Why do so many still call Vergil Virgil when it is obviously a false statement
Connor Kelly
thought the Aeneid was fortelling the second birth of their messiah.
They thought the word Virgil, which mean magic wand, was not
coincidentally close to that of Vergil's name Vergilius and flipped to
random pages of the Aeneid and picked a random line in an attempt to
garner knowledge of the future and such.
Given this knowledge why are people still ignorantly calling Publius
Vergilius Maro a wrong name? Even acclaimed translators like Allen
Mandelbaum have Virgil put on the cover of his Aeneid.
Rudy Caine
for the same reasons the apatasaurus will always be known as loved as
brontosaurus. While there have been attempts on the part of some modern
paleontologists to "correct" the original misnomer is probably just too deeply
seated and ingrained for it to be reversible. I hope it is not too presumptuous
of me to suggest that classicists should learn the lesson taught by old bronty
and accept defeat gracefully. :)
Average Conrad
inflected, ultimate syllable. Following the the great vowel shift, it's
appropriate to replace the "e" with the "i" orthographically.
The Virgil/Vergil story is sweet and succinct, but smacks of folk etymology.
Cheers
Joe Bernstein
Connor Kelly <turtle...@yahoo.com> wrote:
(snipping attempt to explain "Virgil" etymologically)
> why are people still ignorantly calling Publius
> Vergilius Maro a wrong name? Even acclaimed translators like Allen
> Mandelbaum have Virgil put on the cover of his Aeneid.
Maybe he was stuck with it.
Classicists tend to be pretty conservative generally, or at least
have until recently; probably anglophone classicists were no more
interested in switching to Vergilius than francophone ones are
interested in talking about Statius. (The French name for Publius
Papinius Statius is "Stace".) I'm not sure anyone writes in a modern
language about Naso, which there's direct evidence was the preferred
name of Publius Ovidius Naso.
My personal experience is that I wasn't allowed, when writing for
<The Encyclopedia of Fantasy> ed. John Clute & John Grant, to use
"Vergil" as an entry head, nor "Vergilius Maro, Publius", which I
gather would have been correct. I didn't even get to use "Ovidius
Naso, Publius", but rather "Ovid".
Individual classicists probably tend not to want to switch it, with
some exceptions; classicists' publishers probably tend to exaggerate
and enforce this tendency of individuals. And since Mandelbaum,
like me, was publishing *outside* the classical field, into the
general market, I'd guess he, like me, was even more strongly
discouraged from using a spelling that Average Folks wouldn't know.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://these-survive.postilion.org/> At this address,
personal e-mail is welcome, though unsolicited bulk e-mail is unwelcome.
Merops of Cos
Same reason they call Homeros "Homer".
--
Remove knickers to reply.
o8TY
news:592cdb6f.03053...@posting.google.com...
Does Vergil use the word "virgil" for "magic wand".
Can you provide a reference, thanks.
William C Waterhouse
In article <3ee22...@news.iprimus.com.au>, "o8TY" <o8...@hotmail.com> writes:
>...
>
The word for twig, wand, (thin) rod is "virga." It is used literally
in the Georgics and in Aeneid 11, 66. It is also used for Mercury's
staff (4, 242), for the rod with which Circe strikes Picus (7, 190),
and most famously for the "golden bough" that Aeneas plucks in
Aeneid 6 (144, 409), though that is originally called "aureus ramus" (137).
William C. Waterhouse
Penn State
mb
...
> Vergil became known as Virgil in the Middle Ages because christians
> thought the Aeneid was fortelling the second birth of their messiah.
Not necessarily. That kind of regressive assimilation is common in
several Romances, without any need of kooky theories.
> Given this knowledge why are people still ignorantly calling Publius
> Vergilius Maro a wrong name?
...
Wrong to you. People who speak Latin in its modern forms often keep a
direct link. Ignoring something like 2000 years of tradition just
because someone wants to go back to antiquity would be idiotic. The
guy's name is now Virgilio, Virgile etc.; when writing in Latin of
course they write Vergilius.
Peter Hayden
"mb" <azyt...@mail.com> wrote in message
news:c5d8a9d0.03061...@posting.google.com...
I am unaware of any inscriptions contemporary with the poet Maro (I will
duck spelling controversy itself by not using my usual spelling of the
poet's name) which give his name and so I don't know how anyone can be so
sure about whether its Virgil or Vergil. I think the idea of a consistent
spelling of a name is a modern idea and quite honestly even if we knew how
V... errrrr Maro spelt his name does it actually matter?
Peter
An inscription is of course no evidence of how Maro spelt his name anyway!
Dan Amodeo
> Vergil became known as Virgil in the Middle Ages because christians
> thought the Aeneid was fortelling the second birth of their messiah.
> They thought the word Virgil, which mean magic wand, was not
> coincidentally close to that of Vergil's name Vergilius and flipped to
> random pages of the Aeneid and picked a random line in an attempt to
> garner knowledge of the future and such.
You may be right, but I think it was just a misspelling. "Virgil" and
"Vergil" would be pronounced the same in English.
> Given this knowledge why are people still ignorantly calling Publius
> Vergilius Maro a wrong name? Even acclaimed translators like Allen
> Mandelbaum have Virgil put on the cover of his Aeneid.
It isn't ignorant and it isn't a wrong name. The man's name in English is
"Virgil," just as the name in English of the capital of Italy is "Rome," not
"Roma," and Chistopher Columbus's name in English is "Christopher Columbus,"
not the Spanish or Latin or Italian version of his name.
--
Dan Amodeo
E-mail: take my last name, all lower case, put a seven in the middle, then
add at earthlink dot net
Edwin Menes
Similarly, the name of the poor girl stabbed by her father to save her
from the clutches of Appius Claudius in Livy, Book 3 is 'Verginia'. We
don't fool around, however, with trying to convince people names Virgil
or Virginia that they don't know how to spell. We also don't get sniffy
with Classicists elsewhere or with the English literary tradition for
the spelling 'Virgil'.
Maybe we should all just call him Maro. Or we can go back to calling
Cicero Tully. Different strokes, different times, different contexts.
mb
...
> I am unaware of any inscriptions contemporary with the poet Maro (I will
> duck spelling controversy itself by not using my usual spelling of the
> poet's name) which give his name and so I don't know how anyone can be so
> sure about whether its Virgil or Vergil.
Interesting way of lookign at it. Makes one curious, of course: who
mentioned the name in writing so we know it?
Edwin Menes
and Ovid among his contemporaries and near-contemporaries. But the
orthography of manuscripts can be problematic because of scribes who
'correct' spellings. Best to continue to look for epigraphic evidence.
Imre Z. Ruzsa
like Ovid, and for Greek names a Latinized and often truncated form,
like Plato, Plutarch. Sometime - I cannot locate the time very well
and I don't know the reasons - this changed. Now we write Ovidius,
Vergilius, and for Greek names (outside scholarly works) a
transliteration
which uses our accented vowels to represent some letters, say é for
eta, ü for ypsilon (e.g. Aiszkhülosz). So change is possible.
Hungarian orthography is a lot less conservative than Enlish, however.
Imre Ruzsa