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At 8:02am on December 31, 2008, Laura Gibbs said…: Fantastic! That is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for (it's already quite bizarre that what might be the earliest attested usage of the word shows up in Avianus, of all sources - Aesop's fables rarely matter in a philological sense!). In the fable, "nola" as a small bell is exactly right... and what intrigues me about it as a Latin word is exactly the sense that it doesn't appear to be right at all, being altogether too much like a form of nolo, ha ha. The little joke about Clodia expresses that perfectly, ha ha. In cubiculo nola - I love it! Thank you! :-)

At 7:58pm on December 30, 2008, Laura Gibbs said…: That sounds like a fabulous project, Ann - and what fun to be able to put your Latin to someone else's benefit like that. Exciting!

I actually have a question about bells that maybe you can help me with - in Barlow's Aesop, the story about the dog who is given a bell to wear around his neck uses the word "nola" for the bell, and Avianus also says "nola" (although not everyone agrees on that reading in the ms.) - while other Latin versions have "tintinnabulum" - do you have a sense of when "nola" entered into Latin and at what point it can be said to rival tintinnabulum as the common word for bell...???

At 6:34pm on December 30, 2008, Laura Gibbs said…: Hi Ann!!! It's nice to meet up with you here, even if we are on different continents! (I didn't realize you lived in England!) - and WHAT A PROJECT - amazing! I had not heard of the book, so I Googled it, and it took me straight to Wikipedia, where I read this: "Besieged by the Turks, he invented machines to defend Famagusta against their attacks. When the island was conquered, Maggi was sent to the dungeons at Istanbul where, locked in chains, he wrote from memory two detailed treatises, De tintinnabulis, on bells and carillons, and the explicitly illustrated De equuleo, on torture devices." - It sounds like you should write a historical novel to go along with the treatise itself!!! WOW! :-)

Any Latin books you want to recommend...?: I'm just translating De Tintinnabulis, by Magius.

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