23-07-2023, 04:22 PM
(23-07-2023, 01:08 PM)Koen G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I'm not sure if I understand you here. When they say something like "pox pauch", i.e. God's belly, how did pox come to mean God? I would just see it as a minced version: pox sounds like gotts, so it is used instead. There is no thematic connection between God and a "bock" or anything similar.
Exactly, no thematic connection. That's exactly what Hughes (quoted by Schwerhoff) is writing about in the quote that I cited.
I guess pox is not intended to mean God, it is intended to substitute God. When one exclaims "for shit's sake!", shit is not assumed to mean "God", it just is brought in to substitute God.(23-07-2023, 01:08 PM)Koen G wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Therefore, it seems very unlikely that the person who wrote the marginalia decided to swear on the page
A swear would be entirely possible if part of idle pen probing process. If contextually linked to the other portions of the page, then, of course, it would be less probable. I think it will stay undecided at least until a plausible reading is accepted for the last few characters of this line.
(23-07-2023, 02:09 PM)cvetkakocj@rogers.com wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.According to my research, pox, pronounced as POH, is a wrongly spelled BOH which is a Slavic word for God.
Indeed, bog is proto-Slavic for "god", and many modern Slavic languages derive from that. However, it ascends to proto-Indo-European word which means "to bestow" so any parallels with goats (be that Germanic similarly-sounding "bock" or otherwise) seem far-fetched.