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Re: Lingua Latina (laughin` and grief)

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  Posted by Alexander on May 17, 2000 at 08:27:10
In Reply to: Lingua Latina posted by Martin Read on May 16, 2000 at 10:03:01:



: : : : Tolkien liked to use such terms as "hosts" and "companies" to : : : describe the populations of peoples: he didn't have our modern : : : thing for precise numbering. But I wonder how imprecise he : : : really was. Hosts and companies are traditional terms. There : : : probably was a range of numbers for a host during the times : : : that term was in use to describe organized (more or less) : : : groups of warriors. Tolkien, always careful in his use of : : : words, wouldn't grossly violate such a range, and from that we : : : can get an idea of how amny elves were in the hosts of the : : : first age and so forth.

: : "Host" is a word often found in Biblical translations from the KJV era onward, but it's not often used much any more (except maybe in Tolkien-inspired fantasy literature). It comes from Middle Latin, so I don't know if the root word was used in the Vulgate. It generally is used to mean "an army" or "a multitude". I've never seen any source which tried to assign a range of numbers to it.

: Interestingly the Latin root of host, hostis, was the progenitor of two words in modern English of very different meanings. Host as in the person looking after guests, and hostile. I believe the basic original term meant "stranger." This was then extended to one who gave protection to strangers in a host-guest relationship. At the same time the strangers which a small community came into contact with were often both hostile and in armed bands or armies and so the use of host in that sense developed.

: An Anglo-Saxon definition of "army" which might equate with host, was an armed band numbering 200 and over.

I`m not at all an expert, but I think the Greek equivalent of the Lord of Hosts, used in the septuagint and liturgical Greek, is o kyrios ton dynameon (I can`t get Greek letters here, but it`s the origin of our dynamic/dynamism) and I always understood lord of hosts as lord of powers, of the strong, of forces.



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