Un-Latin Sounding Latin Words

clam
instar
dumtaxat
vafer
vapilare
vindex
urbs

Florilegium Linguae Latinae Graecaeque Sinensisque.

a.d. VI Kal. Dec., a.u.c. MMDCCLXVII inchoatum.

Many terms are to be added yet after I can find them in my scattered notebooks. 

Latina.
auceps: > avis capere ("catching birds") : an eavesdropper.
lucubrare: to study by lamplight, to work by night (we have "lucubrate" in English).
mala aetas: "the bad period, age", old age.

[There is a long list of fascinating animal sounds in a fragment of Plutarch, De Naturis Animantium.  I include my favorites.]
minurirre: the chirping sound made by the smallest of birds.
gliccire vel sclingere: the sound of a goose.


Graeca.
ἀρχιπειράτης (archipeirátēs): a pirate chief, an "arch-pirate."
φθέγγεσθαι (phthéggesthai): to make a sound, utter.
εὐάνθεμος φυά (euánthemos phuá): youth, the "well blooming  (".
πομπαĩος οὔρος (pompaĩos oúros): a favorable wind, a "sending wind".
κελαδεĩν (keladeĩn): to sound as running water.
ἐρήμας δι᾽ αἰθέρος (erēmas di' aithéros): through the desolate air.
πολύμηλος (polúmēlos): abounding in sheep.
ἔτυμος (étumos): both true and natural.
ῥίπτειν (rhíptein): to snatch up.
ἱπποδάσεια (hippodáseia): bush with horse hair (said in Homer of a helmet).
δολιχόσκιος (dolichóskios): having a long shadow (said in Homer of a spear).
νυστάζοντες ἐγειρόμενοι (nustázontes egeirómenoi): "sleepy people being woken up".
νυστάζοντε ἐγειρόμενω (nustázonte egeirómenō): "two sleepy chaps being woken up".
θεοὶ ῥεία ζωόντες (theoí rheía zōóntes): the gods who live in ease, who live 'flowingly'.
μελίφρων (melíphrōn): like honey to the mind.
ἀντεραστής (anterastēs): one's competitor in love.
θυόειν (thuóein): to fill with a sweet smell.

Sinensis.
眼神 (yăn shén): the expression in one's eyes.
松濤 : the sound of wind blowing in the pine trees.
早霞，晚霞: (zăo xía, wăn xía): the clouds when lit by the sun in the morning/evening.
霽(jì): the clouds around the moon.
電影 (dìan yǐng): Movie. A common word, but very poetic: it literally means "electric shadow".
去見馬克思 (qù jiàn Mǎkèsī): to die, lit. "to go see Marx".
殉情 (xùn qíng): to die for love. (殉 is a very productive element, indicating "to die for X".  Hence 殉國, to die for one's country; 殉難, to die for a good cause; 殉職, to die while doing one's duty).  


PLUVIALIA.
聽雨軒 (tīng yŭ xuān): a pavilion built specially for listening to the rain; a "listening-to-rain pavilion".  One finds them esp. in old enclosed gardens.  Banana plants are grown outside the windows, that one may appreciate the rain's pattering on their leaves.

 

雨絲 (yŭ sī): a fine drizzle. The sī refers to a silk thread, hence 'rain as fine as the silk thread'.
細雨 (xì yǔ): a fine drizzle. The xì means simply 'fine', esp. of granulated things', but also of slender things, delicate things. The pictographic element of the character (糸) is of silk.
濛濛細雨 (méng méng xì yǔ): This is not a lexeme, but merely a combination of an adj. and a noun. Still, as so often in Chinese, the four characters denote a fairly fixed idea in a set phrase. 濛濛 refers to something misty, the underlying idea being 'blindness' or 'indistinctness'. Hence a misty sort of rain the makes it hard to see.
愁 (chóu): Gloomy, melancholic; anxious, worried. It comes from the combination of heart (心) and Fall (秋). Probably the 'Fall' element is primarily for pronunciation, but it grants the extended meaning to the character of "to take Fall to heart" (把秋放在心上). The Chinese lexicographers seem to think this is meant to refer to the worry one feels for the result of his toil, viz. of the crops in the Fall. I like to think that it might be connected with melancholy: black bile abounds in Fall.

English.
drizzle
horror
misprint (to my mind, the finest sounding word in our language for its consonants and the required mouth shape)

crump: "To eat with an abrupt but somewhat dulled sound; applied esp. to horses and pigs when feeding"  (s.v. OED 1), or the sound of the snow crushed under one's feet (OED 2).
crunkle: the sound that a crane makes. 

Characters in Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Prince Myshkin (Sun Daolin)

Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin (Toshiro Mifune).

General Epanchin (Derek Jacobi).

Generaless Epanchin (Alison Steadman).

Dr. Chris Johanson, of U.C.L.A., said in his lecture at U.B.C. this week that, in his digital reconstruction of the Roman forum, he intentionally departs from realism.  One's avatar is any one of an host of clearly modern people; and the buildings themselves are meant to appear somewhat cartoonish.  Why?  Because realism, he believes, would lead a viewer to believe in the objectivity and finality of the reconstruction. 
     His logic is this, so far as I can gather: Modern learners attempt to construct mental models of the ancient world visually.  Each of us maps Rome in his head, and an image, once settled, is difficult to change.  Drawings and films fix these models all the more tenaciously and vividly in proportion to their realism, not their accuracy.  Hence Anthony Mann's 1964 film The Fall of the Roman Empire has done immeasurable harm to studies of the Forum, by propagating very realistic but inaccurate model.  To avert further damage, tentative models should use a tentative style: the cartoon.
    

Since cartoon's are, generally speaking, associated with fiction, a cartoonish representation would

A Hand from the Water.

An Icelandic classmate mentioned a story to me, apparently from a stage drama, which I shall investigate further, when I asked about Norse horror.  It is a Christian story, from the nineteenth century, somewhat resembling the tale of Faust.  It seems the plot is this: a wicked man goes to the diocese and, entering the crypt, takes a book of spells from a bishop's corpse.  With this, he sells his soul to the devil, whom eventually he tries to flee.  The climax is this: the man takes a boat onto the water, intending to sail westward to safety, when a great, hairy hand emerges from the water and pulls the boat and the man under.

I try to picture, whether the devil be a brachiate sea monster, or a hairy amphibian, or simply a swimming land mammal.  My favorite image, is of the seafloor opening and an great, long arm reaching from the fissure, like a pole, until the gaunt, hair-covered hand clamps around the boat and pulls it violently to the black depths.

The Impressions of Horror by Season.

Rereading this passage from an old letter, I am moved to seek out examples to illustrate my former impressions.  Horror and season.  Hmm.  Horror too is a sort of lens, and it comes in many subtle variations of shade, but all pervaded by the physiological and psychological range of reactions which, in various proportions, characterize an instance of horror just as the proportions of the features on a man's face.  Here, more revulsion and what we have seen; there, more dread at what we have not; here again, a serene, as if suffocated, beauty; there now, so

I am too tired now, and too anxious at a chapter I must submit on Tuesday, to think further hereon, but I might as well put down now, that further elaboration of season and horror will require closer examination of season as an aesthetic and philosophic category.  Let's see, season alone gives us time of life, circularity of time, patterns of decay and renewal, the power of nature, man's impotence against both time and nature, inevitability, constant change, the subdivision of time, life and afterlife, orientation and disorientation.  Aesthetically, each season has very distinctive offerings, which vary by time and place, but which are generally spelt out below.

But surely not all horror makes conscious reference to season.  In the modern world, in particular, now divorced from the land, our sources of horror are not so seasonal as before.  Season plays a part, but it surely is not "intrinsically attached to season."  More attention on this point in my scarce leisure.
 

Jan., 2010:––
     With a little thought, I've come to think that horror, while omnipresent, is intrinsically attached to season.  How horror manifests itself in any given instance is largely determined by its setting, and the setting in turn changes from season to season. Indeed, I'm sure you would agree that even your own house, while physically the same in Winter as in Summer, does not feel like the same place in both seasons. Different seasons are like different lenses: while we are seeing the same horror, we see and appreciate it as the lens shows it.
     Spring is the season of primitive bestiality, where passions are high and the horror is atavistic. Man is the monster -- our monstrous subconscious makes us so. It's the season of a restless mind pulled forward by an even more restless body. It's the season of impulse and desire.
     The horror in Summer, I think, is the most abstract. You would need to read Machen to get a really good idea of it, but the horror of Summer is the horror of losing touch with reality and finding the splendorous planes of high and rich imagination. On those planes, we can, of course, very easily forget who we are and what we are about. Summer is the season of a calm body and a restless mind. On long walks in the Summer, with the thick foliage, the ample sunlight, the hot nights and the night rains, the thunderstorms -- then, a fortnight later, drought, and the interminable hum of the cicadas.
     The spirit of Fall is abstract as Spring is not. It's the horror of nostalgia, and, by extension, of memory. In Fall, we are confronted with our mortality, and we are forced to look inward to define who we are. Naturally, when we look inward, we should expect to uncover some rather horrifying revelations. And, there is always the perversity that the most morbid season should also be the most colorful, and to many sensibilities the most beautiful.
     Fall is the most used backdrop for horror; Winter is the least. I believe Winter is the season wherein the external horror is greatest: in Winter, the climate is as harsh as it will get. Consider, if you had to walk three miles through a forest and forgot your jacket, you would be killed. The same task could, in Summer, be accomplished wearing nothing at all! Cold gathers and lingers like a poisonous gas, and we wear our heaviest clothes to protect ourselves. This is the cruelest season, and it is fittingly also the starkest. But, in its starkness, there is a degree of intense beauty and matchless purity absent in all the other seasons. Winter is the season of desolation, and so inclined are we to stay inside during it, that it is often left to its own devices. Surely, any one who has gone for a long, lonesome walk on a day of heavy snow can recall the eerie effect the snow has on sound: it is all at once very intimate -- the sounds are very close and soft -- and isolating. Some times, one finds that Winter also has the strongest character. While the other seasons send their emissaries in the forms of animals and sounds and plants, Winter comes as himself, and when he finds you walking alone, he accompanies you as himself.

Suspicions.

     A student in the course for which I am T.A. turned in a suspicious paper.  She is a Chinese student, not a native speaker of English, who is quiet and retiring in class, and whose earlier paper for the course I failed, more for its want of coherent or accurate argument than for its broken English.  But she, who wrote earlier of ancient Greeks as a Mesopotamian people, and of the Maya as an ancient Near Eastern civilization, and who wrote of the storms caused by 'Typhonius', writes for me now a most polished essay, submitted days early, succinctly comparing Dumézil, Müller, and Campbell, and organized into paragraphs of such uniform length that they seem to march in formation down the page, and within these are scattered almost irritatingly glib parentheticals and asides.  There is almost a smirk behind the words, and it hardly required the skills of a philologist to feel that these were the words of a rather sardonic young poseur, with a wry smile on his lips like one of the less sympathetic characters in a Dostoevsky novel. 

     I commented on her paper that I could scarcely believe that the authors of her two papers were the same person.  Let her pause at that.  But I am very impressed and pleased with her progress.  And indeed I have graded it as an honest piece of work, though picturing in my mind the advertisements, written in Chinese only, that I had seen posted around our building offering the services of academic ghost-writers.  For it occurred to me that, no less likely than that she paid for the present paper, it could well be her genuine work: on her first paper, she, insecure and anxious, hires a ghost-writer, who, knowing nothing of Greek myth, writes nonsense and tries to cheat her.  Failing the paper, she thinks, Why am I wasting my money on this rubbish?, and sits down to write her own paper.  Am I wrong to give her the benefit of the doubt, and to deem her a sapient who learned her lesson, instead of a fool twice over?