Talk:Mutunus Tutunus

questionable edits
In a recent edit, the logical word order was changed: "this act" can't come before the act is described, and intercourse didn't occur during the marriage ceremony itself (!) as implied by the change.

"Church Fathers" is a standard term and linked; the secondary sources used for the article call them this. Not sure what needs clarified.

"Pudenda" is a general euphemism for "genitalia", but since the phallus is already designated, it clearly refers in context, yes, to the testicles; however, it is not a word for testicles, certainly not a technical or neutral term that should be translated as having the same connotations as English "testicles." It's colloquial. See note in Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, as now cited. Sorry to have omitted this before. Please don't change this without a source.

The modifier horrenti ("awful") was edited out. Why? It's in the source. (These are the kinds of connotative words the Church Fathers use that cause modern scholars to observe that they are hostile or biased sources for ancient Roman religious practice.)

The editor also removed the distinction between "matrons" and "brides." These are very much NOT the same thing; the secondary sources were at pains to point this out. Arnobius says matrons, that is, women who are already married; Lactantius, for instance, says "brides" (nubentes).

The editor inserts a qualifying "generally" about Christian bias, but the question is not general: it's about the Christian presentation of Mutunus, and the abundant sources cited show that each and every Christian source on the subject exhibits hostility, derision, or bias. If altering this, please give a secondary source that says not all the Church Fathers who mention Mutunus were either biased against his cult or outright hostile. WP:NPOV says that the sources have to be represented in a balanced way that accurately represents what they say and the distribution of POVs. We don't add our own editorial comments to be "fair" to one side or the other. The Church Fathers are particularly hostile toward phallic worship, as noted in the secondary sources cited.

Also, the translation of the "left hand" passage missed the joke: epigrams deliver a punchline, and "left hand" works better as the punchline in English than "girlfriend" does in Latin. See note on the left hand in Roman poetry as the hand used for masturbation. It's also "a" girlfriend, not "the" girlfriend. The joke goes: oh, sure, Mutto's got a girlfriend who wipes away his 'tears' (meaning pre-ejaculatory fluid) — it's his left hand," har har. OK, a rather frat-boy dumb joke, but it is what it is. The English word order of course needs to work differently from Latin word order to deliver a joke. The Latin goes more like "Mutto wipes away his tears with his own left hand — that's what he calls a girlfriend."

I appreciate the care of editing, but please make sure your edits are accurate and are based on sources.

Tthe macrons are useful, but most Latin on WP doesn't use it, as it's only a convention of primers. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:14, 14 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Apologies. I brought a preexisting bad mood to this page and sounded unduly snippy above. The use of the macron in a technical passage on etymology is of course linguistically sound. "Balls," apt for a Catullus or Martial, is indeed an infelicitous translation for a Church Father, who is likely to have meant precisely "naughty bits," that is "body parts to be ashamed of." Sorry for the vehemence. "Hostile," however, is precisely the right word, as in "the hostile Ciceronian tradition has painted Clodius Pulcher as a mad dog." Cynwolfe (talk) 21:32, 14 September 2010 (UTC)

'Hostile'
"Hostile sources" is a phrase rather like "hostile witness" in law. For instance, as I noted above, scholars who write about Publius Clodius Pulcher are faced with the problem of Cicero as a source; Cicero hated Clodius, but is the main source of information on him. Now, to suggest that patristic writers weren't hostile to what they characterized as 'paganism' is patently absurd; they themselves would freely state that they were hostile to polytheism and its practices. Moreover, it's what the cited sources say. The WP neutrality policy doesn't mean presenting a false picture that all is calm and pretty and there is no conflict; sources have attitudes, in this case explicitly stated in both primary and secondary sources. If you asked Tertullian whether he was hostile toward phallic religion, he would've said "damn straight," or something to that effect. And after all, the Church did eventually stamp out all these religions as well as most of its own heretical sects, deliberately and systematically, so let's not paint a falsely modern picture of tolerance. Cynwolfe (talk) 14:36, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Egyptian MT as possible, if not probable, source of Latin mut
I hypothesized that Latin "mut" was derived by vowelizing the consonantal Egyptian word MT 'phallus, man, male'. However I did not state my reasons for doing so because those reason are obvious, imo. I will, however, state them below for anyone who wants to know what they are: (1) A great deal of evidence reveals that IE wordsmiths derived many words by differentially vowelizing consonantal roots. (2) The Egyptians used a phallus hieroglyphically to represent "MT" millennia before the Romans used "mut" to mean 'phallus'. (3) The Priority Principle, which governs the ownership of intellectual property, specifies that the person or people who first recorded an idea should be considered its owner(s). (4) The etymological corollary of the Parsimony Principle, aka Occham's Razor, specifies that the etymology that explains where a word came from by invoking the fewest number of unattested (hypothetical) words should be accepted.

Accordingly. Egyptian MT could and should be considered ancestral to L "mut", notwithstanding the seemingly implicit hypothesis that L "mut" must have come from some hypothetical, yet to be discovered, PIE root.