Latin Language Asked by Alexander Young on November 18, 2021
A picture by the 17th century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, explaining his theory of underground waterways connecting all bodies of water on Earth, is titled:
Systema ideale quo exprimitur, aquarum per canales hydragogos subterraneos ex mari et in montium hydrophylacia protrusio, aquarumq[ue] subterrestrium per pyragogos canales concoctus
Can someone please provide an accurate translation of this title?
I will venture a translation. I start with a very literal version, which I do not usually do (it always smacks of “see, teacher, I recognised the ablative plural” etc. to me), but in this case there are some things that I am not sure about, so I want to be explicit about how I understand things. I will then also provide a more usable translation. Quae praefati, interpretemus.
Literal version:
Ideal system by which is expressed the pushing out of waters through water-carrying subterranean channels from the sea and into the hydrophylacia of the mountains, and the concoction of subterrestrian waters through fire-carrying channels.
There are some difficulties here:
Thus we get:
Schematic depiction showing how water is thrust from the sea and up to the hydrophylacia of the mountains through water-carrying subterranean channels, and how subterranean water is boiled by fire-carrying channels.
I also looked for translations online and found this one into German in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft (Journal of the German Geological Society) from 1992 (unfortunately only visible through Google Books' snippet preview, so I cannot even say for certain it is a translation of this particular map):
Ideales System, das den Ausstoß der unterirdischen Gewässer durch Kanäle in die Hydrophylacien der Berge infolge Erhitzung der Gewässer durch feuerführende Kanäle zeigt.
It interprets the text more or less the same as I did above, except (a) hydragogos is lost, (b) ex mari is lost, (c) concoctus is translated as Erhitzung = “heating up,” and (d) it invents a causal relationship (infolge) between the heating and the thrust, which makes sense but is not in the original Latin.
Answered by Sebastian Koppehel on November 18, 2021
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