Comments on: 46 Joel Spolsky & T S Eliot

By: paperpools

paperpools — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 16:27:13 +0000

I don’t know which edition of Complete Poems you’re using. Faber had an edition for a while that got it wrong, though it was corrected in later printings; the Harcourt Brace 1953 Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 gets it right. If Eliot had wanted the Greek for ‘the one that IS’ he would have had to write ‘to on,’ not ‘to en.’

By: Silvo

Silvo — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 15:37:23 +0000

You are correct in “to hen” if it really was ‘The One’ which Eliot meant. However if he wrote on purpose “to en” (as it is in his printed Complete Poems) it would have to be translated as ‘the one that IS’ or ‘Being itself’ or ‘Beingness’. A critical edition of Eliot’s poems is on its way, so within some years we’ll get the authoritative interpretation from Christopher Ricks.

By: Language

Language — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:35:32 +0000

Dissemination of misinformation? Bah, I’ve done that enough times not to dream of criticizing it in others. The wonderful thing about blogs is that you can edit them and fix the problem! It’s those damn old-fashioned books that just sit there misinforming people for years…

I love Deutscher’s book and am saddened to hear its style was cramped by such a thing. In this day and age, that shouldn’t even be a concern.

By: ithaca

ithaca — Mon, 07 May 2007 13:53:32 +0000

You’re right of course about the Greek — and how could I possibly forget this nice example of 2 in the dual? (I am impressed by your restraint in making no comment on dissemination of misinformation to millions of Internet users…) The only thing is, if I’d remembered that the Greek, unlike the late Latin form, used this nice example of the dual, I wouldn’t have put it in, because it wouldn’t have done what it was supposed to — provide something a reader new to Greek might recognise if deciphering correctly. I don’t think one can reasonably throw such a reader “hen dia duoin” without explaining the dual, and, erm, I think if an example that requires explaining the dual is forced on the reader at this early stage it will confirm all his/her worst fears about the difficulty of the language.

Still, it won’t do to disseminate misinformation to millions of Internet users, or even to disseminate misinformation to the tiny band of visitors to this blog, so I have taken hendiadys out altogether — which does make this exchange of commments incomprehensible to latecomers, but it’s better than disseminating misinformation.

This sort of careless mistake is exactly the reason, though, that I would like to see some of the technical obstacles taken out of the typesetting process. Sorting out this post involved a lot of fiddly behind-the-scenes biz, typing in Mellel to get a really big font, taking screenshots, uploading at the right image size, the sort of work that’s not unlike what one goes through in the months it takes to get text correctly set using a typesetter, and the part of the brain that should be rejecting hen dia dys as ungrammatical and looking for a workable substitute just goes to sleep.

My friend Guy Deutscher, Assyriologist, linguist and author of The Evolution of Language, said he decided not to have ANY non-roman scripts in the book because he knew what a nightmare it would be to get them into print. This was a book for the general reader; it seems hard on the general reader if a rare chance to see Akkadian in its native cuneiform is taken away because of the bloodymindedness of typesetters.

By: Language

Language — Mon, 07 May 2007 12:24:29 +0000

You might want to fix the Greek, as I just did in the Wikipedia entry — it should be ἓν διὰ δυοῖν. (I had to hit control-plus three times to up the font size to where I could be absolutely sure I had the breathing right!)