"jam to-morrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam to-day"
Mark Abraham Israel
> As to the issue of "tomorrow", remember _Through the Looking-Glass_:
> [...]
># "You couldn't have it if you DID want it", the Queen said. "The
># rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today."
-- a pun which few will understand today. Even Martin Gardner
missed it in his original _Annotated Alice_; but he explains it
in _More Annotated Alice_. It is advice on how to translate
the English word "now" into Latin: as _iam_ in the past and
future tenses, but as _nunc_ in the present tense.
The "i" in _iam_ is a consonant, and in 19th century printing of
Latin text, consonant-i was printed "j". The ancient Romans used
a single letter for "i" and "j", and a single letter for "u" and "v".
Modern printing of Latin distinguishes the vowel "u" from the
consonant "v", but for reasons that escape me, no longer uses "j".
Rich Lafferty
Mark Abraham Israel <isr...@is07.fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
> In article <96movn$18rg$1...@news.tht.net>, m...@vex.net (Mark Brader) writes:
>
> > As to the issue of "tomorrow", remember _Through the Looking-Glass_:
> > [...]
> ># "You couldn't have it if you DID want it", the Queen said. "The
> ># rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today."
>
> -- a pun which few will understand today. Even Martin Gardner
> missed it in his original _Annotated Alice_; but he explains it
> in _More Annotated Alice_.
MORE Annotated Alice! I'd miss out on so much if I didn't read this
newsgroup. Do tell, what is its scope? How does it fit with the
first _Annotated Alice_? Or is it just an updated reprint?
-Rich
--
Rich Lafferty ----------------------------------------
Nocturnal Aviation Division, IITS Computing Services
Concordia University, Montreal, QC
ri...@bofh.concordia.ca -------------------------------
Bob Cunningham
Israel) said:
[...]
>Modern printing of Latin distinguishes the vowel "u" from the
>consonant "v", but for reasons that escape me, no longer uses "j".
For a couple of years in the 1930s, I attended an elementary school in
Salt Lake City that had its name displayed in engraved stone over the
entrance: "COLVMBVS SCHOOL".
Us kids had fun pronouncing it |k@l'v@mv@s| (approximately "kuhl vuhm
vuhs").
(The school and its funny engraved name are still there, on Fifth East
near Twenty-Seventh South.)
About "us kids": This is an example of the modern idiomatic trend
toward assigning pronouns to new slots in the paradigm of cases.
--
Bob Cunningham, Southern California, USofA
I before E except after C, unless:
a. E precedes I and does not follow C, or
b. I precedes E and follows C.
-- Woody Wordpecker
Geoff Butler
>
>> As to the issue of "tomorrow", remember _Through the Looking-Glass_:
>> [...]
>># "You couldn't have it if you DID want it", the Queen said. "The
>># rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday -- but never jam today."
>
>-- a pun which few will understand today. Even Martin Gardner
>missed it in his original _Annotated Alice_; but he explains it
>in _More Annotated Alice_. It is advice on how to translate
>the English word "now" into Latin: as _iam_ in the past and
>future tenses, but as _nunc_ in the present tense.
Really. You mean that "I Caesar am now by chance present" is really
"Caesar adsum nunc forte"? It'll never catch on.
-ler