SC - typo?

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Robert Beaulieu wrote:

> > I wonder if there may have been a variety of wine whose name resembles
> > the French word, "miel", which might easily have been translated into
> > English by a non-cooking scribe as "hony". I haven't found one, but that
> > doesn't mean there isn't one.
> >
> > Adamantius
> 
>         French is my firstlanguage and I am a wine counselor in the Société des
> Alcools du Québec (the Quebec government run wines and liquor stores)
> for 22 years now and I never herd of such a wine... witch (just like
> period things) does not prove it does or did not exist, but makes it
> unlikely when no sources mention it.

Agreed. The bottom line, is, though, that we don't know. I tried to
suggest a hypothesis that would answer the existing pieces of the
puzzle: we have reason to believe that the meat isn't cooked in honey,
but rather in wine of some kind. How wine becomes honey, in the sense of
a typo or scribal error, has a limited number of likely explanations.
You'd have to misspell "wine" pretty badly to get "honey". A
mistranslation seemed like a pretty good explanation, and I mentioned
the possibility of a wine with a similar name to honey as exactly that:
a possibility. Its perceived likelihood, or the lack thereof, is
something I didn't even bother to consider, apart from mentioning that I
looked for such a wine name and, like you, didn't find one.

Of course, it may also be that there is, or was, a wine (and possibly
not even a French one) whose name is similar to the English word,
"honey". Still another on our limited list of possibilities is that the
scribe's eye accidentally wandered to another part of the page, where it
came to rest on the word "hony", causing the scribe to copy it where it
didn't belong.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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