Trading tongue
can we revive this topic ? But maybe without the "secret.." bit?
The 'lingua franca' like Shay Lamora has all sorts of relevance.
I also find it exciting because its something that Rosanne, Kwaw and others have 'fallen over' independently, which adds much weight to the suggestion.
Forgive me quoting myself here, but its quick. Also confirmation that the cards themselves suggest this. So here's a footnote from my 1998/9 write up - its from the bit where I'm discussing the Fool of the Charles VI set. Though only the first half is really to the point here, as a matter of form I include the whole.
As you will see, I didn't really hit the mark, though I had recognised the 'abcdarian' quality of the imagery. Unlike Rosanne and Qwaw, I had assumed this cross-language lexical quality a result of some individual person's customs, and not thought about it being an 'abcdary' .
Please do let's talk more about how the Lingua Franca may describe the cards.
QUOTE:
This habit may have led to a confusion with
(or deliberate pun on) the Persian term gabr, namely
Fr.guebre, which described a Zoroastian heretic, and
from whence also giaour, a Turkish term for an
infidel.Devices in the Charles VI card offer a visual
thesaurus of words derived from *gb/gbr as resort to
any standard authority will show. Two will be easily
available: Davidson’s Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee
Lexicon and Brown, Driver and Briggs’, Hebrew and
English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Again, for
Europeans, whose language of education was Latin,
the word Gabbar could suggest the very mummified
form which Egyptians had sometimes seen in Orion
(as Min or as Osiris). Augustine calls Egyptian
mummies gabbaras and later ‘iron men’ when
discussing the Christian belief in resurrection. Such
internal evidence suggests, to the present author,
that the original source of this image, and others
now included among the Charles VI card, may have
been an eastern Christian church that retained (in
Syriac or Coptic translation) the corpus of older
Egyptian language and star-lore. It is in a Syrian
Christian work that we find the more admirable
character of the ‘man of stone’ described. See
Climacus, Scala Paradisi, Step 15: “Truly blessed is
the man totally unstirred by any body, any colour or
any beauty [i.e. who is as stone]… Such a man has
truly mastered the fires … One man keeps this
tormentor under control by struggling hard,
another by being humble, another by divine
revelation. The first man is like the star of morning,
the second like the moon when it is full; the third
like the blazing sun. And all three have their home
in heaven. Light comes from the dawn and amid
light the sun arises, so let all that has been said be
the light in which to meditate and learn”.
The origins of the 'Babel-tongue' or traders' language is fascinating. Indeed some of the so-called magical invocations are actually a religious lexicon containing e.g. the names for Tanit in the various countries and religions.
A lot of other snippets of information directed me to the 'universal' trading island of Socotra etc.
But I think this lingua franca immensely important.
In this connection, see the pilgrimage-and-trade roads of western Europe, and their major nexus-towns, and the imagery in them at paradox.com
Don't be put off by the amateurish look of its first pages.
It has maps of the medieval trade- and pilgrimage-routes, histories for each major stop on the ways, a map of the ancient cultural-linguistic regions of Spain, France and Italy, and their original languages, and the art and architecture of the pilgrim churches.
Also look - there - at "Hispania Tarraconensis" and the deities worshipped there in Roman times.
ALSO - Search 'Vezelay' entry.
In Vezelay's tympanum are shown in parallel the zodiac, months, trades and works, and various saints - with the implication that *these* all are 'heavenly types' - under which those travelling in the 'ways of the world' follow their assigned path. We have all the necessary elements in that tympanum of time, heavens, earth, labour, menology (calendar of saints days), and the association of celestial 'types' with assigned works and character - a la Manilius etc. (One of Manilius' types - for the Moon - has been considered in its relevance to late medieval imagery by Ross Caldwell). *AND* we have as the presence (perhaps?) of Lingua franca as a way for unLatined pilgrims to communicate with 'foreigners' along the way.
The Vezelay tympanum - too - was already made by the late 11th century ( or maybe earlier).
