(boing!) Cnoocy Mosque O'Witz

My NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) project for 2023 is at https://github.com/mmoskowitz/NaNoGenMo-MMXXIII , and the novel itself is at https://github.com/mmoskowitz/NaNoGenMo-MMXXIII/blob/main/novel.txt

This text is a myriad of epic nonsense.

That is to say, this is 10,006 lines of Latin dactylic hexameter, which is syntactically and metrically valid, but which makes semantic sense only accidentally. From Lȳsidamus spatham honōret holarcticus almam (May Lysidamus from near the North Pole honor his nourishing sword) to Arachnae ballia depsant, (Arachnes knead custodies) this has been composed by a program that makes use of a lexicon extracted from the Latin entries in Wiktionary, and assembles them like Mad-Libs into different sentence structures within the constraints of dactylic hexameter. There is no narrative and a very limited set of sentence structures, but it was an interesting exercise to build (and does not contain any machine learning) and I hope it is enjoyable, though I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying to read any large part of it.

More info and code at the link above!

Every December, I participate in a fanfiction exchange called Yuletide, in which people request fanfiction for artworks and other fandoms that do not have significant amounts of fanfiction written for them.

This year, there was a request for fanfiction for the poem "The Tay Bridge Disaster" by William McGonnagal. This is one of McGonnagal's best-known poems, and he is known for being among the worst poets ever to write in English. So of course I am a fan. When all I knew was that someone had requested the poem as a fandom, I was already interested in writing something for them. But then I saw the letter, in which one of the suggestions was "Retell it in Virgilian hexameters."

Here's the thing. I had already written the first line as a Virgilian hexameter. About a year earlier, I had seen in a listing of Latin placenames for locations in Britain that the Scottish river Tay is Tavus, and had translated McGonagall's "Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!" as "Trāminis ō pulcher pons tū Tāvī radiantis!" So I had to write more. It was a moral imperative.

As it turned out, I wasn't able to get the whole poem translated by the Yuletide deadline. I did get the opening and closing stanzas, which are perhaps among the best-known parts of the poem. So I put a frame story onto it of discovering the two fragments, which gave me the chance to use some MLA citations. The selection by Colin S.K. Walker is real, and very recommended.

De Tavi Pontis Clade Carminis Fragmenta: Newly Discovered Fragments (543 words) by cnoocy
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Tay Bridge Disaster - William McGonagall
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Academia, scholarship, Hexameter
Summary:

The opening and closing of Gulielmus McGonagall's De Tavi Pontis Clade, newly discovered in the original Latin.

Non mala munera sunt, quae misit Munera Mali.

(They are not bad gifts, which Jobs of Apple gave.)

Not reference books about zombies, reference books that are back from the dead. I now own a newly-printed copy of a type of reference book that's been out of print for more than a century.
( The full story )

I am continuing to read through the Etymologies of St. Isidore of Seville off and on: I'm on the twelfth book of twenty. Sometimes I'm surprised by how modern he is: apparently the term "ant lion" is more than 1300 years old.
And then there's the times I'm surprised in the other direction. XII:vi:3:

Amphibia sunt quaedam genera piscium, dicta eo quod ambulandi in terris usum et natandi in aquis officium habeant. Ἀμφὶ enim Graece utrumque dicitur, id est quia et in aquis et in terris vivunt: ut phocae, corcodilli, hippopotami, hoc est equi fluviales.

Amphibians are certain kinds of fish, so called because they have the task of walking on land and swimming in water. For ἀμφὶ means "both" in Greek, i.e. because they live both in water and on land: such as seals, crocodiles, and hippos, these being river horses.

It's really impressive how much he knows and how differently he views the world.

These are from aspartaimee. ( Read more... )

What the hey. 10 songs, favorite/most translatable lines, in Latin. Try it without online references or with. No particular rules. But post your answers in the next entry, not this one.
( Read more... )

See my earlier post for the skinny.

( The Songs )

Interview meme from leighjen. First, the rules:

1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

( Questions from Leighjen. Some of you have seen me do this before... )
Questions from colorwheel forthcoming. Let me know if you want questions from me. (And in what language!)