It's been ten days since Gary Gygax left the Prime Material Plane; the shiv‘ah, so to speak, is well over, and it's time to move on. But the week has produced many fascinating tributes, and I wanted a chance to blog them. So many of the tributes were about how Gygax subtly but overwhelmingly affected the author's life. It's true that when one thinks about it, Mr. Gygax's influences, while almost invisible, are just about ubiquitous. In last week's entry (q.v.) I wrote in response to Internal Monologue's comment about Gygax's constant use of latin abbreviations, e.g. "i.e., q.v.," etc.) "...it might even be fair to blame my obsession with Latin on Gygax's use of these abbreviations." Given how my "obsession with Latin" dominates my character (to say nothing of my life), I think this off-handed comment deserves some amplification.

When I first started upgrading to AD&D in fourth grade or so, the Latin abbreviations (starting, I think, with q.v., because the Fiend Folio and then the Monster Manual were my first books) really lept out at me. Even the glossary in the back of the Dungeon Master's Guide didn't satisfy my curiosity: I knew there had to be more abbreviations I was missing, and I wanted to know them all, and what each stood for. So naturally I asked my dad. My father is a lawyer, and has a certain fondness for sesquipedalian verbiage (a clichéd phrase, yes, but how can I avoid it?), so he was the most qualified person in my world. He was certainly happy to help. He opened up his legal pad and started writing down "i.e., id est, that is" and so on. Then having filled about half a legal page, he tore it out and gave it to me. I hung this page on my bedroom door, and, as the years went by, slowly made additions until I had filled the page. Granted, I hadn't yet actually started learning Latin (that began in seventh grade), so there are some horrendous mistakes (e.g. I conflated quod vide with quo vadis, inexplicably coming up with the mysterious and nonsensical quod vote.) That yellow and yellowed legal page sits on my old bedroom door in my parents' house to this very day.

So it is indeed possible that without Gygax I would never have become a Mad Latinist. But I suppose that's something of an ambiguous complement ;)

( Without further ado, here are some of the more notable tributes... )

It should come as no surprise, though, that what I'm most eager to mention is my own (all too predictable) tribute: [[la:Ernestus Geisericus Gygax]]. It has been pointed out that there might be better Latin names to equate with Gary, but I'm hoping the wikipedian community will allow me to keep Geisericus, just because it's so absurdly Dark-Age sounding. Those of you who can handle Latin, please check the article for anything that needs emendation or amendment. Heck, if you appreciate the subject matter but not the language, I will be happy to take your suggestions either here or on the disputatio page.

ADDENDVM: if you know Latin, you should also check beluosus' clever tribute.

Manchester Guardian "In praise of ... Latin.":

Such advantages might (just about) justify eccentric efforts to make Latin - long extolled as offering a window on the past - a living tongue for the future. Through Vicipaedia, an offshoot of the web's superb free encylopaedia that was launched last month, the ancient language is being used to read and write about not just Julius Caesar but also Britney Spears. Even if lingua-franca status is unlikely to be regained, the venture deserves success if it gets people reading the classics again.

Obligatory journalistic erratum: Vicipaedia was founded in 2002, not "last month." (Who was it who was just telling me that the most common error in news reports was the assumption that "If I haven't heard about it it must be new"?) I dare say this error is more glaring than the misunderstanding about computatrum.

Within the blogosphere, the original WSJ story has been picked up by Internal Monologue, and Paleojudaica. The former is the blog of one of my long-time friends, so is not surprising. The latter is one of my favorite blogs, but I have very little contact with the blogger at all: his mention of the story was a complete coincidence.

If you know of any other journals (by which I mean both newspapers and blogs) that have brought up the Vicipaedia Latina story, please do let me know.

We've had an article in Vox Latina before, but never something as prestigious as this!

Due, I think, to my thoroughly arcane and scholarly interests, I didn't impress Mr. Gomes as much as some of the others did (don't get me wrong though: Josh does makes a fantastic "poster boy." Now I need his autograph!) but I'm glad he did find something he considered worth quoting from our interview. Unfortunately we had a slight misunderstanding of the sort that is almost obligatory in newspaper articles. So I should clarify.

Computatrum. When I lobbied against it was actually back in the mid-nineties, before wikipedia existed. On the Grex Latine Loquentium computatrum and other -trum words were (and are) very widespread, and it really bothered me. But I couldn't convince very many people on this topic. And as proper usage is determined more by what people actually say than by what they should say (OK, that's not exactly true in a dead language, but it makes sense in cases like these), I eventually gave in to the masses on this one word. Computatrum is just too wide-spread now to fight, and if you can't beat 'em.... But I do still fight the use of this suffix on most other words. So Gomes presented this whole sequence, over 10-years long, as something that happened on Wikipedia, when really it was decided long before.

But in general the article is good, and I'm very pleased!

ADDENDVM: Uh oh, he also confused Tangaloa and Tagalog. Iacobus Amor won't like that.