Varia I. Hiberno-latin <em>quantotus, tantotus</em>

Abstract

VARIA I Hiberno-Latin quantotus, tantotus The technique that I have elsewhere labelled ‘disunderstanding’, apparently at its height in seventh-century Ireland, was a method of finessing new Latin words into existence by creatively reparsing truncated passages taken from established texts. Thus, for example, a noun crassum, meaning ‘breast, chest, lungs’, was arguably generated by disunderstanding (as a neuter substantive) the initial adjective in the Isidorean phrase crassum aerem facit, originally meaning ‘it makes the air thick’.1 Similarly, the opening adverb of the Seville bishop’s phrase facile scintillas emittit, ‘it easily produces sparks’, seems to have been taken instead as a noun, designating the steel against which a flint is struck. Again, the second noun in the Biblical phrase gurgustium piscium, ‘the cabin of fishes’, was apparently viewed as standing in apposition to the first (or as a gloss on it), so that gurgustium was no longer the (accusative) singular of a word for a hovel, but the genitive plural of a new word for fish.2 And so on; such words went on to be employed with their new senses in freshly minted sentences (indeed, that is where we detect them), and examples could easily be multiplied both from the Hisperica famina and from the enigmatic Virgilius Maro Grammaticus.3 Indeed, one particular coining by Virgilius, namely a Latin adjective quantotus, appears from its etymology not merely to be a further neologism generated by means of the technique, but to represent a refinement thereof: it results not from the disunderstanding of a phrase consisting of several words, but rather from the serial application of disunderstanding to a single word. The present note constitutes an attempt to trace the process involved. The coining in question is to be found in section VI.7 of Virgilius’s Epitomae, and only there.4 Claiming one Fabianus as his authority for it, Virgilius states that a verse by the latter reads quantotae tuae tonant carminibus, Iuliane, uxores aptae which, lacking any wider context, I suggest might best be translated as ‘All your talented wives without exception, Julian, give hearty voice to Bmy? DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/ERIU.2016.66.8 Ériu LXVI (2016) 191194 # Royal Irish Academy 1 Anthony Harvey, ‘Blood, dust and cucumbers: constructing the world of Hisperic latinity’, in Emer Purcell et al. (eds), Clerics, kings and vikings: essays on medieval Ireland in honour of Donnchadh Ó Corráin (Dublin, 2015), 35262: 35657. 2 Anthony Harvey, ‘Frankenstein in the scriptorium: bringing Latin to life in early medieval Ireland’, in Mı́cheál Ó Flaithearta (ed.), Code-switching in the medieval classroom (Bremen, forthcoming). 3 On Virgilius’s lexical innovations in general, see Anthony Harvey, ‘Linguistic method in his literary madness? The word-coinings of Virgilius Maro Grammaticus’, in Elisa Roma and David Stifter (eds), Linguistic and philological studies in early Irish (Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, 2014), 79104. 4 Giovanni Polara (ed.), Virgilio Marone grammatico: epitomi ed epistole (Naples, 1979), 76. compositions’. Never mind that the content of the quotation is arresting, or that both the verse and its alleged author appear to have been made up by Virgilius; this is par for the course with him. Rather, let us trace what lies behind his (feminine plural) form quantotae, and how it comes to mean what it does. In a passage just before the ‘quotation’, and without providing a definition, Virgilius states that his lexeme quantotus has a genitive form quantotius. He does not provide such forms for the other lexemes that he mentions in that passage,5 and I believe that this gives us the clue to his real (as opposed to his pretended) starting-point: his etymologising actually begins with quantotius (this being a form that he is likely, in fact, to have come across: see below), and proceeds by serially ‘disunderstanding’ it. The process appears to have been as follows. There had developed within international Late Latin an adverb quantocius meaning ‘as quickly as possible, immediately’. It was, in general, quite common, and indeed occurs frequently in the corpus of specifically Celtic latinity: the draft entry for it in the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic sources cites instances in...