RE: Off topic: English text explanation please

[Jack Aubert via sundial]

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I am a serious amateur musician, but unlike Peter, do not really enjoy anything 
earlier than late baroque.  I am also a word freak and this query sent me down 
some interesting linguistic and etymologic rabbit holes.  

 

It is only stating the obvious to observer that poetry is ipso facto ambiguous; 
a line or phrase can mean several things simultaneously or be incomprehensible 
to most (or all) people.  It is also obvious that the language has evolved so 
something that was idiomatic in the 17th century may not make sense now.  

 

The full original text in English is: 

 

Amyntas with his Phyllis fair,

In height of summer's sun,

Graz'd arm in arm their snowy flock;

And scorching heat to shun,

Under a spreading elm sat down,

Where Love's delightments done,

'Down, dillie down,' thus did they sing,

There is no life like ours,

No heav'n on earth to shepherd's cells,

No hell to princely bow'rs.

 

 

The first part is still relatively idiomatic in current English, although we 
can draw a discrete curtain over “love’s delightments” and wonder if there is 
some double entendre implied by “dillie dille down.”   But the last two lines 
make sense to us only if the “to” is replaced with “like”  as Peter suggested.  
The phrase “like to” is familiar to us from poetry but is no longer idiomatic.  
This is confirmed by the sense given to it by a German translation (thank you 
Google) 

 

Amyntas und seine schöne Phyllis hüteten,

als die Sommersonne am höchsten stand,

Arm in Arm ihre schneeweiße Herde,

und um der brütenden Hitze zu entfliehen,

ließen sie sich unter einer Schatten spendenden Ulme nieder.

Dort, nachdem sie die Freuden der Liebe genossen,

„Tra-la-la“, sangen sie:

„Kein Leben könnte schöner sein als das unsrige,

der Himmel auf Erden ist in der Hütte des Schafhirten,

die Hölle in königlichen Gemächern.

 

My German is weak but putting it back into contemporary English: 

 

There is no more beautiful life than ours

Heaven on earth is in a shepherd's hut.

Hell is in royal chambers.  

 

 

The word “bower” is interesting (thank you again Google) and comes from Old 
Norse like a lot of English does.  It originally meant a room or chamber.  It 
retained this sense in the 17th century when it more specifically meant a 
lady’s personal room or chamber in a hall or castle.  I speculate that this 
sense must have been influenced by French “boudoir” which means exactly that 
but comes from “bouder” meaning “to pout”: literally a boudoir is a pouting 
room.  By this time the Norman conquest had imprinted a heavy dose of French 
onto the Norse and Saxon middle English.   The modern meaning of bower is a 
pleasant shady place under trees or vines so Amyntas and Phyllis were enjoying 
their delightments under the elm tree which could be called a bower.   But the 
German translation, appropriately, kept the sense of “chambers.” 

 

So, to summarize: the original English does not quite make sense to a modern 
reader unless he just guesses that “to” means “like.”

 

Jack Aubert

 

 

From: sundial  On Behalf Of Peter Mayer
Sent: Friday, July 7, 2023 4:19 AM
To: sundial@uni-koeln.de; R. Hooijenga 
Subject: Re: Off topic: English text explanation please

 

Dear Rudolf,

I share your interest in 17th century madrigals.  (Although I'm a firm 
non-smoker, one of my favourites has the line "tobacco is like love..."). My 
interpretation is that this is a compressed form of poetical expression. 
Decompressed, I think, it would be: […] thus did they sing: ‘There is no life 
like ours, No heaven on earth [like] to shepherds' cells, no hell [like] to 
princely bowers’.

That is, there is an assumed parallelism with the first phrase.

best wishes,

Peter

On 7/07/2023 7:45:10, R. Hooijenga via sundial wrote:

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RE: Adjusting dial to new location

[Jack Aubert via sundial]

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I think I must be missing something here.  I cannot quite wrap my brain around 
what we would be trying to accomplish with a longitude adjustment.

 

A horizontal garden variety dial should tell apparent local solar time as long 
as it is correctly designed and the gnomon is pointing at the north celestial 
pole.  It can be moved to a new location and will continue to tell apparent 
local solar time as long as the whole thing is tilted so that it is at the 
latitude it was designed for and positioned so that the gnomon continues to 
point to the north celestial pole.  Now, If such a dial were to be tilted on 
its other axis so that it corresponds to the original longitude then I think it 
would tell local solar time at the original longitude.  This would appear to be 
wrong since it would not correspond to either local solar time or local civil 
time.   

 

AFAIK, the only way longitude comes into play in the design would be to make 
the dial conform more closely to civil time (leaving aside the equation of 
time) for example if the dial is located near the edge of the time zone.  AFAIK 
the only way to do this is to shift the dial plate around the vertical axis 
originating at the bottom end of the gnomon so that noon is no longer lined up 
with the gnomon and east west are no longer at right angles to the gnomon.  If 
such a dial were relocated then it would need some kind of longitude adjustment 
but would it not then tell something approximating civil time at its old 
location rather than the new one?

 

Is this wrong?  Is it possible to make a local longitude adjustment by tilting 
the whole thing on its polar axis?  

 

My spherical trig is almost nonexistent so I am trying to imagine all this 
visually and cannot quite see how it would work.  It seems to me that an 
east-west wedge would throw the gnomon off its polar axis.  

 

Jack Aubert  

 

 

From: sundial  On Behalf Of Steve Lelievre
Sent: Monday, April 3, 2023 7:47 PM
To: Rod Wall ; kool...@dickkoolish.com
Cc: 'Sundial sundiallist' 
Subject: Re: Adjusting dial to new location

 

Hi, Roderick,

My home internet connection is still non-functional so I can't fix it yet, but 
it does seem that I will have to add an extra test to handle southern 
hemisphere locations and reducing latitudes. Actually, I originally had a 
southern hemisphere check in there but took it out after convincing myself the 
same frame of reference (x axis east, y axis north, z up) applied to the 
spherical trigonometry irrespective of hemisphere. Ho hum.

Steve

 

On 2023-04-03 6:45 a.m., Rod Wall wrote:

Hi Steve,

For both examples below with all sundials at the same Longitude. The 
instructions indicate: 

Place the wedge-sundial assembly on a horizontal surface in a nice sunny 
location. Start with the higher end of the wedge to the north and the sides 
aligned on a north-south line and the sharp edge should be on an east-west line.

Example 1:



If you have a sundial that was designed for Latitude -20 deg. And relocate it 
at Latitude -50 deg.

Would you start with the higher end of the 30 deg wedge to the North. Or would 
it be to the South?



*

Example 2:



If you have a sundial that was designed for Latitude 50 deg. And relocate it at 
20 deg. 



Would you start with the higher end of the 30 deg wedge to the North. Or would 
it be to the South?

*



Please correct me if I am wrong. I think that both examples would be to the 
South.



Roderick.



 

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RE: Adjusting dial to new location

[Jack Aubert via sundial]

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I thought about this briefly.  I had always thought that the purpose of the 
shim or wedge adjustment was to tip the dial north or south so that dial is at 
the latitude it was originally designed for.  If the original dial has a 
built-in longitude correction, that could also be factored into a wedge which 
would have both a north-south and east-west axis.  But a wedge would not work 
if it moved the gnomon out of alignment with the with the rotation of the earth 
(or the celestial sphere).  I think a longitudinal adjustment would only work 
if he original dial had a time-zone offset included by rotating the hour lines 
with respect to the origin of the gnomon.  

 

Does this make sense?  It sounds like a good project for a 3-D printer.   

 

Jack

 

From: sundial  On Behalf Of Steve Lelievre
Sent: Sunday, April 2, 2023 5:16 PM
To: Michael Ossipoff 
Cc: Sundial List 
Subject: Re: Adjusting dial to new location

 

Michael,

Yes, I recognize that to get Mean Time involves Equation of Time adjustment and 
that Equation of Longitude can be handled there to give Standard Time (or DST).

But anyway, my inquiry was to seek an online wedge calculator. Nobody 
identified one and  a week seemed an adequate wait for responses, so I've just 
written one.  Anyone who's interested, please see

https://sundials.org/index.php/teachers-corner/sundial-construction/367-easy-dial-adjustment-for-your-latitude

Cheers,

Steve

 

On 2023-04-02 1:41 p.m., Michael Ossipoff wrote:

I just want to mention that the shim under the north or south edge of the dial 
is only for latitude. Longitude is corrected-for by changing the constant term 
of the Sundial-Time to Clock-Time conversion.

 

But usually Sundial-Time, Local True Solar Time, is what I’d want from a 
sundial.

 

On Sun, Mar 26, 2023 at 14:30 Steve Lelievre mailto:steve.lelievre.can...@gmail.com> > wrote:

Hi,

Can anyone point me to an existing online calculator for making a wedge 
to adjust a horizontal dial to a new latitude and longitude?

I am not asking for an explanation of how to do the calculation; I just 
want to be able to point people to a calculator that has already been 
proved on the internet. It should use the original location (latitude 
and longitude) and the new location to calculate the angle of slope of 
the wedge and the required rotation from the meridian.

Many thanks,

Steve


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Star Chasers of Senegal

[Jack Aubert via sundial]

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This video is only partly about sundials.  
https://schedule.wttw.com/series/54/NOVA/?tp=82542bbd-2867-4625-9c86-d4906d4da82b

 

It is about a Senegalese astronomer leading a team to set up a arrays of 
telescopes to measure a star’s occultation by an asteroid to determine its size 
and shape prior to a flyby by a NASA mission.  

But the video also digresses extensively into sundials, astrolabes and 
little-known Senegalese megaliths and some background material on Islamic 
astronomical research and takes a side trip to Istanbul.  

 

All these are of personal interest to me.  I lived in Senegal for three years 
and have spent time in Istanbul.  There are some beautiful videos of Dakar, 
Istanbul and several mosques.

 

Jack Aubert

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