin. (2) the citron-
   tree : Plin.

So you see that here it is rather opposite, in that it is the cypress that
has received the lowest number (1). Not that I attach any significance to
that, but it underscores rather well how illusory the idea is that the
numbering could possibly reflect any kind of "ranking" into "good"
translations and "bad" translations. You also see that the cypress
alternative (1) is already mentioned by Plinius (23-79 ) and Lucan (39-65
), hence your idea that alternative (1), the cypress meaning, should in any
sense be a form of "late latin" (see the beginning of this post, where this
opinion of yours has been included with the quote of your message), is
utterly fallacious. If you have a Latin dictionary that says so, I would
say it cannot be used for such purposes as this.  keth





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