[etni] Printer's Devil

From: Israel Cohen <cohen.izzy@xxxxxxxxx>
To: etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 08:40:51 +0200
Mark Mandel wrote a delightful poem. Maybe you can use it for a class.
Printer's Devil
                 by Mark A. Mandel

Azazel's a tiny demon, just two centimeters tall,
and when he does demon magic, it's proportionally small.
He can boil a drop of water, make some paint flecks disappear,
or whisper very bad advice discreetly in your ear.

'Twas Isaac Asimov who told the tales of Azazel,
and like 'most everything he wrote, he told them very well,
from his first book of short stories -- I, Robot rose to fame --
to the last book of his memoirs --  I.(dot) Asimov bore his name.

Now, you'd expect a demon to do torture pretty well,
but Asimov put Azazel through quite a bit of Hell.
First he changed him from a demon to an alien from space,
and then he changed him back, to publish in another place.

When Isaac died, the demon must have gained his independence,
and posthumously his tormentor now must bear his vengeance.
For in I. Asimov  the list of titles caps this drama:
You'll find there both "I, Robert" and "I, Asimov" ... with a comma.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

On the WordFun list, Walt Quader blamed a typographical error on the
Druckfehlerteufel, the Printer's Devil.

A lot of printing terminology originated in monasteries. A printer's
apprentice is called a "printer's devil". When a configuration of lead type
was no longer needed, it was "sent to h_ll" to be melted and reused. A
printer's union was called a "chapel".

The Hebrew word for apprentice is shin-vav-lamed-yod-heh. Today it is
pronounced SHooLiaH. But, giving this shin its ancient dental T-sound and
treating this vav as a consonantal F produces TFL, as in German Teufel =
Devil.

The ancient consonantal vav had an F-sound. For example, Greek phasis (as
in phase of the moon) was borrowed into Hebrew as vav-samekh-saf FSS. Today
it is pronounced VeSeT and means (regular) menstruation. Adam called his
wife het-vav-heh kHaVaH, usually transliterated in English as Eve/Eva. But
the ancient het (without a schwa) had a W-sound, like ancGreek digamma or
Germanic Wynn. Giving the het its W-sound and the vav its F-sound indicates
that Adam was calling his wife WiFa or WiFeTH.

Which reminds me that the ancient heh had a dalet+heh TH-sound. That makes
Hebrew DaG = fish a reversal of Greek ichth(os). It also equates Bithynia
with Hebrew BoHeN = thumb or big toe. Anatolia (now Turkey) was an arm/hand-
being-washed on the Phoenician map of Hermes. I suspect it was a big foot
on a Viking map of the trickster god Loki. Tarsus is located on the bottom.

Today the yod is a partial velar with a Y-sound. Treating it as a full
velar produces G or K. The ancient sounds described above enable one to
extract a meaning from the tetragrammaton YHVH or YHWH. It would have
sounded like G/K-Th + F-Th, that is, a "god + father" or creator. Compare
Roman JuH+PiTer.

The Hebrew word 3aZaZeL begins with an aiyin (shown here as 3). Sometimes
the aiyin has a CR sound in cognates. For example, Hebrew 3aYiN is a
homonym meaning "eye; color; pool". Giving the 3 a CR sound makes the color
sense of 3aYiN cognate with CRaYoN. 3oFeL is the high fortified area of the
Temple mount in Jerusalem. Giving that 3 a CR sound makes 3oFeL cognate
with Greek aCRoPoLis. So a word-play on 3aZaZeL may have produced CRaZy aS '
eLL.

Izzy (playing the devil's advocate)


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[etni] Printer's Devil

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