26 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



occupies about ten and a-half pages quarto of Vol. II, Fasciculus 2 

 (1889), and contains about 180 verses or parts of verses, so that it is 

 by no means a large portion of the text of Proverbs. 



I shall here set down about thirty errors, of a character which. 

 shows that Prof. Rossi has no proper familiarity with some of the 

 essefttial rules of Coptic grammar, in reference to nearly every part 

 of speech. The text, unfortunately, is not well preserved, so that he 

 has had to have recourse to conjecture, and conjecture is admittedly 

 a dangerous weapon. What makes the matter more unintelligible is, 

 that he had a published text to correct from, if he did not know the 

 proper emendation. And some of his conjectures are about the worst 

 conjectures that could have been made. 



1. To begin at the beginning, the very first verse he has trans- 

 lated incorrectly : 



pestortr de niii piiiise 3fa il disordine e la contemione 



luoose hetf nSiiecroh camminano colV indigenza. 



This is to ignore the meaning of hetf, which certainly does not 

 mean "with," but "before," "in front of"; cf. Prov. xxiv. 66, 

 wcie efsok hetf mpohe mbaampe, " a he-goat stalking before the 

 herd of goats," rpdyos rjyovfjievoi; anroXiov, LXX. The LXX text 

 in our passage, (xvii. 14), shows of course that this was the meaning 

 intended, irpo-qy^lTai Se t^9 evSet'a?. 



The word is of common occurrence, and is met with in his own 

 " texts," cf. I^^ 27 y8 23 ; 41 y 25, in neither of which is the passage 

 translated literally, so as to exhibit the precise meaning of the phrase. 



2. The very next verse, the second of his text, contains another 

 mistake, for he edits conjecturally, his conjecture being in brackets: 



[w]ii bote lie ilipesnaii fa due cose ahbominevoli 



iiiialirlii iiiiwte al cospetto di Bio. 



Here, as ne is the copula, the suggestion of wn (which means there is) 

 is wrong. But the conjecture is further quite out of the range of 

 possibility by the laws of Coptic construction: for bote is the predicate 

 here, the meaning being "both are abominations", a construction 

 which demands henbote ne mpesnau, exactly as in his own text 

 XXX. 14, we have hensefe ne nobhe mpsere ethow, "the teeth of 

 the wicked son are swords", eKyovov kukov /xa;^atpa? tous oSovras ex^'- 

 In our passage, the LXX has aKd0apTo<; Kal ySSeXvKTos, which the 

 Copt has lumped together into his henbote. But Prof. Eossi's con- 

 jecture is quite out of the question, and is not Coptic at all. 



