Odysseus «by any other/by no name» chez Polyphemos

Abstract

Thesis: It is an accepted fact that name-games in Heroic Age Hebrew and Greek texts (archaic loci embedded in the long-redacted Biblical and Homeric texts) held veritable significance in the period when the respective actions occurred. When in Ex. 2: 22 Moses names his First Born Son «Gēršōm», «because I was a resident-alien in a Land-Not-Mine», the implicatum is gēr šām «resident alien there» and any reader, knowing Hebrew, would recognize this second level word-game, one very serious. On the other hand, the translations of the LXX, the Vulgata, and Targum Onqelos are superb in meaning (semantically), but make the name aetiogies in vain, for they don't concern themselves with struggling to bring them across, an essential part of translation. But we are not concerned with translations in such word-games, only with the Urtext. Nevertheless in the Urtext of Odysseia IX, the names which the protagonist gives his inhospitable host, are apparently unmotivated. The author proposes very strong double motivation for the one form, viz. Oútis, the alternate form Mḗtis being automatically generated grammatically. As opposed to the biblical exx., knowledge of languages beyond that of the Greek Urtext is required to understand the name-games involved.