Re: Sin once more

At 2:25:47 PM on Saturday, August 2, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 12:53:42 PM on Saturday, August 2, 2008, tgpedersen
>> wrote:

[...]

>>> The standard theory wants us to believe that whoever
>>> translated Isidor's Miles Hispaniae to Mil Espain knew so
>>> little Latin that he didn't recognize the word miles
>>> "soldier", tranlating it instead as a proper name.

>> No, it doesn't. Re-read Ó Corráin:

>> One of the nodal characters in this legend is Míl of
>> Spain, a transparent literary invention (= Miles
>> Hispaniae, `Soldier of Spain').

>> Note the key phrase: 'literary _invention_'. The
>> transformation of <miles> to <Míl> is taken to be
>> deliberate.

> OK, so in order to impress the learned world with the
> great age and wisdom of the Irish people the authors of
> the Lebor Gabala Erenn re-interpreted the Latin word
> miles, which learned people would have known from their
> first year of studying Latin to mean "soldier", and
> reinterpreted that to be a name?

No. Where did you get 'in order to impress the learned
world'?

Never mind; you clearly have no intention of taking existing
scholarship in this area seriously enough to absorb the
actual arguments. I will merely point out that medievalists
as a group aren't stupid; if these sophomoric objections had
any real merit, they'd have been taken into account long
ago.

Brian