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Originally Posted by Dazrin
While I'm on a posting spree...
I was really amused by the "highly expressive" names for foreigners and slaves:
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Still other people had names that while “highly expressive,” as J. L. García Ramón writes, were “anything but heroic.” Among them are “Goat-Head,” “Mouse-Head,” “Having the Bottom Bare,” and “Devourer of Excrements.” Such names, perhaps unsurprisingly, appear to have been bestowed upon foreigners and slaves.
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Wow! Them's fightin' words! I wonder what reaction the recipients of those names had. Did they not understand they were being insulted like that? Or, if they did and were foreigners, did they not have the ability to do anything about it? Were the Greeks/Minoans that dominant at the time? |
I was looking up part of this and ran across
this paper from 2011:
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In Mycenaean we also find names which are anything but heroic. Some are highly expressive; cf. e.g. mo-ro-qo-ro /Mologwros/ (: Mólobrov, name of a Laconian) ‘devourer of excrements’ (Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, is insulted as molobróv in Od. 17.219, 18.2640) or ku-mo-no-so, which can be read as /Gumnorsos/ ‘(having) the bottom (ôrsóv) bare’ (gumnóv)’,41 or the names with °ka-ra /-kras/ ‘head’: a3-ka-ra if it conceals /Ai(k)-k(a)ras/ ‘GoatHead’ (cf. aîgo-kéfalov ‘owl’), mu-ka-ra /Mu-k(a)ras/ ‘Mouse-Head’ (cf. mÕv ‘mouse’).42
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That is very similar to and uses the exact same examples as Fox's passage. But this isn't the author that Fox says the quotes come from (J. L. García Ramón) although this author does also cite Ramón for some other things on this page, just not this passage. I don't have the book any longer so I can't go double check context, I only have the highlight I made still available.
I am not used to academic papers but it seems like they should try to find at least a couple different examples. Otherwise, how are we supposed to believe the examples are trends and not just a few odd-ball cases of this happening? I understand leaving in "devourer of excrements" and "having the bottom bare", those are too good to pass up, but give us something else for the other examples.
(Note: I added the rest of the passage that I had highlighted to my original quote here instead of the abbreviated passage I have in the original post.)