Comment by stevesimmons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevesimmons | Hacker News Reader

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Catullus's poems are brilliant!

I studied them in my high school Latin class. There were just 12 of us in the class. Due to a bad strain of flu that winter, our final test on Catullus was postponed 4 times as various people were home sick. By the time everyone was back in class, we had studied them so thoroughly we knew many of the poems off by heart...

So 34 years later, I can still recite "Odi et amo, fortasse requiris, ..." and "Sirmio, gem of islands and peninsulas, ..." [peninsula = paenae insula = almost an island :)].

Another interesting side to Catullus comes from the music of Carl Orff. He is of course the composer of Carmina Burana, a collection of medieval drinking songs, with the most famous being O Fortuna! [1]. He also set Catullus's poems to music, in his Carmina Catulli [2]. [3] is a version with the musical score in the background.

Here are two other Catullus resources for anyone wanting to learn more:

* Bilingual edition by Peter Green - Latin and English on opposite pages: https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Catullus-Bilingual-Gaius-Valeri...

* Wikipedia has a very good list of all Catullus's poems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poems_by_Catullus

[1] https://youtu.be/GRjyxr1ysKw?t=77 (O Fortuna starts at 1:17)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catulli_Carmina

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UDc2KdnuAo

> " [peninsula = paenae insula = almost an island :)].

In French they have kept the term, and peninsula is "presqu'île", which means literally that :)

I doubt French kept the term the whole time. I would say that it is more likely that later intellectuals knowledgeable in Latin created afresh a calque on the Latin term.

Respectfully, that does not match up with my rudimentary understanding of linguistics. Considering that both languages pull from the Latin family, I would assume that they are more likely to share an origin, than converge to that etymology coincidentally.

I could totally be wrong about this, of course. For example if you would spoke French, I'd look like an asshole.

Presque in French is not a reflex of Latin paene, so presqu'île is not a straightforward continuation of Latin paeninsula.

> I could totally be wrong about this, of course. For example if you would spoke French, I'd look like an asshole.

I do happen to speak French, but that is irrelevant. Merely speaking a language does not make a person an authority on etymology. The general public often holds unsound views on where the words they use come from. I am however involved in historical linguistics in academia, and what I would like to emphasize here is that the Romance languages are well known to have created calques on the basis of learned Latin -- examples abound in Spanish and Romanian too, for example. The layman may believe them to continue Latin forms, but they can be shown to represent late coinages, not retentions.

Might be, I'm not sure about the history of the term, but that's what they're called now, anyway

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