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+--- Thread: Capital N in incantations (/thread-3037.html)
RE: Capital M in incantations - MarcoP - 09-03-2020
(09-03-2020, 12:21 AM)Koen G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I've been thinking about the syntactic possibilities for this sentence. It smells of second person, someone being addressed (...dabas, maybe portas, te).
So the N in these charms, I guess will usually be a name of someone talked about on the third person? Like the object or subject of the sentence? Or might it be the same person who is being addressed in the second person? Is there some type of sentence we are more likely to expect?
Hi Koen,
I can think of two major classes for "N texts", but maybe there are more. [BTW, could M be corrected into N in the thread title?]
1. An "invocation", like the one in Anton's first post, or those (English and Latin) discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. In this case, the invocation is addressed to a non-human entity (e.g. fever, Saturn of Christ) expressed in the second person. N is the object of the invoked intervention and corresponds to the third person.
2. A "recipe": here it is the officiant who is expressed in the second person. The role of N is identical to the previous case. The Florentine charm discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is an example of a "recipe" (it actually begins with the imperative "Recipe"). By this I only mean that it describes steps to be taken, not that it is less magical or more scientific than an invocation.
In both cases, the second person is used in a mix of imperative and subjunctive sentences: I think this is the type of sentence that one can expect. The Florentine recipe features imperatives like recipe, accipe, scribe, pone and subjunctives like habeas, ponas, caveas. In all the examples discussed in this thread, the N-text is preceded by a Latin title / usage indication.
I am afraid that the sentences in 116v will only be readable if someone finds a close and less corrupted parallel. If such a parallel does not exist, I don't believe the meaning (if any) is recoverable (but meaningless pseudo-Latin in charms appears elsewhere). Helmut suggested that "cere"(?) in line 2 could be "tere", which indeed is an imperative that often appears in recipes, but the four consecutive -x words in line 3 are quite suggestive of meaningless pseudo-Latin.
RE: Capital M in incantations - Koen G - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital N in incantations - Anton - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital N in incantations - Koen G - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital M in incantations - Helmut Winkler - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital N in incantations - Anton - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital N in incantations - Anton - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital N in incantations - Koen G - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital N in incantations - Anton - 09-03-2020
RE: Capital N in incantations - -JKP- - 09-03-2020