The font in Christ’s Chapel
I am not an art historian. My interests lie not in material, manufacture, attribution, nor in provenance and acquisition. I leave curatorial considerations such as date and style to others. What engages me is what we read – the message more than the medium. Yet the utility of the artefact coalesces with the message, because the font cover is an object addressing the viewer. And I am a philologist – a lover of language.
Orthography (spelling) and phonology (sounds)
Twenty-three letters are incised into just under one-third of the oval trim. They form five words. In order to discuss what we hear when we say these out loud or to ourselves, I must transliterate them (the first line) and break them up into syllables (the second), as follows:
NIP/SON ANOMĒMAMĒ MONAN OP/SIN (p/s represents a compound consonant )
NIP-SON-A-NO- MĒ -MA- MĒ -MO-NAN-OP-SIN.
I count eleven syllables. Twenty-three and eleven are odd numbers. They approximate a ratio of 2:1. That is because the syllables are fairly short; there are no consonant clusters, no diphthongs. And, if we take the letters in order, the odd-numbered ones are consonants, the evens vowels. Only four vowels are employed, and only three consonants. The consonants m and n are phonemic ‘nasals’. Nasals are a type of ‘resonants’. For our purposes it is enough to say that m and n sound quite alike, and that they reverberate. They drone, while the vowels bounce high and low like ping-pong balls. The auditory effect is a singsong. When I was learning French, somebody taught me to say Ces saucissons-ci sont six sous (‘These sausages here are [priced at] six sous ’). This comes to mind because (1) it is in a foreign language and (2) the vowel sounds are all over the place. What makes it most ear-catching, however, is the alliteration. I think, too, of She sells sea-shells by the seashore . These tongue-twisters, both purely by accident about exotic sales practices, retain our interest because they are somewhat silly to picture. Content amuses. Our Greek line, in contrast, though a bit of a mouth-contorting mumble, strikes me as neither particularly alliterative nor assonantal. This is because of the proportion of consonants to vowels as well as their balance and distribution. Its sonic quality is bound up in another consideration, as we will see below.
Morphology (in part, function)
Our epigraph is a complete sentence, although unpunctuated. It consists of a verb, two nouns, and two adverbs. The verb is transitive, taking the nouns as its direct objects. The verb is also a second person imperative, with the subject (you) understood, as in English. It issues an order. Greek idiom does not require possessives (your) with, in this case, the noun objects, whereas English does. The pattern, most baldly stated, is Do X to Y and Z . So the instruction is quite succinct.
NIPSON is an aorist imperative, yet the aorist is introduced to beginning students of Greek as a past tense. How can that be, when the imperative is the mood that expresses a command? You can’t tell
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