Knitting -- French/Breton sailor's jersey

They say this classic top would have stayed in the French navy without Coco Chanel to adapt it for her sportswear line. It was the start of the modern pattern. I've added a twist that will let you adapt old patterns calling for set-in sleeves.

Here's a vintage photo of real French sailors wearing their jerseys. You can see that it would be easy to work the sleeves like you do for Fair Isle: attach your yarn to the steeking and work the stripes around the arms without paying attention to the stripes on the body.

What Coco did was this:  

See how the stripes match? You're going to want to knit the sleeves, probably bottom up, making sure that from the armpits up, the stripes are positioned to match the body. Also notice that there's one last white stripe below the neck ribbing.

This may sound like a job for raglan but also notice that these are definitely set-in sleeves. 

What I did was -- wait for it -- raglan. I made faux set-in sleeves and I'll tell you how. You can use this technique on any pattern you have that calls for set-in sleeves, so that when you're done knitting, you're done.

Cable on 240 stitches in DK to a size 5 or 6 needle with a 24 inch tether.

Work 6 rows K1/P1 rib.

Make the stripes 4 rows high. End with a full stripe in either color.

At the underarms, put ten stitches each onto a holder.

Cable on 56 for the sleeve, work the rib, then work the number of rows you need to get to the armpit. End with a full stripe, the same color as on the body.

Start the next stripe in the other color. Add each sleeve to your main needle at the armpit.

Work one full stripe in that color.

At EACH SIDE of the sleeve, Slip 1/K1/ PSSO to work decreases ON EVERY ROUND. This is what makes the faux set-in sleeve work. Do NOT decrease on the body. Do NOT work K2TOG decreases; they don't look nearly as nice.

Work 56 rows above the armpits ending with 2 rows of the hem rib color. You can work a mid-back elevation if you want; I didn't.

Knit together 25 stitches at the shoulders.

Work K1/P1 rib at the neck for 6 rounds.

Close your armpits, tie in the tag ends of the yarn and you're done.

I used Sirdar Snuggly DK in merino, cashmere and silk; the blue is called Prince Charming and is basically a French blue or cadet blue; the white is called Snow Queen. 

The other plus here is that if your yarn isn't wool, you don't want to work steeking because it won't hackle together, but you can still work in the round.

So now go to this site and try out some classic patterns that want set-in sleeves, that you didn't want to try before because you're hooked on knitting in the round.

https://freevintageknitting.com/women.html

Fact-Checking the Torah -- put it to bed with a shovel

So I was doing on some Talmudic studies on Sefaria.org, which is a wonderful site. They are currently working on putting all the vowels in Talmud Bavli and expect to be finished by the end of 2022.

And I forget how this happened but I came up with something I've seen on another Jewish site, myjewishlearning.com. It's time to put this urban legend to bed with a shovel.

There's a wonderful saying attributed to R. Yochanan b. Zakkai, who saved Judaism after the Second Temple was destroyed. “If you have a sapling in your hand and are told, ‘Look, the Messiah is here,’ you should first plant the sapling and then go out to welcome the Messiah”. The citation is Avot d'Rabbi Natan 31b.

I have seen two different digital versions of Avot d'Rabbi Natan, one of them on the Sefaria site under Talmud, Masekhtot Ketanot. As you scroll down the Avot, the top of the page shows section numbers. 

Section number 31 does not have this quote. It has quotes from rabbis who came after R. Yochanan.

This is classic for an urban legend. The next step to take is to assume the numbers are reversed. This can happen if the person doing the writing doesn't know Hebrew. The gravestone of Mendel Beilis seems to have two letters reversed, showing the wrong year of death.

So now section 13: It has sayings by Rabbi Shammai, who was vice president of the Sanhedrin when Rabbi Hillel was president. So that doesn't work either.

Step three is, what quotes of Rabbi Yochanan DOES Avot have? That's in section 14. The Messiah is not referred to in that section.

There are also quotes from him in sections 17, 22 and 25. None of them have to do with the Messiah.

The Sefaria document is searchable. That's how I found the last three sections. The words in the spurious quote are not in there.

So what is going on here? Well, Sefaria fosters registered users who can create sheets about topics they are interested in or want to see discussed. And apparently one of these users believes the urban legend, but has never compared it to the on-site version of Avot d'Rabbi Natan. This is chronic with people who spread urban legends; they never check the source. The sheet with the urban legend claims it comes from a specific version of Avot, but gives no publication data on this version -- no publisher's name for the book, no date of publication, no editor, nothing.

That's like the Jesus ossuary or the manuscript which refers to Jesus and wives. Neither one has a provenance. Remember, I talked about that in The Digs. Anybody who makes a claim has to give the evidence that says it's real. In the case of the ossuary and manuscript, there is no such data. The owner of the manuscript has changed his story about where he got it. 

If anybody can give publication data on a version of Avot d'Rabbi Natan that DOES contain this urban legend, then we can possibly find it on Internet Archive, HebrewBooks.org, or for sale on etsy, E-Bay, or even Dan Wyman's store. But until we know the publication data, everybody spreading this story is spreading an urban legend.

Sefaria is not responsible for a user who doesn't doubt he is right, and posts on a site that gives the lie to his urban legend. Myjewishlearning has a named author for their post. I emailed them, told them when I was going to publish, and gave them this text. I got no answer back from the site or their author.

As with the Baba Bathra question, this story deserves to be true. But I come to bury urban legends, not to praise them.

21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional five

Thucydides Book I section 11 has another claim that lack of money was at the bottom of the problems running the Trojan War. You learned igagon and ilpizo just in time for this chunk.

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.

Learn kantautha from the last section and autothen and entautha from this one.

Notice the oukh categorical denial of the role of small population in the mustering of troops against Troy. There were plenty of people to choose from, says Thucydides, there just wasn’t enough money to supply them. Jowett calls the problem inferiority, but that’s false unless he means inferiority to circumstances. There was nothing inferior about the numbers of population or their military skill.

Also notice the parenthetical expression using an with an indicative. Here an means “in that case” and it is negated with ouk, not mi. Building a wall is evidence showing that it is false to propose that the attackers did not win the first battle they fought, and that’s why Thucydides has dilon de at the start of the expression.

Subsection 2 has our fifth conditional.

περιουσίαν δὲ

εἰ ἦλθον ἔχοντες τροφῆς καὶ ὄντες ἁθρόοι ἄνευ λῃστείας καὶ γεωργίας ξυνεχῶς τὸν πόλεμον διέφερον,

ῥᾳδίως ἂν μάχῃ κρατοῦντες εἷλον,

οἵ γε καὶ οὐχ ἁθρόοι, ἀλλὰ μέρει τῷ αἰεὶ παρόντι ἀντεῖχον, πολιορκίᾳ δ᾽ ἂν προσκαθεζόμενοι ἐν ἐλάσσονί τε χρόνῳ καὶ ἀπονώτερον τὴν Τροίαν εἷλον. ἀλλὰ δι᾽ ἀχρηματίαν τά τε πρὸ τούτων ἀσθενῆ ἦν καὶ αὐτά γε δὴ ταῦτα, ὀνομαστότατα τῶν πρὶν γενόμενα, δηλοῦται τοῖς ἔργοις ὑποδεέστερα ὄντα τῆς φήμης καὶ τοῦ νῦν περὶ αὐτῶν διὰ τοὺς ποιητὰς λόγου κατεσχηκότος:

 

You learned ilthon and you can see that Thucydides used it because he has evidence that his protasis did not occur. He assumes that it might have been possible to ship 20 years worth of supplies into the Troad at the start.

We know better. First, every army thinks the war will be over before the next holiday, in this case either the Lesser (spring) or Greater (autumn) Eleusinian Mysteries.

Second, this is the classic long supply line that has defeated every invader since time began. The most extreme case was Napoleon’s march to and from Moscow. There’s a terrific graphic that shows how his army was melting away before he got to Russia, and then how a scorched earth policy made it impossible for more than a few thousand to survive the march back.

In fact if Homer said that the Achaeans committed piracy while besieging Troy, or practiced agriculture, I have forgotten it. Thucydides is grappling with the logistics of a siege that happened to last 20 years. That 20 years is an artifact of an oral tradition, and probably not what actually happened. Thucydides would not have realized it when he started writing; by the end of the war, with the siege, famine, and plague of Athens, he understood all too well that Troy could not have held out for 2 years, let alone 20.

Why is the number 20 is important to the oral tradition of the Iliad? The first thing that suggests itself to me is that Odysseos left his son behind an infant, but finds a grown man when he returns to Ithaka. The ten years of the Odyssey itself would not allow this to happen. Telemachus is important as Odysseos’ assistant in clearing the suitors out. The need for two nobles (and two servants) to accomplish this task is Olrik’s Law of Twins in action. This means that claims of a written origin for the Odyssey are false; it is firmly an oral tradition bound with the Iliad and even requiring the Iliad to represent part of a 20 year war, instead of a more reasonable 2 or 3 years.

21st Century Classical Greek -- leipo losing a vowel

Thucydides Book I section 11 has a verb you’ve seen before.

I 2.1

φαίνεται γὰρ ἡ νῦν Ἑλλὰς καλουμένη οὐ πάλαι βεβαίως οἰκουμένη, ἀλλὰ μεταναστάσεις τε οὖσαι τὰ πρότερα καὶ ῥᾳδίως ἕκαστοι τὴν ἑαυτῶν ἀπολείποντες βιαζόμενοι ὑπό τινων αἰεὶ πλειόνων.

I 10.2

Λακεδαιμονίων γὰρ εἰ ἡ πόλις ἐρημωθείη, λειφθείη δὲ τά τε ἱερὰ καὶ τῆς κατασκευῆς τὰ ἐδάφη…

I 11.1

…ὑπολειπομένοις ἀντίπαλοι ὄντες.

Leipo loses a vowel in the imperfective eventive; here is the Wiktionary entry.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%AF%CF%80%CF%89#Ancient_Greek

The same thing happens, if you remember, in poeio and faino.

Leipo also loses the letter pi in parts of its conjugation. It assimilates to the first consonant of the conjugational ending. See White, page 244, section 775.

Losing vowels and consonants is nothing new for a NE Anatolian language. All Semitic languages do this, although it’s a little more predictable than in the Greek. Some time when you have a free brain cell, study up on hollow, assimilated and “defective” verbs in Arabic. 

21st Century Classical Greek -- mello/elpizo

Thucydides Book I section 10.4 has another idiom for you to learn.

πεποίηκε γὰρ χιλίων καὶ διακοσίων νεῶν τὰς μὲν Βοιωτῶν εἴκοσι καὶ ἑκατὸν ἀνδρῶν,

τὰς δὲ Φιλοκτήτου πεντήκοντα, δηλῶν, ὡς ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ, τὰς μεγίστας καὶ ἐλαχίστας: ἄλλων γοῦν μεγέθους πέρι ἐν νεῶν καταλόγῳ οὐκ ἐμνήσθη.

αὐτερέται δὲ ὅτι ἦσαν καὶ μάχιμοι πάντες, ἐν ταῖς Φιλοκτήτου ναυσὶ δεδήλωκεν:

τοξότας γὰρ πάντας πεποίηκε τοὺς προσκώπους. περίνεως δὲ οὐκ εἰκὸς πολλοὺς ξυμπλεῖν ἔξω τῶν βασιλέων καὶ τῶν μάλιστα ἐν τέλει,

ἄλλως τε καὶ μέλλοντας πέλαγος περαιώσεσθαι μετὰ σκευῶν πολεμικῶν,

οὐδ᾽ αὖ τὰ πλοῖα κατάφαρκτα ἔχοντας, ἀλλὰ τῷ παλαιῷ τρόπῳ λῃστικώτερον παρεσκευασμένα.

Mellontas is a personal gerundive (executive voice) from mello, which takes a complement in an imperfective conceptual impersonal gerundive. Peraiosesthai is, of course, in base voice.

Mello can mean everything from intent the whole way up to a certainty, and it’s the last one in this case: to supply the Achaeans at Troy, there would have to be fleets of the small piratical craft going back and forth from Crete or the Peloponnese with rations and weapons to replace those used up.

The important thing is to realize that mello is a spectrum, and you have to examine the context to see if the text is at one extreme or the other, or somewhere in the middle which has the nuance of a probability.

Another idiom that takes this i.g. is elpizo; learn that rather than mello. We’ve had elpizo before. Wiktionary is deficient; it has the modern Greek only, and only executive voice. Use the LSJ entry:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=e%29lpi%2Fzw&la=greek&can=e%29lpi%2Fzw0&d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=e)lpi/zw&i=1#lexicon

I'm just saying -- breaking the mold

This is about my latest toy. No, I haven't started spinning my own yarn. After that experience with the Lamb's Pride, I know spinning yarn will be unbearably fluffy with lint all over the house. If you have read other topics on this blog, like Fact-Checking or the 21st Century language threads, you know I love breaking the mold. So here's a new take.

After 30 years, my kitchen is a disaster. It has to be gutted down to the plaster, re-plastered and painted, all the appliances replaced. With appliances taking at least a month to come in during the pandemic, and my sister's experience with new kitchen cabinets, I decided it was time to break the mold.

So first I bought a multi-function cooker. Air-frying, broiling, dehydrating, etc, For a couple hundred bucks. Delivered in one week. If it only lasts two years, that's still comparable to spending a thousand or so on a full-up range and having it work 9 years, replacing the pans under the burners every couple of years, and having the baking element short out. 

This new toy works from a lamp socket. It runs cool. So where I originally put the toast on the middle setting, I can see I'll have to set it to dark. When I baked shortbread at the right temperature, I had to almost double the time. The broiler works fine. I used the dehydrator on some nuts that absorbed humidity during our rainy weeks. The air fryer did great on fries and chicken nuggets made from scratch. The dehydrator will let me incubate yogurt, which was always chancy in my oven -- which ran hot anyway. Cool running I can adjust for.

Second, you have to get familiar with your new toy before you can do what you want with it. My French bread recipe, from George Greenstein's book, has you bake at 425 to make the crust crispy, and finish at 350. The bake setting won't go up to 425, but the roast setting will. So I roasted for 10 minutes and baked for 25, and it came out beautifully.

Why is this important? Because I keep kosher. The nearest kosher restaurant is 10 miles away over one of the 10 least reliable intersections in the nation. With this and my hot water urn, I won't have to live off salads and sushi while the kitchen is being torn apart. When the kitchen's done, I can put this on top of storage, like a butcher block kitchen trolley with storage. 

I can get a couple of cabinets and put modern solid-element "hot plates" on them. This is safer than a four-burner range where you might have to reach over a hot burner or pot, risking a burn. I can't tell you how many times I've turned on the wrong burner and risked a serious injury. Mounting two-burner units side by side gets rid of the reach problem, and cuts down on the number of times you use the wrong knob. 

I can have the remodelers put up wall-mount pot and pan hangers that arrive in -- you guessed it, about a week. Leaving the cabinets for my Royal Doulton English bone china and my Corellware. With my current cabinets, half the space is inaccessible to tiny little me. One of them was even installed just above eye level and several times I have run my head against the corner of it. 

My kitchen is only 10 x 10 or 100 square feet. This setup will leave more floor space without making it harder to reach my spices when I'm using a burner. I can put the burners on a top shelf and keep spices below that shelf, and brother have I got a lot of spices. I'll even have room for some shelving beside the fridge for sugar, salt, flour, beans, and canned goods. If your kitchen is larger than mine, and you can break away from a full-up range with these smaller appliances, you may have room for that island you always wanted.

The washer and dryer are a different matter, but hopefully I can keep the dryer where it is until the new one comes in. If not, I know where there's a laundromat. And I'm NOT going to put counters over these appliances. I have that and it was impossible to replace the broken washing machine without tearing down that entire side of the room. I won't make the next people in this house go through that.

If the first toy breaks down too soon because the manufacturer didn't plan for a high duty cycle, there are wall mount electrical convection ovens that can also be mounted on cabinets. Just make sure you buy one that has a fan; one from a well known appliance maker doesn't -- what were they thinking?

Before I have to leave this house, I might put in a full-up range cos most people are hooked on that, or I might let them pick the one they like best cos hopefully things will be better by then. But I'm not trapped waiting a month for a range and all it took was breaking the mold.

I'm just saying....

21st Century Classical Greek -- conditional three

Thucydides Book I section 10.2 has another conditional that shows some of the problems with Goodwin.

Λακεδαιμονίων γὰρ εἰ ἡ πόλις ἐρημωθείη, λειφθείη δὲ τά τε ἱερὰ καὶ τῆς κατασκευῆς τὰ ἐδάφη,

πολλὴν ἂν οἶμαι ἀπιστίαν τῆς δυνάμεως προελθόντος πολλοῦ χρόνου τοῖς ἔπειτα πρὸς τὸ κλέος αὐτῶν εἶναι

(καίτοι Πελοποννήσου τῶν πέντε τὰς δύο μοίρας νέμονται, τῆς τε ξυμπάσης ἡγοῦνται καὶ τῶν ἔξω ξυμμάχων πολλῶν: ὅμως δὲ οὔτε ξυνοικισθείσης πόλεως οὔτε ἱεροῖς καὶ κατασκευαῖς πολυτελέσι χρησαμένης, κατὰ κώμας δὲ τῷ παλαιῷ τῆς Ἑλλάδος τρόπῳ οἰκισθείσης, φαίνοιτ᾽ ἂν ὑποδεεστέρα), Ἀθηναίων δὲ τὸ αὐτὸ τοῦτο παθόντων διπλασίαν ἂν τὴν δύναμιν εἰκάζεσθαι ἀπὸ τῆς φανερᾶς ὄψεως τῆς πόλεως ἢ ἔστιν.

If the city of the Lakedaimonians were destroyed, laid waste, both the temples and foundations of the buildings

[then] most, I think, would not trust [that] the power preceding [the destruction] for a long time then was commensurate with its fame…

The first two bolded verbs are epistemics. However, this is a protasis contrary to fact. Lakedaimon had never been destroyed. In that case, Goodwin (p. 296, Roman numeral II at the top of the page) wants an indicative in the protasis, not an epistemic.  Ei with the epistemic is claimed by Goodwin to be the dreaded “future less vivid”, with another epistemic in the apodosis. That’s not what the apodosis has; it’s a progressive conceptual in the impersonal gerundive, which is also bolded.

Goodwin gets around the “tense” problem in the apodosis by saying that it can have any form expressing past repetition. The progressive encodes repetition of a habit but is conceptual here, not eventive, it is from eimi, “be”, and in any case Mr. T encodes timing outside the verb morphology.

Another important point is that Mr. T does not use a "future" epistemic for something that hasn’t happened yet. He uses the more general imperfective eventive epistemic.

This is evidence that the “aorist” is not a past tense; the imperfective eventive can represent action completely without regard to timing. It parallels the Biblical ehyeh asher ehyeh encoding the eternal nature of Gd in the imperfect.

Both of Mr. T’s epistemics are passives. Thucydides is taking advantage of the intransitivity of the passive to avoid providing an agent for an action that never happened.

And the an does not introduce the apodosis. It’s an oimai, “as I suspect”.

Thucydides, in a long parenthesis following this, says that nobody would ever think the Lakedaimonians were powerfully organized anyway, because their city is so spread out. We know that Sparta had no recognizable acropolis, unlike Athens, which Thucydides says would have made striking ruins.

In fact the situation is rather like the south and the north before the American Civil War. While the south had external trade (selling cotton to England, of course), and harbors that accommodated agricultural trade, most blockade-running was small potatoes because it had to be concealed. The north had all the large harbors and they were not under attack, let alone blockaded. So aside from its own industrial superiority, the north could ship in whatever it needed.

Once the north put conscription into effect, it could draw on immigrants as well as the native born for troops. When the south lost a private or an officer, he could not be replaced. The 1862 conscription law in the south was largely ignored as a violation of states’ rights.

Likewise the Spartan “Equals” had to be born into that class and survive the brutal training program of the young. Men bunked at their mess, not at home, and the birth rate was consequently low. Men could be expelled from their mess, and were never readmitted. Losing 300 Equals in the Persian War was a severe blow. When the Athenians captured only 140 Equals toward the end of the Peloponnesian war, it crippled Sparta. There were some 5,000 Equals before the Persian War; there were only about 1000 in Aristotle’s time.