16 December 2013

Mons Sion, ne timueris, lauda Dominum!

It's funny how ones mind works ... I woke up this morning with a phrase reverberating in my mind from somewhere near the end of Jeremiah's Lamentations ... Mons Sion disperiit quia vulpes perambulant in eo ....vel similia. Dunno how that got there. Tricks in the subconscious, I s'pose. Suggestions on the back of a postcard.

By the way ... those of you who were kind enough to read my convoluted piece on the Benediction Laudate psalm ... did you notice recently that on the Second Sunday of Advent, in the Epistle from Romans 15, where S Paul quotes it (I think he must have gone to Benediction quite regularly), the second of the words meaning praise is translated into Latin as "Magnificate"? The Greek, by the way, of both the mss of S Paul and the mss of the LXX is very confused; Sinaiticus doesn't even agree with itself! Variations centre on (i) should there be a prefix ep-; (ii) should the inflexion be -esatosan or -esate. (Some of the maelstrom of confusion is the result of scribes spelling phonetically, naughty things.) I wonder if we should blame Atticising ... or even de-atticising? Suggestions on the back of a postcard.

Ah well, Veritas Domini manet in aeternum.

1 comment:

Joshua said...

Capite nobis vulpes parvulas quæ demoliuntur vineas: nam vinea nostra floruit.