Thursday, December 26, 2013

Reticaudicem Habemus (we have a blog!)

Hello World.

I have made this blog, basically as a place to air my thoughts and make more public what I happen to be working on.

I have a variety of interests, including but not limited to languages (particularly English and Latin, but also Greek, Italian, German, Spanish and others), etymology, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. I plan to write about each of these, though I suspect, at least at first, that I will have much of philosophy, particularly critiques of arguments for god's existence.

I myself have been an agnostic atheist for quite some time, and have for several years been interested in apologetics. Particularly, I have found the articulated and outspoken debates of Dr. William Lane Craig very informative, as to the arguments for god's existence and their defenses. I have since learned about other proponents of philosophical theism, and have become especially interested in the project of natural theology. I hope to interact with these arguments in upcoming posts.

In addition to this, I plan to give some of my musings on more general philosophy, as well as possibly some social and academic issues. However, there is much in the way of non-philosophy I also plan to give, such as some amateur work in mathematics.

Lastly, but importantly, there is much I have written in Latin that I hope to make public. Recently, I have become very interested in writing Latin translations of works in English. My main projects have been writing a translation of JRR Tolkein's The Hobbit (before I learned someone beat me to it, and before Peter Jackson decided to make a new trilogy out of it. I know, I'm such a hipster ). My other area of interest in translating has been poetry and song. Recently, I have translated several works of Dr. Seuss (though someone also beat me to that idea): I hope to post several translations over time, and hopefully add more.

Finally to explain the name of this blog: the name derives from the greek roots ὐπερ- (hyper-), a prefix meaning "over" or "excessive", and φρονειν (phronein) a verb meaning "to think". Thus, it translates to "over-thinking," which some would consider apt to describe me. Alternately, it can be translated to mean "beyond-thinking" or "super-thinking", which is a bit more complimentary.

P.S. As to the name of this post, I have attempted to bring some modernity to the Latin language. Others have proposed words for "blog" in Latin, such as blogis for "a blog" and blogire for "to blog". If I were to propose some words of this sort, I would opt for blogum for "a blog" and blogere for "to blog". However, to keep it more etymologically neat, I have opted for reticaudex, "net-notebook" (incidentally, caudex seems an apt translation of "logbook", as it can be translated both as "notebook" and as "tree trunk").
As for the verb, it seems there are several options: scribere in reticaudice "to write in a blog" is the most plainspoken way to phrase it , or scribere in interrete "to write in the internet". However, we may offer some contracted forms, such as retiscribere, or even (though hardly Latin-sounding) retscribere "to net-write". On the other hand, we may opt for simply introducing the adverb interretie "online" and say interretie scribere. I would be very averse for turning the noun itself into a verb and writing anything like reticaudicere, even if it is rather neat sounding.

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