In English: The hands are the body's workers, the fingers are pluckers of strings.
Carrying on with the theme of sayings about the hand which I started yesterday, I thought this saying would make a good contribution. It is from the wonderful medieval riddling dialogue, commonly known as the "Dialogue of Alcuin and Pippin," where there is a long series of questions-and-answers about the cosmos, the natural world, and the things found therein, the human body in particular.
Here is the context in which hands and fingers appear, with the questions addressed by P (Pippin) and the answers provided by A (Alcuin):
P. Quid manus? — A. Operarii corporis.
P. Quid sunt digiti? — A. Chordarum plectra.
P. Quid est pulmo? — A. Servator aeris.
P. Quid est cor? — A. Receptaculum vitae.
P. Quid est jecur? — A. Custodia caloris.
What are the hands? They are the body's workers.
What are the fingers? The pluckers of strings.
What is the lung? The keeper of air.
What is the heart? The holder of life.
What is the liver? The guardian of heat.
Intriguing? I will confess that I love this kind of thing, and I borrowed many phrases and riddles from this dialogue in preparing the Latin Via Proverbs book. You can find the complete Latin text of the dialogue from the old Migne edition online, and you can also find a complete English translation online, thanks to the poet-translator Gillian Spraggs!
Riddles have played a profound role in cultures around the world. In my Ancient Indian Epics class each semester, we read the Mahabharata, one of the great epics of India (it contains the Bhagavad-Gita), and you will find there a long riddling dialogue which has a great deal in common with the spirit and even the content of this medieval European dialogue. You can read an English translation online of this famous confrontation between the King Yudhishthira and his father, the god Dharma (Truth), who is concealed as a yaksha guarding the waters of a lake.
Back then to Alcuin's hands and fingers. Take a look at your hand right now: we give it the name "hand," and you can say "hand" and think "this is a hand"... but what is a hand? If you suddenly lost the word "hand" and didn't know the name of this thing, this part of your body, how would you describe it? Well, it is a worker, it does things, makes things, causes things to happen, dressing the body, lifting food to the body's mouth, cleaning the body, etc. It is clearly a worker: the hands, then, are the body's workers.
And what about fingers? If you suddenly did not know the word "finger" and had to say what those strange things are sticking out off the end of your hand, what would you call them? What do they look like? Well surely they are designed to pluck strings, something the fleshy part of the hand could never manage to do. You need the hands to do the work, but the fingers to accomplish the detail, to pluck the strings of the body, of life, of the world, and make them resound.
So, in honor of the Latin digiti, here is today's saying made available to you in DIGITAL audio... let the virtual strings resound!
557. Manus operarii corporis, digiti chordarum plectra.
The number here is the number for this proverb in Latin Via Proverbs: 4000 Proverbs, Mottoes and Sayings for Students of Latin.
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