Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:

We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: Henri de Catt

[mildred_of_midgard]

The problem with this: δόξᾳ doesn't mean box. In all the dictionaries I've checked, I've not been able to find any definitions other than the ones I was familiar with: judgment, opinion, vision, glory. How on earth does that make sense in context? It should mean box or other type of container. Another layer of code here?

You know, it did occur to me that it's suspiciously like the English word "box", especially if you flip the delta around. But I immediately decided that was me being Anglocentric, why on earth would Henri de Catt use English-Greek code, etc.

But now that I know he has no problem throwing random English words into his diary, that's totally what I think it is! And I do think it's code, because he doesn't want everyone knowing where Fritz keeps his suicide device.

And it occurs to me that one thing I used to do in my own very secret diary was throw *random* words into dwarven runes, just so potential snoops wouldn't home in on the secret words and only the secret words.

And this *is* the first time he starts code-switching. I now think maybe he's covering his tracks with random languages, so his diary doesn't have exactly one sentence in other languages in the midst of all-French diary. Because the very next entry is one sentence of code-switching.

Against this idea is that it then takes him another month or so to start code-switching again, at least from my skimming. But then he starts doing it regularly.

So I wonder if it just gave him the idea, or if he was covering his tracks by trying to sprinkle other languages through a mostly all-French diary?

The further you get into the diary, though, the wilder he gets, I can tell you that. Whatever else was going on, I think he started having fun.

ETA: No, I'm wrong. Just three days later, he's code-switching again. Yeah, he might be covering his tracks.