{"id":132,"date":"2003-10-31T12:55:33","date_gmt":"2003-10-31T16:55:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/10\/31\/abundancy\/"},"modified":"2003-10-31T12:55:33","modified_gmt":"2003-10-31T16:55:33","slug":"abundancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/2003\/10\/31\/abundancy\/","title":{"rendered":"abundancy"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Peter Abelard sez of Heloise: “Que cum per faciem non esset infima, per habundantiam litterarum erat suprema.” [She was hot, and also supreme in abundance of letters.  -d]<\/p>\n

I find his misspelling “habundantiam” interesting. It pretty much means that he’s no longer seeing the metaphor in the verb abundare<\/i> – since unda<\/i> means wave, this verb is literally something like “overflow” – the image, to me, is of waves spilling out. But nobody spells ab<\/i>, “from”, as hab<\/i>, not even Abelard. So it looks to me like he’s probably not hip to the metaphor.<\/p>\n

Hidden metaphors like this were so cool to me when I was first learning Spanish. They say “sobrevenir” for “overcome”. How crazy is that?!<\/i><\/p>\n

And it’s not just word-to-word correspondences like that – where Latin has the verb convenire<\/i>, the source of our “convenient”, we use the expression “everything’s coming together nicely” and the like.<\/p>\n

Some might say this sort of thing hints at universal structures in the human mind. Others might excoriate them for drawing such broad conclusions based on only a few Indo-European languages. The former parties would no doubt agree that to be a problem, and would then have to look into the current research, or learn more languages, or both.<\/p>\n

Now let’s all think about the metaphor in “inundate”!<\/p>\n

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Peter Abelard sez of Heloise: “Que cum per faciem non esset infima, per habundantiam litterarum erat suprema.” [She was hot, and also supreme in abundance of letters.  -d] I find his misspelling “habundantiam” interesting. It pretty much means that he’s no longer seeing the metaphor in the verb abundare – since unda means wave, this verb […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/desultor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}