Homoiophones

Is there a word for words which sound similar? My year 12 class were pondering this question early yesterday morning, stimulated by a line of Lucretius:

ergo dissolvi quoque convenit omnem animai
naturam, ceu fumus, in altas aeris auras...

And so it folows that the whole nature of the soul is dissolved,
just like smoke, into the lofty breezes of the air...

[Lucretius, DRN III.455f]

Homophones (from the Greek homos meaning 'same' and phone meaning 'sound') are words that have the same sound, but different meanings (eg their/there/they're), so I proposed that words that have similiar sounds should be called homoiophones, from the Greek homoios, meaning 'like' or 'similar'.

I typed 'homoiophone' into google to see if such a word already existed, and only got one hit, but when I followed the link I couldn't actually discover where it was used on that page. I also got a hit for 'homoiphone'- but only as a misspelling of homophone.

Latin Letters

Latin's been on the letter pages of the paper over the last few days. Here they are if you missed them:

Liberal education at risk

Les MacDonald is quite right in suggesting that we all need a good liberal education as well as vocational training (Letters, May 25). It is very sad to see such school subjects as geography losing numbers to semi-mindless subjects such as business studies. It is also sad to see arts faculties in universities having to fight to keep subjects and courses alive. Subjects at risk include Latin and classical Greek, which should be alive and kicking at any good institution of liberal education. It is true, of course, that some arts academics have tried to dig their graves by having courses with a blatant Marxist or feminist bias, but that is no excuse for governments and universities to act like money-oriented Philistines.

David Morrison, Springwood


On your Marx

David Morrison (Letters, May 26-27) suggests that Latin and classical Greek are vital university subjects while berating "arts academics … with a blatant Marxist or feminist bias". With all respect, I would much prefer to receive the critical tools provided by means of engaging with Marxist or feminist theory. In an age of hegemonic acceptance of all things rational it would seem a critical mind is of more use than an ability to use a language used by a very few these days.

Stephen Owen, Carrington


Quid pro quo

Salve, Stephen Owen (Letters, May 28), allow me to point out it takes "a critical mind" in the first place to study Latin and ancient Greek. Furthermore, students of these languages develop broader capacities such as advanced logical, analytical and research faculty (to name but a few), and enhance their grasp of more modern tongues such as the Romance languages and even our own. Please don't fail to remember, either, that classicists are the custodians of one of the longest-standing disciplines in the university tradition.

Milton J. Micallef, Maroubra Junction

et in Arcadia ego

Byron asked me about the origin of the phrase "et in Arcadia, ego" ("Even in Arcadia, there I am") the other day. Arcadia was an area of Greece known for its beauty, and for the simple life that its inhabitants lived. In Greek and Roman mythology it came to represent a kind of paradise or utopia, where the golden age still reigned. The above phrase is generally thought of as being spoken by Death, and conveys the idea that death is everywhere, even in a place as idyllic as Arcadia.

I told Byron with confidence that it came, of course, from somewhere in Virgil, but as I thought a bit more I became less certain. I had a vague feeling it was somewhere in the Eclogues, Virgil's pastoral poems set in the paradise of Arcadia, but it seemed odd to me that Virgil would personify death in that way. So I did some research in the best way I know how, and discovered that it's not quite that simple. The idea of death being present in Arcadia does indeed come up in Virgil's fifth Eclogue (which are set in Arcadia), where he records the following inscription on the tomb of the Nymph Daphnis:

Daphnis ego in silvis, hinc usque ad sidera notus,
formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse.

Daphnis was I amid the woods, known from even to the stars.
Fair was the flock I guarded, but fairer was I, their master.

However the link between those lines and the phrase "et in Arcadia, ego" is, to put it mildly, not immediately obvious. In fact it's unclear where the phrase comes from. As far as I could work it first appears in Renaissance art as a memento mori- a reminder of death. Such reminders (often a skull, or an hourglass, or cut flowers) were often included in renaissance art to remind people that life is short, and to focus their attenion on the afterlife.

Some people however take it further. The authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (from which Dan Brown took many of his ideas for the Da Vinci Code) suggest that the phrase is in fact an anagram for "i! tego arcana dei."- Latin for "Go away! I hide the secrets of God", and that the painting of the same name hides a secret to the identity of Jesus.

Horace the Satirist and Sarmentus the 'Scurra'

In a couple of weeks time a friend of mine (who's now doing a PhD in classics at Columbia University in New York) will be giving a talk at Sydney Uni, entitled "Horace the Satirist and Sarmentus the 'Scurra': Literary and Political Competition in Satires 1.5". That doesn't mean a lot to me, but James is a very clever guy and a very engaging speaker, and I am sure his talk will be well worth going to. For more info, visit this page.

As a bit of a taster, here's a brief excerpt of a talk he gave a couple of years ago now on Roman love elegy:

Last Thursday, at 4am in the morning, on a dirty grey pavement in Paddington, as I stood there outside her door amongst the significantly abandoned McDonalds wrappers and discarded casks of Lambrusco (ours), I was, ceremoniously, dumped by my long-term partner (of two weeks). It had been a whirlwind two weeks – or, at least, it had been for me: two weeks of over-excited displays of public affection, incessant dropping of the words ‘my girlfriend’ in conversation, long hours staring at a mobile phone screen awaiting SMS’s. And most of all, it was two weeks of that exhilarating insecurity which we romantics call ‘love’...

Back on that pavement, though, as I was wandering away from her cruelly closed door, it was a line from Ovid’s Amores, from poem 19 of book 2, which immediately came to mind: Nil ego, quod nullo tempore laedat, amo – ‘I don’t love anything which never hurts me’. It struck me at that moment how well this line worked as, simultaneously, both a witty comment on the overplayed nature of a tired literary convention and a sympathetic motto for the perpetually screwed around. As I will argue throughout this lecture, the most sympathetic reader of Ovid’s love poetry, the lover, may find emotional resonance even in the most parodic of Ovid’s literary manoeuvres, and he or she might relate exactly to feeling love of an entirely disproportionate nature, or even argue that the disproportionate nature of emotions when in love is, well, entirely the point.

[James Uden, The Development of Roman Love Elegy and What it Means for You, lecture delivered 17/6/05]

Lucretius and Truth

Reading a few different books lately has got me pondering what we can know and how we can know it. The Roman philosopher-poet (an odd combination one might think) Lucretius was interested in the same kind of things, and talks about it in his didactic poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of the Universe). Here's some of what he has to say:

"If anyone thinks that nothing is ever known, he does not know whether even this can be known, since he admits that he knows nothing. Against such an adversary, therefore, who deliberately stands on his head, I will not trouble to argue my case. And yet, if I were to grant that he possessed this knowledge, I might ask several pertinent questions. Since he has had no experience of truth, how does he know what either knowledge or ignorance are? What has originated the concept of truth and falsehood? Where is his proof that doubt is not the same as certainty?"

[Lucretius, De Rerum Natura IV.469ff]

Post-Modernism (or at least the relativism that often characterises it) is not as new as a lot of people think. But Lucretius does more than just undermine this idea, he proposes his own theory on how we can know what we know:

"You will find, in fact, that the concept of truth was originated by the senses and that the senses cannot be rebutted. The testimony that we accept as more trustworthy is that which can spontaneously overcome falsehood with truth. What then are we to pronounce more trustworthy than the senses? Can reason derived from the deceitful senses be invoked to contradict them, when it itself is wholly derived from the senses? If they are not true, then reason in its entirety is equally false... Whatever the senses may percieve at any time is all alike true."

[Lucretius, De Rerum Natura IV.478ff]

For Lucretius the senses were the primary arbiter of truth- if you could percieve something, it must be real. This belief sprang from, believe it or not, his ideas about physics. He (along with Epicurus whose philosophy he was adapting into Latin) believed that the world was made up exclusively of atoms and void (ie empty space). Everything we percieve is the result of atoms banging into each other, and therefore our senses give us a true representation of reality- nothing supernatural exists to decieve our senses, nor to somehow reveal truth to us.

appropinquaveramus

How many Latin words, of four letters or more, can you make from the jumbled letters of 'appropinquaveramus'? My year 10 Latin class managed to come up with 43 in only five minutes the other day (though I'm sure there are many more). Here's their list:

amare (to love), amor (love), anus (old woman), appropinquare (to approach), aqua (water), arena (arena), avarus (miser), avus (grandfather), eram (I was), mane (in the morning), mansi (I waited), manus (hand), mare (sea), Mars (god of war), Minerva (goddess of wisdom), pareo (I obey), paro (I prepare), pars (some), parvus (small), pavo (peacock), pons (bridge), primus (first), prius (beforehand), prope (near), prora (prow), puer (boy), quae (which), quam (how, than), quis (who), reparo (I repair), servum (slave), verus (true), viae (streets), quippe (of course), quia (because), sero (late), sequor (I follow), sive (or if), sine (without), suis (her own), viro (man), vires (strength), vinum (wine)

[in case you didn't know appropinquaveramus itself means 'we had approached']