Re: Sin once more

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

> --- In cybalist@... s.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

So then, Torsten. What else can you get out of Mil Espainne other than Miles Hispaniae?