Classical E-Text: HOMER, ILIAD 1

“Forte” or “Fortë,” “Cache” or “Cachet”?

Online Etymology Dictionary This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. …

Most common words in English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The list below of most common words in English, like any superlative list, cannot be definitive. It is based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus of over a billion words, and represents one stu…

Today I was working on some regular expression sample code, and remembered this from high school Latin: O Tite tute Tati tibi tanta tyranne tulisti! It's fun to say. Read it out loud. It means "Oh, you tyrant, Titus Tatius, such great troubles you brought upon yourself!"

While I was looking for that, I found malo malo malo malo (which makes more sense than Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo).

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. I…

Fun With Words: Pangrams A pangram is a sentence that contains all letters of the alphabet. Less frequently, such sentences are called holalphabetic sentences. Interesting pangrams are generally short ones; constructing a s…

Mamihlapinatapai - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considere…

I'm curious if the "keeper of sheep" and "my brother's keeper" in Genesis 4 are the same "keeper" in the original sources. I found this online Hebrew-English interlinear Old Testament.

Genesis 4:2 (KJV)
And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

In the Hebrew linked above, the "keeper" in 4:2 is "roe" or "shepherding-of".

Genesis 4:9 (KJV)
And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

The interlinear for 4:9 shows the Hebrew for "keeper" as "?·e·shmr" or "?·one-keeping".

If the source word for "keeper" was the same in both verses, it would be a bit of pleasingly symmetrical diction. Unfortunately, the Hebrew words look completely different (to an eye completely unfamiliar with Hebrew).

The interlinear link above is based on the Leningrad Codex. I would still be curious to compare the two verses in any older/alternate Hebrew, Greek, or Aramaic texts.

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Saturday sushi links:

• Pedant
• The impact of contemporary theoretical physics on the prescriptive grammar of Victorian England
• Asparagus by G.K. Chesterton
• Grammatical shibboleths

Links from Sunday:

• The simile — implied
• Spammers solving AI problems
• Pam Braun Pens
• Stoeger coach gun
• Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May mysteries
• Doctor Who: City of Death
• Banrock Station Shiraz 2007
• Polished concrete floors
• Catholic indugences
• Don't sleep, there are snakes

Kottke linked to this amusing origin of the phrase stealing one's thunder. The source for that origin, Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature, is available from Project Gutenberg (volume 1 and volume 2) and quite interesting itself.