Words from coinage6/1/2023 By that year, the center of the Roman world had been moved East to Constantinople and would continue more or less uninterrupted until 1453 AD when the Byzantine empire fell to the Ottoman, Muhammad the Conqueror. Rome did not fall with a crash when the last emperor (Romulus Augustus) was deposed. Unfortunately, pigeonholing history is not all that simple. Ancient is used to separate time periods before the fall of Rome (traditional date 476 AD) and later which are termed medieval and modern. Paragraphs below and on following pages will consider Greek & Roman. This site has been named "Ancient Greek & Roman Coins". Perhaps this page will facilitate communications by leveling the playing field. Much of this material will seem obvious to most collectors but my mail suggests that there is a great variety of backgrounds of people newly interested in ancient coins. In most cases, only the first presentation of a term has been highlighted. Some explanations of the needed vocabulary are too extensive to repeat on this page so readers are encouraged to visit these additional pages. Words defined in more detail on other pages of this site will show hyperlinks. Words considered significant will be presented in bold type. The purpose of this list is assisting the students' understanding not the simple memorization of an alphabetical vocabulary list. The order will be somewhat random as they occur on our examples. We will present terms needed to describe coins by showing examples that illustrate those words. This series of pages will attempt to correct this problem. While some attempt has been made to do this in comprehensible English, it has been necessary to use a specialized vocabulary that might not be understood fully by every person. This site has been dedicated to the spreading of the 'word' on ancient coins. Tell me which ones you like.įinally, if anyone knows enough Javvascrippt to make a little program (call it " Coino!") that generatomates coinages of this sort, I would be burstulating with apprecimations.Ancient Coin Vocabulary Describing Ancient Coins The Vocabulary of Classical Numismatics All suggestions (use form below) will be addendled to the databasery, and you will be creditickled for your efforts.Įve Sedgwick thought of 'glimmle', so let it be to little-god glimmle (not to be confused with 'Flubber') that this page is dedicated.Īnother thing: spread these words around and see what happens. Here are some that the Victorians came up with and a bunch that have poppled out of my head. Coinages that have appreciable semantic weight are a little more difficult. It's very easy to come up with texture-word coinages by cut-n-pasting across sound-categories ( gribble, ribber, mibble, etc.). Perhaps reference to orthodox linguistics could help in that regard. Words like galumphing and snicker-snack evoke textures through sound-plays I'm not quite sure how to categorize. Coinages like gimble, mimsy, and burble may be semantically based on " gimlet," " lithe and miserable," and bubble, but the sound of the coinages multiplies and troubles potential meanings as an effect of texture.Īlthough I've highlighted some of the texture-words here constructed out of the rules I've been following with regard to my 'INTEXT' tables, the fact is that this poem makes those rules seem quite minor. As I've suggested in my Introduction to this project, texture-words (the ones that obey rules I can identify) tend to have a certain fuzzy-doubling at their heart, which results in incomplete referentiality and fuzziness of meaning. In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty Dumpty gives explanations of the coinages here, including the by-now standard definition of the 'portmanteau' coinage: "two meanings packed up into one word." In fact, this definition doesn't do justice to the coinages in Carroll's own poem, which play on the instability inherent in texture-words (even 'real' ones). One, two! One, two! And through and through The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Perhaps the most successful and mucky example of texture-word coinage is Lewis Carroll's poem " Jabberwocky," which everyone knows, but which I'll insert here just for refreshment: We see "toddle" in an Eliot novel - is it a word? "Gabble"? Did these ever become institutionally-accepted words, and when did they if they did? Texture-words, I think, tend to be more easily coin-able than other kinds of words, because of the fuzzy interchangeability of their sound and appearance that I hope my 'INTEXTs' demonstrate. If Dickens makes up a word and it sticks because it describes a useful texture, then it becomes part of the language.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |