```
We learn misogynistic pejoratives like “meriochane”, given to Cleopatra by Horace and company, which Rosenbaum translates as “the woman who gapes wide for ten thousand men”
```
Well, no. Rosenbaum discusses μυοχάνη on pg. 14, a word found in Galen's Glossary of Hippocrates. Galen:
My trans. "Muriochane/Muiochane: A name for a woman yawning. But if it is to be written 'thousand relaxer', it should be a woman who relaxes [ie., her legs] for a thousand."
This "yawn" or "yawn after something" can be similar in Greek usage to our "drool after."
The "Cleopatra" claim is internet garbage, nowhere in Rosenbaum, and I wonder if an AI summarizer picked it up from Reddit or something? All Rosenbaum does is quote Erotian in that discussion, who says "μηριοχάνη ὄνομα γυναικός," Meriochane is the name of a woman.
There's another related word from the Suda, μυσάχνη, which it attributes to Archilochus as a reference (name for?) a prostitute.
>The "Cleopatra" claim is internet garbage, nowhere in Rosenbaum, and I wonder if an AI summarizer picked it up from Reddit or something? All Rosenbaum does is quote Erotian in that discussion, who says "μηριοχάνη ὄνομα γυναικός," Meriochane is the name of a woman.
The moment you learn someone has used an LLM to make a claim you can safely ignore them forever. Better yet, you can ignore everyone who reproduces it uncritically.
In a Latin transcription, the Greek "u psilon" (simple u) may be written as either "u" or "y", without causing ambiguities.
The Greek vowel had been originally pronounced the same as Latin u, so the old borrowings in Latin from Greek write it as "u".
Then, by the time from which most classical Greek literature has been preserved, the pronunciation of "u psilon" has been modified in most contexts to become a front rounded vowel, like the French "u" or the German "ü".
Because of this, in later Latin the letter "Y" has been created and added to the Latin alphabet, to write the front rounded vowel of the contemporaneous Greek, which had no Latin correspondent.
Latin "y" is normally preferable for writing Greek "u psilon", unless the discussion is about older attestations of words (like in Homer) or about the etymology of Greek words, when it is preferable to write "u psilon" as "u", to match the old pronunciation or the vowels of the cognate words.
> In a Latin transcription, the Greek "u psilon" (simple u) may be written as either "u" or "y", without causing ambiguities.
There's no ambiguity if you already know whatever Greek word is at issue. But by that standard, there is also no ambiguity if you represent every Greek word with the spelling "x". If all you know is the transcription, "u" would be expected to correspond to Greek ου. This isn't really an ambiguity, but it will instantly become one if you start using "u" to correspond to υ as well.
> Latin "y" is normally preferable for writing Greek "u psilon", unless the discussion is about older attestations of words (like in Homer) or about the etymology of Greek words, when it is preferable to write "u psilon" as "u"
Well, the timing here is Hippocrates, who appears to be contemporaneous with "Thucydides".
It is an etymological discussion, but writing "muriochane" seems more like an attempt to intentionally obscure the root of "myriad" than an attempt to make it clearer.
Unfortunately, for old books the modern transcriptions into text are never reliable.
Only the original scanned images can be trusted, and even those can be ambiguous when the scanner had a too low resolution.
The modern text transcriptions are very useful for fast searching, but the results must always be verified with the original scanned images, because the mistakes made by either automated OCRs or by human readers can be shocking, especially for such texts, which may contain unfamiliar Ancient Greek words.
I determined that there is an error in Gutenberg's version of Samuel Butler's prose translation of the Iliad, where somewhere in the catalog of ships Homer's tessarakonta is translated as something other than forty. I think it was fifty.
I briefly looked into the process for correcting Project Gutenberg, but didn't do anything. And I have no idea whether the error was made by Butler (and would appear in print) or by whoever transcribed Butler's work for Project Gutenberg. I would argue that in either case Gutenberg should correct the text, but I can see where opinions might differ if the error is original to Butler.
Well, no. Rosenbaum discusses μυοχάνη on pg. 14, a word found in Galen's Glossary of Hippocrates. Galen:
μυ<ρ>ιοχάνη· ἐπίθετον χασκούσης. εἰ δὲ μυριοχαύνη γράφοιτο, ἡ ἐπὶ μυρίοις ἂν εἴη χαυνουμένη.
My trans. "Muriochane/Muiochane: A name for a woman yawning. But if it is to be written 'thousand relaxer', it should be a woman who relaxes [ie., her legs] for a thousand."
This "yawn" or "yawn after something" can be similar in Greek usage to our "drool after."
The "Cleopatra" claim is internet garbage, nowhere in Rosenbaum, and I wonder if an AI summarizer picked it up from Reddit or something? All Rosenbaum does is quote Erotian in that discussion, who says "μηριοχάνη ὄνομα γυναικός," Meriochane is the name of a woman.
There's another related word from the Suda, μυσάχνη, which it attributes to Archilochus as a reference (name for?) a prostitute.