It's All Greek : Three of Kepler's Book Titles

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Authors

PETROVIĆOVÁ Katarina GABOR Paul

Year of publication 2021
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Arts

Citation
Web webová stránka ročníku 24 (2021)
Keywords Kepler; Greek; learned Neo-Latin; Dioptrice; Harmonice mundi; Astronomia nova aitiologetos; the word aitiologetos
Description Three of Kepler’s major works have Greek words in their titles: Astronomia nova "aitiologétos", Dioptrice, and Harmonice mundi. We perform a linguistic analysis, examine the usage of Greek terms in Neo-Latin literature, and conjecture Kepler’s particular reasons for including these words prominently in his book titles. In particular, we show why the letter ‘c’ in dioptrice and harmonice should be pronounced as a hard ‘k’, and that the abbreviated title should be Harmonice and not harmonices. We pay special attention to Kepler’s neologism "aitiologétos", examining its general context and the potential sources of Kepler’s inspiration. We suggest that its least unfaithful English translation is ‘etiological’.
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