I’m going through A First Latin Course by Scott and Jones and will post any questions that I have about it in this thread.
There is a Latin saying to memorize in Caput quartum: “Homo trium litterarum – FUR.” Just a couple of days ago I also ran into the same saying in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “A fault that every writer finds, as I do now, and yet faulty themselves, trium literarum homines, all thieves.” For some reason it stuck out to me.
Literally, I read it as “A man of three letters – a thief (=FUR)”. But that seems a little too banal. Is it a joke about their illiteracy? Or is fur such a bad insult that it needs the euphemism?
I have never thought these Geflügelte Worte (or ἔπεα πτερόεντα) would have more than the two dimensions: someone who knows only three letters and someone who in himself is written with three letters (there’s also uir of course). It may also tell something about a relatively literate culture, when a word is pictured in letters. The opposite is homo multarum litterarum, a well-read man—which can also be used as a derogatory comment on someone who writes too lengthily. Make a difference between littera “letter (of alphabet)” and plurale tantum litterae “letter, epistle”.
It’s a tag from Plautus’ Aulularia (a heist comedy), which evidently caught on with English elites who favored the coyness of allusive Latin tags over plain speaking. Presumably they had read the play as schoolboys, unless they adopted it at second hand—a meme?
I guess Burton’s referring to plagiarism, which Greeks and Romans called theft (κλοπή, furtum).
“Castrant alios ut libros suos per se graciles alieno adipe suffarciant (so Jovius inveighs): they lard their lean books with the fat of others’ works. Ineruditi fures, etc.”
Burton removes the mixed metaphor for decency’s sake, I suppose. And now I see how the trium literarum homines explains and reinforces ineruditi fures. (I take it that literarum is a misspelling or misprint?)
Apparently spelling litera is common in manuscripts. I’ve little knowledge on Renaissance Latin, but it’s not surprising. Galilei’s work is called Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger), a pope’s name is Bonifa_t_ius (Good-doer), and sky/heaven is quite generally coelum (correctly caelum). They didn’t make these distinctions in pronunciation (ci and ti were both [tʃi], ae and oe and e [e]/[ε]), and I doubt they were able to distinguish between [littera] and [litera], which is why it didn’t matter (at least once the mix-up had occurred and the wrong form had become current).
This one is actually a bit stranger. Italian, unlike other Romance languages, does distinguish double and single vowels*, and even today the contemporary word is “Letteratura”. So I don’t know what got into them to write litera.
Thanks for calling attention to that! You are of course right. It would be interesting to see if there was a correlation — I would seriously bet that there would be — between the place of origin of the scribe or scholar and his tendency to fall for this particular mistake.
In Romance studies the Romance dialects are sometimes divided into two major dialect groups by drawing the border somewhere near the central Italy. I wouldn’t be surprised, for instance, if northern Italian languages (like Venetian) formed their plural with -s (originally Latin acc. pl.) where Tuscan forms it with -i or -e. (Though I have the feeling that despite Dante modern Florentine doesn’t quite tally with modern standard Italian; I’m sure I’ve heard e.g. altra hosa and hoha-hola.)
Väänänen writes that ‘seuls l’italien du Centre et du Midi et le sarde ont maintenu les géminées’. They’ve thus been simplified also in Romanian, and so we have Rm. vacă, Fr. vache, Sp.&Prt. vaca, but It. vacca and Logudorese bacca.
After reading the ossa thread, I listened to an episode of “Latin Lover” on Vatican radio. At the end he said that “plagiarism” is a Greek word – the earliest Latin I could find for it was a 17th century dissertation on “Plagio Literario” – and he said that the classical Latin for plagiarisms would have been “sunt furta litteraria – literary robberies.” So furtum, just as mwh said.
I think that “plagio/plagiarism” must have come from Greek πλαγιάζειν, to turn sideways, for which the LSJ cites Plutarch “πλ. ἢ φωνὴν ἢ πρᾶξιν.” Old editions of the LSJ had “to adapt them to circumstances,” for that quote, which fits plagiarism well, but the 9th has the same quote under “lead astray/pervert/(abs.) use torturous methods,” and translates only the last part of the sentence, “in word or deed,” which doesn’t quite fit with any of the three glosses in the section. The Loeb has “οἷον ἐκτρεπομένου καὶ πλαγιάζοντος ἢ φωνὴν ἢ πρᾶξιν” and translates “one who is turned from his course and veers to and fro either in word or deed.”
The word plagiarius is already in Cicero, meaning “kidnapper”. Martial uses it in the modern sense “plagiarist”.The derivation is from plăga meaning both “open expanse” and “net, web”, cf. retiarius “gladiator with net” (< rete “net”). (This is to be distinguished from plāga “a blow”, probably borrowed from Greek πληγή (Doric πλαγά), if not a Latin formation from plangere.)
Notice that Plagio Literario isn’t in the nominative case.
I hesitate to disagree with Timothée on such matters, but surely the Latin words are not derived from plaga but from Greek πλάγιος. We have to remember that words change their meaning and application over time and place and language, and we should distinguish the word from the idea. Theft is theft; Greeks and Romans had a strong sense of intellectual property. Interesting interface or interpenetration with the concept of aemulatio, imitation/allusion/intertextuality.
Two quotes comes to mind: Vergil saying it was easier to steal Hercules’ club than to steal a line from Homer, and Donald Trump saying “Michelle Obama gives a speech. And everyone loves it, it’s fantastic. They think she’s absolutely great. My wife Melania gives the exact same speech. And people get on her case. And I don’t get it. I don’t know why.”
You’re in good company, as messieurs Ernout & Meillet think so, though they do say that it’s borrowed from πλάγιον, which is strange as according to the LS is a ‘technical term of uncertain meaning’. But to me the derivation seems quite clear:
plăga “net (used by hunters to catch game), trap” plăgium “the netting of game; kidnapping” plăgiārius “a kidnapper; (transf.) plagiarist”
Besides, we have that rētiārius, which must have provided a model for derivation. It has to be added, though, that we have also a rare adjective plăgiusa um (with the Greek meaning “placed sideways”) which was indeed borrowed from πλάγιος α ον, which in its turn may easily have caused some interference and mixing up.
Now that I look at the OLD you’re obviously right about the etymology of “plagiarism.” The modern use of the word presumably derives from Martial (1.52, cited by OLD). Martial speaks of his books (i.e. his poems) being appropriated by another poet, who acts as if he’s their dominus when in fact Martial “manumitted” (= freed) them, meos manuque missos (a pun). Martial styles him a “kidnapper” (plagiarius) who should be publicly shamed. The next epigram reverts to plain speaking, with accusation of furtum by a fur who put out a book of Martial’s poems as his own.
The matter was only a springboard for the rest of my post, on the concept rather than the word. (And it was a golden opportunity to quote Trump’s only good joke—if it was a joke.)