128 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



This text naturally causes one to open great eyes of wonder at the 

 ingenuity of wrongness which could stray so far from th.e lines laid 

 down by the text of the LXX, cn6.dji.ov fj-iya. koX [xiKpov kol /xirpa 

 Stcro-a. For pe could here have no meaning at all; si (sei) which 

 he suggests, is masc, whereas snte, "two" is fe?)i., and it was very 

 unlikely that tlie Copt would again use it for fj-irpa after he had just 

 used it for a-TdO/xov. 



In fact, it is a bad guess, for the words should be auo oipe snte, 

 oipe being the regular Coptic word for fxerpov, and further haviog the 

 advantage of being a noun feminitie, — oipe snte, "two measui'es." 



6. Here again he has edited an impossibility, though it is not 

 possible for me to say whether he has obeyed or disobeyed his 

 papyrus : in either case his text and his translation are both wholly 

 incorrect and impossible (xxiii. 5) : 



esope eksansmn se volgi 



eratk erof tiio piede verso di lui, 



nnefwunh ebol non apparisea. 



I do not know why he should have thought it right to give such a 

 weakening to the very strong negative future, nnefwonh ebol, 

 used to represent the LXX ovSafjiov ^aj/etrat, but the protasis contains 

 a triple monstrosity in the word eratk given by him and translated 

 " thy fooV\ tuo piede. The badness is quite out of proportion to the 

 difference of meaning : — 



(a) the verb smn is in its short form, the form used when it 

 immediately precedes the noun it governs and with which it forms 

 almost a compound word— a form somewhat analogous to the construct 

 state in Hebrew, and which therefore has been styled the construct 

 form of the verb, though I prefer to call it the proclitic form, — and 

 could not possibly be followed by the preposition e in eratk . 



(J) even so, smn with rat could have no meaning such as he 

 attributed to it. 



(c) rat, meaning "foot", is not Coptic at all: the word is only 

 used in cpd. prepp., and in certain verbal phrases, of which this is 

 not one ; see No. 24. 



The LXX should have kept him straight here, for it has lav 

 eTTio-T-qa-r]^ TO crov ojxfjia Trpo's avTov, i.e. the word was eiat-k, "thy 

 glance", and has nothing to do with eratk ! 



7. And as he has a very impei'fect notion of the functions of the 

 various forms of the verbal root, so he has an equally unsatisfactory 

 .^rasp on the ascertained facts as to the cases governed by special 



