Guidacerius' Pronoun Porridge (from FB)

Since we're on the topic of Christian Hebraism, this is the title page of a Latin translation of R. David Kimchi's Michlol, the most authoritative Hebrew grammar of the medieval period:

The translation was done in 1540 by one Agathius Guidacerius, an Italian scholar who was appointed by King Francis I himself as one of the "lecteurs royaux" at the College de France (at that time it was just called the College des lecteurs royaux). Although he describes himself below in Latin as a professor of "sacred theology" (more on that below) at the university, a document in the Archives Nationales describes him as one of the "lecteurs en hebraic". A page in he further qualifies himself as the "royal lecturer in sacred theology in the original language". Fair enough.

I dare any Hebrew reader to make sense of the Hebrew title without looking at the Latin. I certainly could not! It took me a couple of looks at the Latin and then back at the Hebrew to understand what on earth this guy is talking about when he writes that this is the book אשר בו אותה כולה מלמד ומשלם!

Well, my friends, let me break it down for you. The full title reads:

ספר מכלול הדקדוק לשון הקודש ר' דוד קמחי אשר בו אותה כלה מלמד ומשלם: על ידי אגאתיו הקורא במצות המלך אלהית המקרא בישיבת פריץ

A one-to-one correspondence of the first line, preserving the word order, would be:

"The book mikhlol [lit. completion or perfection] of the grammar of the sacred tongue R. David Kimchi that in it it entire it teaches and pays."

Wow! What?! "That in it it entire it teaches and pays"?? Well, in Latin this reads: quo eam integram docet et absoluit. Why does this help? Because in Latin one expects pronouns and their antecedents to occupy opposite ends of the same sentence and for pronouns to all be lumped together somewhere, each having several potential antecedents. So you understand that "eam integram" modifies "lingua" and so on. Also, there is no construct-state nesting to obscure the noun being modified. Now the Hebrew can be read as:

"The book mikhlol of the grammar of the sacred tongue R. David Kimchi in/by which it (the sacred tongue) entire he (R. David Kimchi) teaches and pays."

This almost makes sense, and a few adjustments will make a reasonable statement out of it. First, Guidacerius mistakenly uses משלם to mean "complete", as can be seen from the Latin absoluit, "he completes". Unfortunately, the root שלם only retains the sense of completion in other verb forms, so he really wants to say משלים. Second, he uses an inadmissible construct state (סמיכות) in which "R. David Kimchi" is supposed to be the last term (instead of the correct לר' דוד קמחי with a possessive lamed). Actually, he also uses an inadmissible "the" in הדקדוק, but ok. Taking those things into account and now putting it all into good English, we get:

"The book mikhlol of the grammar of the sacred tongue by R. David Kimchi, in which he teaches and completes the sacred tongue."

Some of the errors above are flat-out mistakes, like "pay" where he means "complete". But the most confusing part is the antecedent soup, which tells you more than anything else that this is a back-translation from Latin. This was great style in literary Latin, as in, for example, this infuriating line from Ovid's Metamorphoses:

Et liquidem spisso secrevit ab aere caelum

which, keeping close to the words, means:

"And liquid (or "clear") thick he separated from air heavens"

where "liquid" modifies "heavens" and "thick" modifies "air", giving:

"And he seperated the liquid heavens from the thick air".

U nfortunately, this is absolutely awful Hebrew, to the point of being ungrammatical. In a way, this is not unlike many of the Arabic locutions (such as מה for "a bit" or "some one") found in R. Shmuel ibn Tibbon's translations of works from Judaeo-Arabic into Hebrew, but it's so awkward and far from Hebrew intuition that it leaves the realm of intelligible writing.

Reading the Hebrew הקורא במצות המלך אלהית המקרא, one would think it means "reader, by the divine command of the king, of Bible" (in the British sense of "read", as in "reader of mathematics at Cambridge"). But that is clearly not the intent, as the Latin describes him as a professor sacrae Theologiae, sacred theology. He means, rather, that he is הקורא במצות המלך, the royal ("by command of the king") reader of אלהית המקרא, the divine [wisdom] of Scripture! He must be thinking that he can use אלהית, which means "divine", as an adjectival substantive meaning "divine [wisdom]" or "divine [knowledge]". This, too, is not idiomatic Hebrew, and follows the Latin theologia sacrae scripturae, "theology of the sacred writings", which can be abbreviated as theologia sacrae, with the adjective sacrae implying the noun scripturae. And so he is not, in fact, professor of "sacred theology", he is professor of the "theology of the sacred writings", and "royal lecturer in the theology of the sacred writings in their original language"!

But at the end of the day, what really gives me a chuckle is the Hebrew rendering of the university of Paris: ישיבת פריץ, the yeshiva of Paris! (Note the use of ץ for "s", as in Rashi's glosses.)