mlinssen wrote: ↑Fri Oct 30, 2020 12:47 amThen it splits into two different applications: one fluid(ish) and wet / moist (butter or cheese), and one fixed and dry (leaven). Don't have in mind our solid yellow cheeses, but more the Greek feta
(Just to be clear, clabber is not "fixed and dry." It can be almost like a cheese. It can also be soupy and lumpy or creamy and spoonable almost like mayonnaise. The consistency is not what makes it clabbered milk.)
In the line of your previous reasoning: had Thomas wanted to use
leaven he could have used
https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C4778, ⲑⲁⲃ, or
https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C1098, ⲕⲱⲃ
And milk would be
https://coptic-dictionary.org/entry.cgi?tla=C708, ⲉⲣⲱⲧⲉ just like you said. Knowing Thomas there are additional parameters to his words of choice such as sound, likeness to others, and combined heritage (CITE COTE CATE for example), but let's assume that this very word here was picked for its meaning alone, or at least mostly - especially giving his metamorphosis model of change between starkly contrasting begin and end states, and the fact that this logion narrates about exactly such a process.
It is an agent of some kind, although I think that everyone agrees on that....
I agree, and well put. It definitely looks like an agent. What do you think it is "
agens" (= Latin for "doing") in the saying?
Well that and all the Coptic scholars who translated the text, as well as the pretentious opportunistic one-time only supposed Coptic scholars like Gathercole and DeConick, who know diddly of Coptic and demonstrate that at length with their transcription and interpretation of Thomas
What do you think motivates people who have no expertise in Coptic to give such seemingly authoritative yet misguided interpretations of a text like Thomas? Is it just some kind of incentivizing in the academy, or what does one stand to gain by it?
mlinssen wrote: ↑Thu Oct 29, 2020 7:59 amGathercole, like Deconick, has little understanding of Coptic, if any. He has 12 transcription errors in his book, still better than the dozens that others have. April starts her booklet with misspelling the word
hidden in the prologue, she has a ⲧ where it says ⲡ.
Transcription errors can be frustrating. How many transcription errors does Crum have? You and I found one similar kind of error already (ⲥⲁⲉⲓⲣⲉ for ⲥⲁⲓⲣⲉ). Are there others? If so, roughly how many? A lot or a little? Better or worse than Gathercole?
And then there is Westendorf, clubbing together, as you pointed out, spelling variants that Crum had kept separate. What do you make of that? (I neither know Coptic nor am very familiar with Coptic studies; I know the big names and many of their conclusions, of course, but am not in much of a position to properly evaluate their work.)
You know, what is interesting is that the spelling variant in Thomas exactly matches only one other instance (so far):
- Summary Thus Far.png (41.22 KiB) Viewed 8143 times
The only perfect match is in 1 Samuel 17.18, where it is translating a word that means "cheese."
What if, then, the variant ⲥⲁⲉⲓⲣ simply means cheese? Something just beyond curds. I had thought before that perhaps butter was a viable option, but the results above have perhaps pointed in another direction. Perhaps the woman is tucking cheese into her dough. What do you think of that?
ETA: I know it is just an editable online resource, but Wiktionary appears to condone this viewpoint: