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Comment by sethammons | Hacker News Reader

I had not heard of taking small enough bites that you can always respond to a conversation; that seems such a small amount that I must be the ape they abstain from being.

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Well, if your liege ask you something, you should be able to reply immediately. It would be impolite to make them wait for you to end chewing. I remember in some of the musketeer books described how Portos had cut a big part of a boar while dining with the king and when the king asked him something, he had to swallow the entire piece.

Did you mean to write 'liege'?

Yep, sorry. Edited now.

No worries, I just wanted to see whether you wanted to take a subtle swing at medieval power structures.

I have a subtle issue with homophones. :)

I blame English orthography for these troubles.

English orthography also leads to endless stigmatisation of people who mix up the spellings of "their", "there" and "they're" or "you're" and "your" as if they were idiots or can't "think properly". Instead of the reality that they just don't display the class marker of having been drilled in this idiotic aspect of the writing system.

With me the issue is that being blind means that I listen to most words and the spelling is something which I don't always focus on unless necessary. Hence, two homophones are likely to be confused if not written often enough.

Oh, yes, screen readers etc add a whole another level of complication to the mix.

Huh, curious, I don't remember them ever dining with the king in the musketeer books.

Don't have the text handy, but Wikipedia agrees with my memory:

> His eating abilities even impress King Louis XIV during a banquet at Fontainebleau.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porthos

It says "A diner should not take so large a bite that he is completely unable to speak, if he were addressed." which seems very reasonable. I can speak while having a normal sized bite in mouth, although it's of course less than ideal and not polite these days. But sometimes useful for shorter utterances.

I was a bit surprised that a twelfth century source would refer to apes. Possibly the word meant something else first and was later used for big nonhuman primates?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ape#Name_and_terminology :

"Ape", from Old English apa, is a word of uncertain origin. The term has a history of rather imprecise usage—and of comedic or punning usage in the vernacular. Its earliest meaning was generally of any non-human anthropoid primate, as is still the case for its cognates in other Germanic languages.

Czech "opice" seems to have a common root with "ape". The older version thereof was "op", even closer to "ape".

So the origin might actually be Indo-European.

You don't need to look back to Proto-Indo-European for a word like this. Like many other words in Slavic, this Czech word is more likely a borrowing from Germanic prior to the merger of short *a and *o to /o/ in Common Slavonic. Indeed, I just checked and it is listed on p. 200 of Pronk-Tiethoff’s The Germanic Loanwords in Proto-Slavic, the modern standard reference for these matters.

> I was a bit surprised that a twelfth century source would refer to apes.

The Roman empire extended into North Africa and they would absolutely have been aware of the wildlife. Hannibal actually launched an attack on the Romans that involved bringing war elephants across the Alps [0]. Subsequent readers of Roman authors would have known about the animals the Romans knew about, e.g. [1], which in turn made their way into medieval bestiaries (along with unicorns and a few others).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal%27s_crossing_of_the_A...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiologus

There are no apes in North Africa, though, unless your definition of “North” is quite expansive.

Or your definition of "ape" includes macaques, which a twelfth century definition very possibly would.

Definitely. According to the OED, "ape" included monkeys before the word "monkey" was introduced in the 16th century, and even after that any primate without a tail was an "ape", including the "Barbary ape", as it is still often called.

The inhabitants of North Africa may have been familiar to some degree and had some contact with subsaharan Africa.

There are Carthaginian records of an expedition to Subsaharan Africa where they encountered fury human like creatures which they called the “Gorillai”.

The name was reused in the 1800s, of course we don’t know it was actual gorillas that they encountered might have been other great apes.

Also there is no evidence this was a regular occurrence. Getting over the Sahara is extremely hard and ancient ships weren’t really fit for this type of journey due to the prevailing winds (some scientists today still doubt that Hanno the Navigator could have sailed further than West Sahara despite the written evidence..).

Anyway.. it’s extremely unlikely they were in direct contact and good luck getting any great apes across the desert. Also even if they did Carthaginian culture (and pretty much all written records) was pretty exterminated by the Romans.

https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast148.htm

the gallery on this website has over 100 illustrations of apes... some from the 12th century.

Medieval europeans were in direct contact with Barbary macaques. On top of African animals that were exchanged through Mediterranean sea since the Romans, Iberian populations, Christians, Muslim and Jewish had direct contact with macaques introduced by Maures.

I guess that depends on the standards. I can talk with about half my mouth full, but doing so would be considered impolite by today's standards. At about a quarter mouth full I can push it into my cheeks to talk mostly unimpeded.

Chipmonking is an important skill.

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