In my reader there is a saying that goes like this; κόπος κόπον λύει
I think I get the drift but I am not sure.
Toil dissolves toil.
In other words doing the toil now prevents hardship later. Is that right?
kopos kopon luei
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Hmm... I'm not too sure about your translation Thomas... luw is normally only translated as save when talking about saving persons. Destroy or dissolve don't sound as good of course ...
Not sure what it means exactly though, maybe it's as Thomas said, you work now and save doing work later, but I'm not sure, I mean it depends on the context. It could be like that, but my guess is that this is a play on words, that is the word kopos has two meanings and both are used in this sentence.
kopos means:
a) tiredness
b) work/toil
so 'tiredness destroys work', as you can't toil or work when you're tired.
Not sure what it means exactly though, maybe it's as Thomas said, you work now and save doing work later, but I'm not sure, I mean it depends on the context. It could be like that, but my guess is that this is a play on words, that is the word kopos has two meanings and both are used in this sentence.
kopos means:
a) tiredness
b) work/toil
so 'tiredness destroys work', as you can't toil or work when you're tired.
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ah... I thought you were trying to give an exact translation in your second post... I didn't realise you were just trying to make the meaning of the sentence more clear . I understand what you mean and as I said I don't actually know what the meaning of this ancient Greek proverb is for sure. Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
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The boy who wrote this proverb was describing the drudgery of doing math repetitions, learning the multiplication tables etc.Emma_85 wrote:Hmmm... what exactly is the context?
Then he says κόπος κόπον λύει
I didn't go into the context because I thought that this might be a well known proverb. Oops.