Knitting -- alterations

Some of you may not have been able to unsee the Fair Isle jumper I made with scraps (although I did get a compliment on it from a fellow knitter in a grocery store). 

Well, if you saw the Celtic braid sweater, you know that the sleeves were longer than the body. 

I like it that way. They come down well over my wrists and keep my arms warmer. But with the Fair Isle, I kept the sleeve and body patterns coordinated.

Then I didn't feel warm enough in it.

So here's where the alterations come in. I worked a circular needle into the bottom stitches of one part of the sleeve, unpicked the top of the next lower section, worked an additional motif into it, and knit the two parts of the sleeve back together. Here's a photo showing the circular holder worked into the sleeve.

I did this twice for each sleeve, once at the top of the black section, and once at the top of the darkest gray section. Having those different colors on either side of the dividing line made it easy to pick the sleeve apart.

And here's the reknitted black section.

One important tip. When you knit the sleeve back together, you are going to turn inside out the part of the sleeve with the holder. You're going to stick the other part inside so that right sides are together. Now the stitches on that holder are going to be twisted, but the stitches on the needles are going to be untwisted. When you knit each of two stitches together, you have to put your needle through the back loop of the twisted stitch on the holder, and through the front loop of the stitch from the other part of the sleeve, because this second stitch is NOT twisted. Knit them together, pull them both off, and then bring the previous stitch over.

So now the top part of each sleeve with the lightest gray is the same as it was, it still doesn't have that circular motif. But the sleeves are as long as I want them now, and I don't have any more of the pumpkin colored yarn, nor am I going to buy any.

Because I still have lots of scraps. I mean, I still have 18 yards of that light yellow. Since you get about 1/3 as many yards of actual stitches as you have yarn, there's 6 yards of yellow stitches. Since I size things for a 40 inch body, that's a little over 5 rounds of stitches. It would make nice sparkles, maybe two rounds each on body and sleeves. I have 25 yards of the darker yellow, or about 8 yards of stitches, or 7 rounds of stitches. So there's another Fair Isle scrap jumper in my future, without buying more yarn. 

And here's the altered jumper. 

Moral of the story: DO YOUR MATH. It won't keep you from overbuying, because it's nearly impossible to buy only the amount of yarn you need, you would have to design to the amount of yarn you're buying. BUT it will ensure that you don't have to alter something because you knitted to the wrong measurements.

21st Century Classical Greek -- where does the negation go?

I have more conditionals for you ahead, as well as posts about negation drumming into you that Goodwin’s material is in part incomplete and in part inaccurate. I am also going to blast through “final” and “purpose” clauses, reducing about a dozen pages in Goodwin to an objective statement that is shorter than some paragraphs.

Book I section 17. You should know most of the words here. Ef’ is epi; learn it.

τύραννοί τε ὅσοι ἦσαν ἐν ταῖς Ἑλληνικαῖς πόλεσι,τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν μόνον προορώμενοι ἔς τε τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἐς τὸ τὸν ἴδιον οἶκον αὔξειν δι᾽ ἀσφαλείας ὅσον ἐδύναντο μάλιστα τὰς πόλεις ᾤκουν, ἐπράχθη δὲ οὐδὲν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν ἔργον ἀξιόλογον, εἰ μὴ εἴ τι πρὸς περιοίκους τοὺς αὐτῶν ἑκάστοις: οἱ γὰρ ἐν Σικελίᾳ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐχώρησαν δυνάμεως. οὕτω πανταχόθεν ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον κατείχετο μήτε κοινῇ φανερὸν μηδὲν κατεργάζεσθαι, κατὰ πόλεις τε ἀτολμοτέρα εἶναι.

Ei mi ei is not a conditional. It’s an idiom meaning “except for”, meaning that except for fighting their border wars, the tyrants didn’t do anything notable except enrich themselves and their families.

Eprakhthi comes from prasso, which does some weird things. For example, you can see here that in the passive, instead of the sigma marker of the imperfective, it’s theta in the eventive, but it’s still sigma in the conceptual. See White, page 241, section 770. In the executive, however, the two sigmas become ksi. In the progressive eventive, the sigmas become taus.

The difference between prasso and poieo is the idea of experience. You use prasso not just for the experience of the Persian war, but also in practicing a trade; it is used of practicing bribery as well.

Jowett inserts “nor” at the start of his translation that is not supported in the Greek. Thucydides says the tyrants attended to their and their families’ needs “alone”, monon. By inserting this negation, Jowett discredits the word substitution he did in section 16. Thucydides ends the phrase with malista tas poleis okoun, “mostly the cities they inhabited,” which Jowett ignores.

Jowett’s insertion of “ever” following this is also not supported in the Greek. He tranposes wording in the last sentence.

In the last line notice mite koini. Previously I called out oudeis ksunesti as a negation of an action that specified joint operations, instead of a negation of the jointness of an action. Here we have a negation of jointness, and that alone is enough to give it the “partitive” sense inherent in mi. I’ll say more about this in a month or so.

One thing this example does is nail down that the negation always appears close to what it negates. I wrote about a year ago, about negation of an adverb that Jowett attributed to the verb, producing the wrong nuance compared to what Thucydides meant. Here we see that Mr. T felt he could not use a negation and have it apply to both the adjective and verb, he had to negate both. So read carefully and don’t just assume, as Jowett consistently does, that moving the negation to where English wants it says the same thing as Thucydides meant. Jowett writes “Grenglish”.

Fact-Checking the Torah -- the ants

I am constantly impressed by how much contact Talmudic rabbis had with agriculture and their environment. A statement in Mishnah Kilayim 1:4 declaring peaches and almonds to be prohibited (the planting them together) turns out to be logical, because almonds are drupes like peaches, not true nuts like hickories, and the almond is analogous to the kernel inside a peach seed shell, the one that is supposed to dose you with laetrile (although that is not clinically supported as a cancer preventative).

It's logical because they didn't have seed stores back in those days, they had to breed their own seeds. Hybrid plants and animals are not self-reproducing in most cases; the number of female mules that are fertile is tiny. Ancient people needed to preserve reproductive capacity in domesticated plants and animals. The way to do that, was to plant in separate blocks. So there's a practical basis to the laws of kilayim that we are oblivious to because we have over a century of experience with hybrids -- which won't do us any good in a true SHTF situation because the hybrid seeds that are left will produce exactly one crop and then the only people who will eat are those preserving open-pollinated plants for seed. (rant over)

So I was listening to Babylonian Talmud Moed Katan 6b and they are talking about how to kill ants. Which is to get some soil from at least a parasang away and put it in the holes of the ants you want to kill.

This works for two reasons, one of which is stated in the gemara: ants are fiercely territorial as well as everywhere, and the soil you put in the holes likely contains ants. The strangers and natives will fight each other to the death.

The second reason is one that could only be discovered after the microscope was invented and we found out about microbes. See this paper, which suggests that ant colonies modify the soil they live in. Soil from another colony or another place will have a different microbial population. It provokes an immune response in the ants. Between the battle with the strangers and the induced disease, you can succeed in wiping out a nest.

So now let's look at Exodus 21:35, "a man's ox pushing another person's ox." I'm sure you all think I am mistranslating and I mean "goring," but that's in verses 28-32. Here the verb is not nogach but nogaf, pushing. What's the difference? Cattle push each other in a dominance display. All social animals have dominance displays. The difference is that pushing is not supposed to cause death, but stuff happens. 

But a goring ox is using its horns, and the owner is put on notice to keep it locked up. If he fails, he's in serious trouble. He ought to be put to death with his ox but he can redeem himself by a fine.

Don't ignore those bits and pieces. Do your fact-checking, sure, But don't automatically assume that just because the material is one to three thousand years old, it's nonsense.

Gibbon -- the urban legend, pt. 6

So the big thing I showed last time is that when Gibbon gave only part of the citations about the Mithridatic war, he covered up evidence that undercut his chapter 2 claim that 150,000 Romans were destroyed by Mithridates. The number was given as 80,000 by Appian, but they were not all destroyed and they could have been Bithynians, not Roman legionaries. Mithridates' army was supposed to be 250,000 strong. The whole thing looks like one of those 10x exaggerations some historians warn about, all the more so as Sulla beat Mithridates with only 25,000 veteran Roman legionaries. 

Gibbon hides more inconvenient truth in Chapter VI when he praises the victory at Narva of Charles XII, but leaves out his defeat at Poltava, after which he was forced to flee and spent years in exile in Ottoman-ruled Moldavia.

In Chapter 6 we get three things.

a) Gibbon proves he didn't read Cassius Dio because he constantly gives the wrong section number and even claims that something is in Dio that I haven't been able to find.

b) He shows he believes that Ossian was genuine. In fact he died before people started writing that James MacPherson was the actual author. There are objective tests as to whether MacPherson composed that work or it was genuinely oral in origin, in Axel Olrik's 20th century work with oral narrative traditions. This is another in a long string of "OK Gibbon wouldn't have known this but we know it now so this part of what Gibbon wrote is irrelevant."

c) I have a long footnote about Julia Domna being an Arab the same as the emperor Philip, and about his "brigandage" being an urban legend invented by a bigoted Roman writer. If you can, read Glenn Bowersock. “Roman Arabia”. Cambridge, MA, US: Harvard University Press.  https://archive.org/details/romanarabia0000bowe/page/122/mode/2up

In this chapter, Gibbon begins to inveigh against eunuchs in Roman culture. Some chapters ahead, Gibbon will write about Narses who conquered Italy for Justinian, but he was not the only eunuch with military or other power: a eunuch named Rifq took Aleppo for the Muslims. There have been other eunuch generals throughout history, along with bodyguards, prime ministers, Sima Qian the historian, Origen, and some of the Mamluk slave-soldiers of Egypt. Gibbon sees eunuchs as something worse than slaves, but I think that's just because he can't think of them without feeling the knife being taken to his own flesh. You know what I mean.

'Tany rate, the soldiers decided they didn't like Elagabalus and turned to the last of the Severans, Severus Alexander. It was a bad choice. He debased the coinage again, and his troops suffered humiliating losses to the new Sassanid dynasty, the last non-Muslim dynasty of Persia. The Praetorians murdered his advisor, jurist Ulpian, and the Germans breached the line of fortresses along the Rhine and Danube. Alexander was also assassinated. Gibbon seems to believe he was an angel, despite letting his mother run things, but there was no stopping the setting of the Severan sun. 

From here on out, an emperor might as easily be a barbarian as an Italian, and the objections to Macrinus' non-senatorial rank seem very weak. But the fact is, the army was making the emperors, not the Senate, and the turnover was too fast for the senate to keep up with. All they had was resentment.

Toward the end of this chapter, Gibbon tries to show that he understands economics. He writes about internal taxes and customs, and inheritance taxes, and confiscations of the property when somebody wrote an "unjust" last will and testament. He never talks about inflation caused by debasement of the coinage, and how the revenue suffered because of it, leading to confiscatory practices by government. His main beef with confiscation is that it proves that Roman "liberty" was declining. Again, he fails to understand the paterfamilias concept; the emperor had the right to do whatever he deemed necessary so as to pay the troops who were supposed to be defending the Rhine and Danube. 

And of course, immediately after this chapter, we get into the consequences of the plague.

To the PDF

21st Century Classical Greek -- ei mi idiom

Book I section 17. You should know most of the words here. Ef’ is epi; learn it.

τύραννοί τε ὅσοι ἦσαν ἐν ταῖς Ἑλληνικαῖς πόλεσι,τὸ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτῶν μόνον προορώμενοι ἔς τε τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἐς τὸ τὸν ἴδιον οἶκον αὔξειν δι᾽ ἀσφαλείας ὅσον ἐδύναντο μάλιστα τὰς πόλεις ᾤκουν, ἐπράχθη δὲ οὐδὲν ἀπ᾽ αὐτῶν ἔργον ἀξιόλογον, εἰ μὴ εἴ τι πρὸς περιοίκους τοὺς αὐτῶν ἑκάστοις: οἱ γὰρ ἐν Σικελίᾳ ἐπὶ πλεῖστον ἐχώρησαν δυνάμεως. οὕτω πανταχόθεν ἡ Ἑλλὰς ἐπὶ πολὺν χρόνον κατείχετο μήτε κοινῇ φανερὸν μηδὲν κατεργάζεσθαι, κατὰ πόλεις τε ἀτολμοτέρα εἶναι.

Ei mi ei is not a conditional. It’s an idiom meaning “except for”, meaning that except for fighting their border wars, the tyrants didn’t do anything notable except enrich themselves and their families.

Eprakhthi comes from prasso, which does some weird things. For example, you can see here that in the passive, instead of the sigma marker of the imperfective, it’s theta in the eventive, but it’s still sigma in the conceptual. See White, page 241, section 770. In the executive, however, the two sigmas become ksi. In the progressive eventive, the sigmas become taus.

The difference between prasso and poieo is the idea of experience. You use prasso not just for the experience of the Persian war, but also in practicing a trade; it is used of practicing bribery as well.

Spend the rest of this week going over this section and making sure you can trace the grammar back to prior lessons.

 

Knitting -- scraps

So I dragged out a box of leftover fingering weight yarn and made five pairs of socks, and still had leftovers. Just not enough leftovers in each color to be sure I could make one-color socks.

But I had some coordinating and some contrasting colors, and here is the result.

The pattern is, use the contrasting color and the slingshot cast on for 12 stitches per needle. Increase to a total of 30 stitches per needle.  (18 rounds)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4hhxKrylOs

Add on the main color and split the 30 stitches on one needle onto two DPs. These will be used for your heel. My size is 7 1/2 so I knitted 51 rounds for the foot. 

Then I added in the contrasting color again and worked the short row heel. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZahZE4GREr0

Note that she splits the heel stitches into 3 sets, so only 10 stitches on each heel needle will get wrapped and then knit up into the gusset. The middle 10 stitches (5 per needle) remain stable the entire length of the heel, which is 40 rows, 20 under the heel and 20 behind the heel. When I did the last purl row and wrapped the end stitch on the instep, I switched back to the main color and knitted a round, flipping the wraps to the back as the video shows.

This puts me at the ankle; I knitted to round 8 in which I increased 8 stitches, and another 8 in round 17. Then I knitted the cuff as k2/p2 rib.

When you have doubts whether you have enough yarn to make a whole pair of socks it helps to have some spare needles. You use a 32 or 40 inch circular needle to work the toe, and DPs to work the rest of the sock. You should also have a 12 or 16 inch circular somewhere, which you normally use to knit sleeves and ribbed necks. Knit the sock to the end of the ankle. Now knit half of the ribbed cuff, if you think you have enough to work the other sock to the same point.

Start the other sock and knit to the same point. If you think you have yarn for 10 more rounds apiece, do that, and so on. To do this, you may have to find the inside of the first skein and use it up from both ends, but at least you won't wind up with socks with two different length cuffs. The maximum rounds in the cuff will be 39 plus the knit-off round. 

And of course with small amounts of scraps, you can work the foot and top of these socks using Fair Isle patterns, stripes, small checkerboards, etc.

There are about 222 yards of yarn in a skein of Cotton Fine. If you buy one skein of the contrasting or coordinating color, you can probably work 20 heel and toe sets so you would get 10 pairs of socks out of 10 skeins of Cotton Fine. YMMV depending on your shoe size.

If you do this with worsted weight yarn, cast on 10 stitches per needle for the toe and increase to 20 stitches per needle (20 rounds), then knit 45 rounds in the foot. The heel will be a little difficult; 20/3 is 6 with 2 extra stitches. Work your wraps over the outside 7 stitches with the center 6 stitches (3 on each heel needle) stable. Work 15 rounds in the ankle, increasing in round 7 and 15, and make the cuff 40 rounds high. 

These stitch counts should also work for DK/sport yarn; try one and if it's too tight, unravel and use the fingering stitch counts.

So here is another reason for not throwing away leftovers, even if you don't have enough to knit a top-down raglan jumper.

21st Century Classical Greek -- pros

Book I section 16. This is a shortie and I have a preposition for you to learn.

ἐπεγένετο δὲ ἄλλοις τε ἄλλοθι κωλύματα μὴ αὐξηθῆναι, καὶ Ἴωσι προχωρησάντων ἐπὶ μέγα τῶν πραγμάτων Κῦρος καὶ ἡ Περσικὴ βασιλεία Κροῖσον καθελοῦσα καὶ ὅσα ἐντὸς Ἅλυος ποταμοῦ πρὸς θάλασσαν ἐπεστράτευσε καὶ τὰς ἐν τῇ ἠπείρῳ πόλεις ἐδούλωσε, Δαρεῖός τε ὕστερον τῷ Φοινίκων ναυτικῷ κρατῶν καὶ τὰς νήσους.

Learn the preposition pros which is used with all the oblique cases. 

You saw it in 10.5 with the -ous case meaning “in relation to”.

[5] πρὸς τὰς μεγίστας δ᾽ οὖν καὶ ἐλαχίστας ναῦς τὸ μέσον σκοποῦντι οὐ πολλοὶ φαίνονται ἐλθόντες, ὡς ἀπὸ πάσης τῆς Ἑλλάδος κοινῇ πεμπόμενοι.

In 11.1, it mean “to turn to” farming to support the besiegers of Troy:

αἴτιον δ᾽ ἦν οὐχ ἡ ὀλιγανθρωπία τοσοῦτον ὅσον ἡ ἀχρηματία. τῆς γὰρ τροφῆς ἀπορίᾳ τόν τε στρατὸν ἐλάσσω ἤγαγον καὶ ὅσον ἤλπιζον αὐτόθεν πολεμοῦντα βιοτεύσειν, ἐπειδὴ δὲ ἀφικόμενοι μάχῃ ἐκράτησαν (δῆλον δέ: τὸ γὰρ ἔρυμα τῷ στρατοπέδῳ οὐκ ἂν ἐτειχίσαντο), φαίνονται δ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἐνταῦθα πάσῃ τῇ δυνάμει χρησάμενοι, ἀλλὰ πρὸς γεωργίαν τῆς Χερσονήσου τραπόμενοι καὶ λῃστείαν τῆς τροφῆς ἀπορίᾳ. ᾗ καὶ μᾶλλον οἱ Τρῶες αὐτῶν διεσπαρμένων τὰ δέκα ἔτη ἀντεῖχον βίᾳ, τοῖς αἰεὶ ὑπολειπομένοις ἀντίπαλοι ὄντες. 

In 13.4, it meant “against”.

ναυμαχία τε παλαιτάτη ὧν ἴσμεν γίγνεται Κορινθίων πρὸς Κερκυραίους: ἔτη δὲ μάλιστα καὶ ταύτῃ ἑξήκοντα καὶ διακόσιά ἐστι μέχρι τοῦ αὐτοῦ χρόνου.

In 15.2 we had two examples with the -ous case, again meaning “against”.

κατὰ γῆν δὲ πόλεμος, ὅθεν τις καὶ δύναμις παρεγένετο, οὐδεὶς ξυνέστη: πάντες δὲ ἦσαν, ὅσοι καὶ ἐγένοντο, πρὸς ὁμόρους τοὺς σφετέρους ἑκάστοις, καὶ ἐκδήμους στρατείας πολὺ ἀπὸ τῆς ἑαυτῶν ἐπ᾽ ἄλλων καταστροφῇ οὐκ ἐξῇσαν οἱ Ἕλληνες. οὐ γὰρ ξυνειστήκεσαν πρὸς τὰς μεγίστας πόλεις ὑπήκοοι, οὐδ᾽ αὖ αὐτοὶ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης κοινὰς στρατείας ἐποιοῦντο, κατ᾽ ἀλλήλους δὲ μᾶλλον ὡς ἕκαστοι οἱ ἀστυγείτονες ἐπολέμουν.