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Headword: Onon ornin
Adler number: omicron,378
Translated headword: [you call] a donkey a bird
Vetting Status: high
The story goes something like this: when a fortune-teller was being consulted about a sick man he saw a donkey getting up from a fall. He also heard another person saying, "How, if he's a donkey, did he get up?"[1] And he said "the ailing man will get up," and he got up. And again: "consider[2] everything that makes a distinction in prophecy a 'bird'." For they used to call them all 'fowls', even the things that were not avians. "[You call] a servant a bird": since they were accustomed to call certain ones of their servants[3] 'woodenfeet'[4] and 'good-fowled'.
Greek Original:
Onon ornin: legetai ti toiouton, hôs sumbolikos erôtômenos peri arrôstou eiden onon ek ptômatos anastanta. akêkoe de kai heterou legontos, pôs onos ôn anestê; ho de ephê: ho nosôn anastêsetai. kai anestê. kai authis: ornin nomize panth' hosa peri manteias diakrinei. panta gar oiônous ekaloun, kai ta mê ornea. therapont' ornin. epei tinas eiôthasi tôn therapontôn kalopodas legein kai kaloiônistous.
The headword phrase, along with the other quoted phrases, are excerpts from Aristophanes, Birds 719-721, with comments from the scholia. Some of the same material appears in omicroniota 167.
Bird-watching was one form of divination used by the ancients; terms for birds were generalized to the point that they could refer to omens of any sort.
[1] In the scholia, the other person exclaims "Look how he, being a donkey, got up."
[2] This is a singular imperative verb in the Suda, whereas Aristophanes has a plural that is probably indicative ("you (pl.) consider..."), though the form is ambiguous.
[3] '[P]resumably the first servant one saw after waking up' (Dunbar).
[4] Apparently the scholiast is interpreting the word kalo/pous as being derived from kalo/s ('good') and pou/s ('foot'). This is possible (cf. kappa 249), but all attestations of the word seem to derive the first element from ka=lon ('wood'), and refer to the shoemaker's last (wooden foot-model).
Keywords: comedy; daily life; definition; dialects, grammar, and etymology; imagery; medicine; poetry; religion; science and technology; trade and manufacture; zoology
Translated by: William Hutton on 10 January 2010@12:06:26.
Vetted by:
Catharine Roth (cosmetics, status) on 11 January 2010@00:49:55.
David Whitehead (another note; cosmetics) on 11 January 2010@03:25:41.
David Whitehead (cosmetics) on 4 July 2013@04:15:13.


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