Talk:een goed begin is het halve werk

Direct calque?

@Mnemosientje, Lambiam What is your view on the etymology? The passage in the Politics appears to be ἡ δ᾽ ἀρχὴ λέγεται ἥμισυ εἶναι παντός ("the beginning is said to be [the] half of everything", V, 1329, not really certain about the precise verse). This clearly is a match but as a direct calque it would be very loose and it is that very fact which leaves me wondering if there aren't any intermediates involved or if the Dutch phrase may not derive from Aristotle at all. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 10:05, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I think πᾶν (pân) should be understood here as “the whole”, i.e., the whole job to be cleared. The reception of Aristotle in the Middle Ages was through translations into Latin (see Recovery of Aristotle), in the case of the Politics mainly through Bruni’s excellent translation from the Greek. He translates the Greek sentence, quite faithfully, as principium autem dicitur esse dimidium totius.^[1] I’d say that the Dutch phrase is a reasonable translation; the main deviation from a more literal translation (het begin is de helft van het geheel) is replacing het begin by een goed begin. But this is not only done in the Dutch version of the proverb; in English we find a good start is half the work,^[2] (often referred to as “an Irish proverb”) and in French une chose bien commencée est à demi achevée.^[3] Here it translates Cervantes’ original Spanish el comenzar las cosas es tenerlas medio acabadas (“to start things is to have them half finished”), so the goodness of the commencing was added by the translator. German has guter Anfang ist die halbe Arbeit.^[4] There are many variations, such as a good lather is half the shave.^[5] The question may be narrowed to how goodness came to be explicitly stated as a requirement. In Artistotle’s text it is obviously a requirement, but left unsaid in the phrasing of the proverb.  --Lambiam 12:42, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree on the meaning of πᾶν and also agree that the Dutch proverb functions as a reasonable if non-literal translation of Aristotle's phrase. What I think that you have demonstrated, is that there is an "idea of the good", if you excuse my platotude, in the proverbs of the European vernaculars that is separate from the Greek and Latin 'canonical' texts. I wonder if it is possible to trace how they're linked. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 16:12, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

The lack of goodness in the Latin version is a direct consequence of the translator faithfully following the Greek. I hesitate to call Aristotle’s version “canonical”; it is quite likely that the saying existed in a variety of versions, some of which may have explicit used an NP meaning “a good beginning”, and it is not at all certain that Aristotle’s version is at the root of the tree leading to the versions current now. Cervantes’ version, written before 1605, offers an interesting data point. The oldest occurrence I have found after Aristotle is the Spanish proverb buen principio la mitad es hecho, recorded in 1578.^[6] Assuming that the saying Cervantes puts in the mouth of Sancho Pancha was also an existing variant, both “good” and null variants coexisted in his days.  --Lambiam 17:17, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Even older (1533): principium bonum maxima pars est.^[7]  --Lambiam 17:30, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Less old than Girolami Buono but perhaps also of note is this English translation from 1564 of Erasmus, who ascribes a similar idea to Socrates, where the Greek has a word for "good": [8] The Latin original of Apophthegmatum opus was from 1539, but I did not yet find the passage in it. [9] This Dutch proverb book from 1554 has another goodly one with a Greek counterpart without "good" that is attributed to Hesiod: [10] 'Scribal' abbreviations for n may make it burdensome to look for principium, however. I think that the OCR doesn't deal well with those. But it does cast further doubt on the definite attribution to Aristotle in the current etymology. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 15:41, 30 March 2021 (UTC)