Dear Henry,
i wrote:
>>Inasmuch as I can't see, palaeographically speaking, how this
particular permutation could happen in my (one-man/visual-imput) model, this
necessitates the supposition that this entry in the list which B.
Hadebert ordered inserted into the Gregorian Sacramentary which he'd gotten
from Big Charlie was written by a *scribe taking dictation.*<
you responded:
>Yes, it's rather too easy to get dragged into vacuous phonetic models in
this sort of question.
Quite right, and I must try to avoid being dragged suchlike in future.
Thanks for the tip.
you also wrote:
>An alternative, purely "visual" hypothesis might be that the first two
letters of the name in the form _Gonodiernus_ had become obscured
(worm-hole or other lacuna) so that all the scribe saw was _nodiernus_
which he read as _hodiernus_ due to confusion of _n_ and _h_ in half-uncial
script.
I suppose it must be that we get a rather better class of documents round
about Chartres, so the idea of lacunae just didn't enter my head.
Sounds like a down-to-earth, thoroughly non-vacuous solution.
Which could even be true.
Though you have to admit, it's close to cheating: it's not really
_Gonodiernus_ which becomes _hodiernus_, but rather
_[ ]nodiernus_.
Got me to thinking (ouch) that there were *three hundred* years between Bishop
G. and the late 9th c. (duh); plenty of time for worms to work
over any papyrii which might have survived from from his time.
Really amazing that anything has survived at all.
Thanks, Henry, for a bit of an education.
>By the way, for "Thigernum Castrum" (?tyrant['s] castle), I was relying on
Jackson K. "Language and History in Early Britain", p446.
Now, *that* too, is something that I'd never think of: use a British source to
check out a French place.
As I said, Ernest Nègre offers "seigneur" for _tigerno_ rather than "?tyrant";
is the (considerable) difference one of political correctness or is the rumor
true that no one *really* knows what the hell any of these words *actually*
meant?
Thanks again.
Best from here,
Christopher
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