senryu – look I’m a cat = zut ! je suis un chat

senryu – look I'm a cat = zut ! je suis un chat






look I'm a cat
how dare you ask, are you wise?
I'll give you a cuff

zut ! je suis un chat
me demandes-tu, es-tu sage ?
je te gifle

Richard Vallance

photo © by/ par Richard Vallance

Advertisement

4 more profoundly moving spiritual thoughts from the Stoic, Marcus Aurelius

4 more profoundly moving spiritual thoughts from the Stoic, Marcus Aurelius:

Just to give you an idea of the vast scope and universal appeal of the Stoic philosophy the Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius (AD 160-180) espoused, here is a composite of four quotations from his splendid Meditations, which I urge anyone who has an eye and an ear for profound spiritual thought to read.



I have been and am most deeply moved by this profound observation by Marcus Aurelius on the nature of the soul:

The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thought.

How true, how eminently and profoundly true. This single, acute observation goes a very long way in explaining how the extent of both the good and the evil in every one of us tinctures the soul of each one of us.  Where ever the good prevails over the evil in one’s life, and the more the better, the more appealing the colour of one’s soul. We can think of many individuals throughout history whose souls are of a subtle, delightful hue. Persons such as Buddha, Mahatma Ghandi and Jesus come to mind.  Their souls must project an aura of  caerulean blue, aquamarine, teal or the like.  But woe to those such as the Roman emperor, the monster, Caligula, Joseph Stalin and  Adolf Hitler, whose souls (or whatever is left of them, if anything) have been tarred all but pitch black.

New Testament in Greek & Meditations of Marcus: Aurelius, Meditations: II,4

New Testament in Greek & Meditations of Marcus: Aurelius, Meditations: II,4

Beginning today, and posting every two weeks or so, I shall be quoting alternately from the New Testament and from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in Greek. Wherever possible I shall also translate sentences and phrases in each citation. This is a very tricky manoeuvre, but at the same time it close to ideally serves me in writing in natural, not tabular, Mycenaean Greek.  The next citation will be drawn from the New Testament in Greek in early January 2017.  

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: II,4



The Greek text is taken from Haines, C.R. ed. & trans. Marcus Aurelius. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1953, with several revisions, the last of which was published in 2003. ISBN 0-674-99064-1. xxxi, 416 pp.

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of peace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in yourf power again.

Translation by Maxwell Staniforth = Marcus Aurelius Meditations. London: the Folio Society, 2002.

 

LBK&M has just joined several major literary LinkedIn Groups!

LBK&M has just joined several major literary LinkedIn Groups!

LBK&M has just joined several major literary LinkedIn Groups! These are:

And this is my welcoming message:

We expect to see many more visitors to Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae now that we have hooked up with so many great LinkedIn literary groups.

NEWS RELEASE! Just a few of the KEY Twitter Accounts following us

NEWS RELEASE! Just a few of the KEY Twitter Accounts following us: Click our banner to view our Twitter account:



Note that the number of Twitter accounts following us has grown from about 500 at the beginning of 2014 to just short of 800 now, growing at a rate of 10-20 new followers per month.  

As of December 2014, we have the honour and privilege of being followed by some of the more significant, indeed some of the most important Twitter accounts. Of these, perhaps the most impressive is none other than The British Museum, with 428,000 followers: Click on its banner to visit their Twitter (also Click on all of the other Twitter accounts below to do the same): Click here:


You will perhaps have noticed that The British Museum follows fewer than 10 % of the Twitter accounts who follow them; so it is particularly telling that they decided to follow us.

Here are some more Twitter accounts of direct relevance to ours, starting with linguistics:


Once again, Babel follows just over 10 % of those who follow them. They stood up and noticed us.

And here we have just of few of the scores of Twitter accounts relevant to ours following us:








who by the way lives in Mycenae.







And here are just two of the most popular MEDIA and Promotional accounts on Twitter now following us (some of them with 100s of thousands of followers):





Richard

Two New Book Titles on the Arcado-Cypriot Dialect, Rare Birds Indeed!

Two New Book Titles on the Arcado-Cypriot Dialect, Rare Birds Indeed! Click to ENLARGE:



This first title is most unusual, I dare say, unique, since I have never, ever seen, let alone heard of a book on ancient Greek philosophy written in Linear C, which is to say, if it is written in Linear C rather than in alphabetical Arcado-Cypriot. Either way, it is of inestimable value. Of course, I just have to lay my hands on it. What’s more, this title confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt that Arcado-Cypriot, quite unlike Mycenaean Linear B, was a literary script, as well as legal + constitutional, given that the Idalion Tablet (which is in Linear C) runs along those lines. This characteristic in particular may lead to some complications in our attempt to correlate a significant cross-section of Arcado-Cypriot Linear C vocabulary, of which more words are bound to be connotative & abstract rather than merely denotative or concrete with presumably equivalent vocabulary in Mycenaean Linear B, of which of which more words are bound to be denotative rather than connotative, i.e. the reverse scenario. However, this situation is not all that likely to actually cripple the process of cross-correlation between Linear B and Linear C vocabulary, since after all, there are bound to be plenty of denotative, concrete nouns, along with connotative, abstract, in both dialects, given our personal interest in the latter for the purposes of establishing a corpus of derived (D) Mycenaean words, however minimal it may prove to be. Only time will tell. In this endeavour, I expect to be able to work well with another Linear B colleague and translator, Ms. Gretchen Leonhardt, who I suspect is rather more interested than am I in collating a derivative (D) vocabulary of Mycenaean connotative words in Linear B. But that I am sure is fine with both of us, as we are surely going to share our resources. 

You may visit Ms. Leonhardt’s blog here. Her approach to the decipherment of Linear B is both highly unusual, and to my mind, radical, running rationally, practically and instinctively against the grain to me at least, but fascinating nevertheless:



The second book to which I wish to draw your attention is — Click to ENLARGE:



Actually, I was astonished to find any books at all on Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, since practically no-one seems even remotely interested in it, not counting myself, of course, or another Linear B colleague of mine, Gretchen Leonhardt, who also wants to learn Linear C. All the more power to us! At least she and I will probably end up being the only two researchers in practically the entire world who can not only read Linear C but translate it as well. And trust me, if we do (more like, when we do, as it is only a matter of time), that is bound to raise a few eyebrows in the Mycenaean Linear B research community, given the extremely close relationship between these two dialects. One can easily call them kissing cousins, as they are even closer to one another than Ionic and Attic Greek are!


Richard 

Let’s all bid a warm welcome to our newest member, our friend, Thomas Wischer, to Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae!

Let’s all bid a warm welcome to our newest member, our friend, Thomas Wischer, to Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae!

You can find Thomas here:



and here:



You know what, Thomas. I have seen your picture, and maybe one of your blogs before (I can’t quite remember when).  

May you post and comment merrily away, Thomas.

Richard