{"id":1366,"date":"2016-09-26T18:57:25","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T23:57:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=1366"},"modified":"2016-09-26T19:00:14","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T00:00:14","slug":"g-or-l-who-can-tell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/?p=1366","title":{"rendered":"G or L: Who Can Tell?"},"content":{"rendered":"

    A few weeks ago, Laudator Temporis Acti<\/em> blogged<\/a> about a translated novel set in a Greek classroom, in which the Greek was badly botched. As he noted, “You’d think that, in a short novel that takes place inside a Greek class, words quoted in Greek letters would be printed accurately.” My example is less embarrassing in one way, in that the Greek is not from a Greek class, but more embarrassing in another, in that the Library of America should be able to hire proofreaders who can handle Greek quotations. After all, their professed aim<\/a> is “to curate and publish authoritative new editions of America’s best writing, including acknowledged classics, neglected masterpieces, and historically significant documents and texts”, and “authoritative” is a high standard.<\/p>\n

    This is the beginning of T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” in the Library of America volume American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume 1: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker<\/em> (2000), page 739:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

For the Greekless, it should say ó<\/u>moi péple<\/u>gmai kairían ple<\/u>gè<\/u>n éso<\/u><\/strong>, but the editor or typesetter has reversed both of the le<\/u>g<\/strong> sequences to ge<\/u>l<\/strong> to make the unintelligible (not just to the Greekless) and unpronounceable ó<\/u>moi pépge<\/u>lmai kairían pge<\/u>lè<\/u>n éso<\/u><\/strong>. (I’ve underlined the etas and omegas – long Es and long Os – since there’s no room for a macron and an accent on the same letter in HTML Roman script.) Minuscule gamma (γ<\/strong>) does look very much like an upside-down (mirrored, not rotated) lambda (λ<\/strong>), so it appears that some kind of vertical dyslexia may be at work. Most dyslexia seems to involve horizontal scrambling of letters, so this (if it is not a strange coincidence) is new to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A few weeks ago, Laudator Temporis Acti blogged about a translated novel set in a Greek classroom, in which the Greek was badly botched. As he noted, “You’d think that, in a short novel that takes place inside a Greek … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,27],"tags":[245,246],"class_list":["post-1366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-poetry","category-orbilius","tag-library-of-america","tag-t-s-eliot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1373,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions\/1373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/curculio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}