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Comment by rgvr | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the point of changing words like "many" to "mony" or "man" to "mon". I mean if you're anyway writing the entire thing in modern day English then why do this.

Is it just for the effect of it I.e., making it look sophisticated? or is it some kind of attempt at retaining the originality/authenticity?

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I think I vaguely recall the explanation from a classics course many, many, many years ago, but I can't find a source without investing a ton more effort, so take this with a grain of salt: IIRC, Plutarch wrote the sayings in intentionally archaic (for his time) Greek. He lived hundreds of years after Sparta had disappeared as a power in the ancient world, so he could have intended it to demonstrate the great antiquity of the quotations, or he could have done so to paint the Spartans as rough-around-the-edges rustics. The translation attempts to mimic this effect by translating the archaic-sounding Greek as archaic-sounding English.

To me it sounded like suddenly they were Rastafarians. Or perhaps Rastas out of the William Gibson novel, Neuromancer? I've read that more recently than I've read the history of Bob Marley and the Wailers, because I still have Neuromancer but sold Catch A Fire (I should go buy another copy, it was a very good book).

I doubt any of this was the intent.

Imagine the movie 300 except voiced in the style of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6wtj04dJ_g

It's supposed to be conveying some kind of regional accent/dialect, I think. A bit from the same translation:

A Spartan, being asked if the road into Sparta were safe, said, That depends on what kind of a mon ye are; for the lions gang about where they wull, but the hares we hunt over that land."

Edit: poking around the translation some, it looks like it's supposed to represent the Doric Greek dialect.

https://i.imgur.com/Di0nGS9.png

Correct. The translated sentence ("my son was a gude and honourable mon, but Sparta has mony a mon better than him.") does ends with two distinctly Doric words: τήνω (there, i.e. in Sparta) κάρρονας (stronger/better), instead of the Attic ἐκεῖ κρείττονας.

> "my son was a gude and honourable mon, but Sparta has mony a mon better than him."

On a sidenote, this sounds northern irish to me. Think Daniel Day-Louis in The Boxer

Thanks! Fascinating that the translator chose to represent the dialectal bits explicitly with a contemporary dialect, even though the style of the translation is not all contemporary. And the contemporariness makes the intent hard to understand without reading a bunch of footnotes (or ancient Greek) only a few decades later.

Per the heading, it is a scan of an old book which itself seems to be a collection of older texts. The weird spellings are consistent with English representations of Scottish speech patterns, and might have been intended to communicate to the original audience that the Spartans' general gruffness and aggression were comparable to that of Scots.

From a British perspective, this is pretty clearly a faux-Scots interpretation for that earthy feel the author must have thought was warranted. Appropriated with all the confidence only the English can muster. I may be way off base, but those are first impressions.

> aither clear yersel' of this or stop yer living.

A few stereotypical Scots markers there. And "mony" and "mon" are Northern features from Derby to Scotland in various pockets. Dying out altogether now, of course, becoming the homogenised transatlantic factory line English we're all so excited to speak nowadays. Can I get a tea with milk to go? Cheers!

I figured those were OCR errors or something. How would this help maintain originality?

No, this is intentional. Here's the original book on the publisher's own web site:

https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plutarch-moralia_sayings_s...

There's a footnote on that part "Cf. the note on Moralia, 190 B, supra", but I'm not sure what that's referencing.

This footnote refers to Sayings of Kings and Commanders[0], another text of Plutarch, but is not related to the translation.

[0] https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plutarch-moralia_sayings_k...

That's 190 C. It might be this bit about Doric somethingorother

https://i.imgur.com/oV88mWG.png

Some people take the Sapir-Whorf theory too seriously: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

In what sense is that connected to the above?

Isn’t this a site for people who take some things too seriously?

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