isthic esse = il y a, es gibt, hay, there are...?

Latin Learning Latin
1

Salvete,

I am reading some of Erasmus’s letters, and I came across an interesting expression that I do not feel like I’ve seen before in Latin. In Epistle 1274 (Allen, Vol. 5), Erasmus writes:

Sed utinam mihi liceat coram tuis amicissimis monitis erudiri, et ad exactissimi iudicii tui regulam attemperare stilum! Miror isthic esse aut adeo stultos aut tam impudenter mendaces, qui me praedicent fautorem esse Luthero.

My interpretation of the key part: I am surprised that there are people either so stupid or such impudent liars…

isthic (also istic) seems like it would normally refer to a specific location or place recently mentioned, or soon-to-be mentioned in the discourse. There seems to be no such context in this piece of Erasmus. Could he have just said Miror esse with the same effect? Why include isthic?

This caught my eye because I have always wanted there to be in Latin a similar expression to the il y a of French, the hay of Spanish, the es gibt of German, and the there are of English. Elsewhere, like in Virgil when he is about to give you a description of a place (est locus…), I know that Latin may use simply est/sunt, frequently placed at the beginning of a sentence, to express this “existential” idea.

Any thoughts?

Valete.

2

I think isthic has its normal meaning and actually refers to a place. Since it is a letter, I would assume that their respective locations were known to both parties involved.

3

I doubt Erasmus of all people would commit such a barbarism. I have no problem with istic in the context of a letter that is sent to another location. I believe Cicero does that in his letters.

4

Ah, of course.

I had forgotten about the simple and obvious fact that this is a letter - specifically that he is having a conversation with someone who is in a different place… and therefore that he would use words like isthic to talk about specific locations, whether he’s talking about where he is or where his correspondent is (in this case, Louis Coronel).

Thanks for the clarification.

5

Or, as you would put in English,

“that there there are”

Heh.