Honorificabilitudinitatibus
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Honorificabilitudinitatibus is a Middle Latin word that William Shakespeare used in his comedy Lost Love Labor and that has subsequently gained some fame in the English-speaking world.
The word appears in the first scene of the fifth act. Costard (German also skull ), a teasing joker, satirizes the stilted language of the schoolmaster Holofernes, interspersed with Latinisms :
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The form honorificabilitudinitatibus is the ablative plural of the word honorificabilitudinitas, which means "honesty", broken down into morphemes literally "ability to gain honor". At 27 letters it is the longest word in Shakespeare's work. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755) cited it in the anglicized form honorificabilitudinity as the longest word in the entire English language. It is also one of the rare words in which consonants and vowels alternate. (Other examples are "unimaginatively" or "verisimilitudes".)
Also, since it only appears once in the Shakespeare corpus , i.e. it represents a Hapax legomenon in it, the word has become the subject of speculation on the part of some so-called anti-Stratfordians . The question of whether Shakespeare is actually the author of the works ascribed to him has preoccupied English philology since the 17th century - anti-Stratfordians is the collective term in this discussion for those critics who question the authorship of Shakespeare. Francis Bacon believes that a theory that was first formulated in 1856 and is widely rumored to this day, albeit a very dubious one, is the author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare. Sir Edwin Durning Lawrence- examined this hypothesis in 1910 in his book, Bacon Is Shakespeare to prove by the claim that honorificabilitudinitatibus actually an anagram is, encrypted with the Bacon the piece signed have. The plain text is by Lawrence Durning hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi, Latin for "These pieces, sired by F. Bacon, the world are preserved." The absurdity of this thesis has since been satirized many times, including in 1970 by the American author John Sladek , who arranged the letters to the word chain I, B. Ionsonii, uurit [writ] a lift'd batch and thus "proved" that the author of Shakespeare's Pieces rather was Ben Jonson .
In fact, the word is by no means a Shakespeare creation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it is first attested in a document written in Latin from 1187. Dante Alighieri led honorificabilitudinitate in his language and style known handy font De vulgari eloquentia (1303-05) as an example of a particularly long term. In the ablative form used by Shakespeare, it is also found in a Latin passage from The Complaynt of Scotland , written in Scots in 1549 . According to the OED, the first evidence of the word in a script in English dates back to 1598; The creation of Lost Love's Labor is usually dated around 1595.
James Joyce picked up the word in Ulysses with reference to Shakespeare in one of his many Portmanteau passages. In the chapter Scylla and Charybdis it says:
"Like John o'Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country."
In the animated series Pinky and the Brain , the word honorificabilitudinitatibus appears in episode 8 of the first season ( Napoleon Brainaparte, 1995) : In the credits it is used as an example of the long, incomprehensible words that are regularly explained there.
literature
- Nicholas Royle : The distraction of "Freud": Literature, Psychoanalysis and the Bacon-Shakespeare Controversy , in: William Leahy (Ed.): Shakespeare and His Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question . London: Continuum, 2010 ISBN 978-0-8264-3684-9 , pp. 58-90
