Mark Thakkar

BREAKING: THE discovers a new grammatical category of questions to which the answer is “No”! Also, “Isabel spent over 20 years working in technology innovation and digital transformation at American Express and Visa… before transitioning into academia full-time in 2015. Her teaching reflects this” 💯

Screenshot of the Wayback Machine capture of the old entry for BL MS Add 49598

OMG PEOPLE! I have the BL hack of all BL hacks. Why didn't this occur to me before? It turns out the Wayback Machine has snapshots of MS metadata from the old Digitised Manuscripts site. I tried it for the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold, in honor of his day, and lo! web.archive.org/web/20140305...

Also a missed opportunity, as they usually are, to say that Latin doesn’t only provide a window onto ancient Rome (“the stories, the history”) but gives you the keys to vast swathes of European culture up to 1800 or some other arbitrary cut-off point. Hardly a niche interest when you think about it!

Thanks, Mike! I was disappointed to hear Lorna Robinson being so upbeat about the status of Latin in the state sector when it’s quite obviously a basket case. It really isn’t much consolation for people at one of the many schools that don’t teach it to be told there are “loads of great initiatives”.

Even better, I think, would be a generous but not overwhelming amount of context, giving enough of a sense of what’s going on to make the reading process more natural – most texts are read within an understood context! – but not so much as to provide any counterproductive shortcuts to understanding.

That said, if I had to choose, I’d go for option C (no translation), and definitely not option A (facing-page translation). If there is a full translation within easy reach, students will inevitably resort to it sooner than is good for them – like a TV screen in a bar, it’s extremely hard to ignore!

Cf. the “momentum” principle in the 2nd edition of Reading Latin, whereby some passages are followed by a translation: “This will enable the reading of the Text to be speeded up without depriving the teacher of the chance to home in on any lexical or grammatical features judged to need attention.”

None of these will please everyone. A fourth option that no one could reasonably complain about would be to have a mixture – just A/B and C, I think, because including all three might be confusing. That way, teachers could use the book as they see fit. (Few classes will read the whole thing anyway.)

Oh, and if the next bit is causing problems too, I suspect the scribe was meant to write ‘et de pecuniis inde provenientibus’ but started with ‘in de’ by mistake, corrected it by overwriting an ‘et’ symbol at the base of the ‘ī’, and understandably forgot about ‘inde’ at the start of the next line.

Perhaps the abbreviation mark is the one that’s missing from ‘provenie(n)tibus’ on the line below! Which is to say, the scribe was evidently not on top form, so I’d be inclined to read it as ‘mancio’ all the same.

“bonum meorum mobilium et immobilium”, “venundetur”. The word before ‘mea’ should be nominative as the subject of ‘venundetur’, though I’m not sure it can be read as ‘mancio’ given the abbreviation mark.

For anything relating to the BL website, “Cock-up or conspiracy?” can surely be given the usual answer with more than the usual confidence.

Epistemic? More like a panstemic!

Google launches new AI search feature in UK The new tool marks a significant change for the search giant but raises questions for advertisers.

“The Daily Mail claims the number of people who click its links from Google search results has fallen by around 50% on both desktop and mobile traffic since Google introduced its AI Overview feature.” Every cloud… www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

YouTube video by karatelunchbox Monty Python's Flying Circus - "Working Class Playwright"

“Hampstead wasn’t good enough for you…” www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQDe...

I say “sadly” because I think this would have been a good opportunity to explain what old-fashioned textual scholars do and why it’s important (and worth funding!). If more medievalists were trained to do this kind of work as a matter of course, there would be a lot less building of castles on sand.

Mark Thakkar on X: "Some of the 35 emendations I’ve made this week: comunibus > rationibus. praeterea > praeceptorum. sugere distant > fugere discant. praeterea > praeterita. pugma > angina. commune > ratione. elusio mutationis > eversio munitionis. neminem lis > monimentis. #medievalTwitter" / X Some of the 35 emendations I’ve made this week: comunibus > rationibus. praeterea > praeceptorum. sugere distant > fugere discant. praeterea > praeterita. pugma > angina. commune > ratione. elusio mutationis > eversio munitionis. neminem lis > monimentis. #medievalTwitter

Ha, yes. Sadly it comes across as a one-off magic trick rather than something that editors do several times a day without batting an eyelid. Last summer, while working on Colón’s Book of Epitomes, I posted a highlights report for 3 weeks before inevitably running out of steam: x.com/brunellus/st...

Flexor. Simples!

My worry is that any steps we’ve taken towards acknowledging the “new” reality of grad students learning Latin from scratch – baby steps only, to my knowledge – will now be taken back on technological grounds, leaving the same old inequalities even further entrenched than they have been for decades.

…but now that LLMs are increasingly persuading people that the two-tier access problem has already evaporated – as long as the text has been digitized, the machines can do the rest! – the elephant in the room is that automatic translation has pitfalls that you can only avoid by knowing the language.

The elephant in the room used to be the fact that the vast majority of Latin texts will never be translated, so even a massive project targeting untranslated bestsellers would still leave two very different access tiers for medievalists. Take Latin teaching seriously and this problem will evaporate…

Nice! Scholars do seem to have got their knickers in a twist over this. Speaking of which, what are the grounds for reading the nickers as sea-snakes rather than mermaids? Cf. Harley 505 f. 132r “C(h)oreantes similes sunt … syrenis, anglice nikeres” (Wenzel 1992) and other quots in MED s.v. ‘niker’.

It is of course not true in general to say that everything after the question mark “can be removed without issue”. Often some parameters are necessary for the link to work at all, let alone as intended. Happily, though, another moment’s thought is usually enough to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Doesn’t everyone who knows this know that most people don’t? The evidence isn’t just on social media or in private messages – there are academic books and articles that cite URLs with clearly superfluous parameters. As for how *you* knew it, could it just be that you’d given it a moment’s thought? 😉

Something special at Leeds: the surprise discovery of a Wyclif manuscript at Merton College, where he was a grad student in the 1350s! Gigi Campi can’t make it, so the other talks will be less compressed. Jordan Lavender’s will be about his discovery; mine will be more general. #IMC2025 #medievalSky

HarperCollins one-volume Lord of the Rings, with John Howe’s cover image of Gandalf the Grey striding downhill through the rain.

I think the Black Gate cover is a mistake for first-time readers, as it constitutes a bit of a spoiler for anyone paying attention. I myself read a one-volume 1992 paperback with this cover, which didn’t have the same problem:

Cover and spine of the 1991 one-volume hardback of The Lord of the Rings (ISBN 0261102303). Alan Lee’s cover image shows Frodo, Sam and Gollum hiding behind rocks as a company of Haradrim march to the Black Gate.

Snap! Well, I’m reading it to my son, who’s almost 13. (We’re on the road to Isengard, p. 576.) The text is indeed generously sized, and the maps benefit from the extra space too. The only downside for readers of a certain age – young or old, really – is that it’s uncomfortably heavy in the hand.

Mark Thakkar on X: "I see FU Berlin has ditched a copy of the TLL, presumably thanks to the merging of collections in Classical Philology, Medieval Latin Philology and “Indo-Germanic” Linguistics. Vultures can find some cheap volumes & fascicles here (plus ones already sold): https://t.co/ZXCNv3yIfS https://t.co/Gl3oRNqdaw" / X I see FU Berlin has ditched a copy of the TLL, presumably thanks to the merging of collections in Classical Philology, Medieval Latin Philology and “Indo-Germanic” Linguistics. Vultures can find some cheap volumes & fascicles here (plus ones already sold): https://t.co/ZXCNv3yIfS https://t.co/Gl3oRNqdaw

Sadly the tide has turned so strongly that new reference works won’t make it into the kind of libraries that have been ditching their old ones – you can’t rescue a lapsed ebook subscription! Btw, I didn’t bother posting this here because Latinists are mostly still on Twitter: x.com/brunellus/st...

Left in the [decent] obscurity of a learned language!

Yes, that’s the beauty of it. I’m lucky enough to have a study again after two years of working in our bedroom, and it makes such a difference to have my books within reach. All I need now is twice as many shelves – I think I’m past the stage where I can solve this problem with determined weeding 🤦‍♂️