Hipegon
Hipegon Plinius in segetibus nascitur foliis rute et cetera.
Apparatus:
Whole entry missing in f
Mss. ejp have a line preceding this entry: Hipegon (Hypegon ms. e) Plinius uocat, ut infra, which in ms. e is added to previous entry Hipecon, in mss. jp it is on a new line rubricated
Hipegon | Hepegon p
in segetibus nascitur | n. i. s. B p
foliis | folis C
et cetera om. e
Translation:
Hipegon according to Pliny grows in cornfields; it has leaves like ruta {“rue”}, et cetera.
Commentary:
This is an excerpt from a brief chapter found in Pliny, 37, 68, 93, ed. Rackham (1938-63: VII.93): Hypecoön.
Hipegon:
For further analysis of the name ὑπήκοον, /hypḗkoon/, Latinised hypecoon, sometimes written with trema hypecoön; see Hipecon.
The late Latin pronunciation of Hypecoön would have been /ipéko(o)n/ (cf. Dioscorides Longobardus: ipecon), or the more learned /(h)ipéko(o)n/. Simon as a native speaker of Ligurian would have had a tendency - observable in the whole Western Romania from the late Latin era onward - to voice intervocalic /k/, e.g. laco (pronounced /lako/) becomes /lago/ “lake”; this sound-change changed Hipecon into Hipegon.
Pliny as well as Dioscorides had excerpted their brief monographs from the same or a very similar source and one has to assume that the two entries Hipecon and Hipegon were originally conceived as one entry. But the new pronunciation motivated some classically less well-versed scribe(s) early on to separate the two.
Some witnesses added a line after the previous, i.e. Dioscoridean, entry Hipecon q.v.: Hipegon Plinius vocat ut infra in order to draw attention to this monograph.
WilfGunther (talk) 12:26, 27 January 2016 (GMT)