What we have here might just be two different quoting traditions: one  
Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American (see the Dictionary of foreign Terms by  
O. Sylvester Mawson (ed. of Roget's International Thesaurus,Pocket  
Edition, Bantam, 1961, p. 94) favorising «bonum» (see also the English  
Wikipedia); the other, German (see. Büchmann's famous "Gefügelte  
Worte", 34th ed., Frankfurt... 1981, 249b), favorising «bene» (see  
also the German Wikipedia). This divergence is perhaps due to two  
different translations, because the Latin is NOT the semantically  
faithful translation of the Greek, but rather a modulation of it.  
According to Büchmann's "Gefügelte Worte", the Greek original is «Tòn  
tethnekóta mè kakologein» «Man soll von einem Toten nichts Schlechtes  
reden» [one should say nothing bad of a dead]; the Latin translation  
turned «nothing bad» into «only good». But there are still other more  
divergent variants of this sentence quoted by Buechmann.

So it seems that everybody may be happy with his version, for  
everybody is right within his own tradition.

German-speaking may be interested in the following article:
http://www.onlinezeitung24.de/article/3545

Farid.


Zitat von Rich Hansen <[log in to unmask]>:

> On Oct 7, 2011, at 12:27 AM, Manfred Kropp wrote:
>>
>> The "bonum" is a miscitation (cf. the not trustworthy  
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_mortuis_nil_nisi_bonum)
>> or deliberate alteration of
>> "de mortuis nil nisi bene".
>> Deliberate?: yes, because it changes the imperative from "being  
>> just and fair" in "to be a panegyric" (perhaps more fashionable and  
>> accepted in our times).
>> msk
>
> Well as the translation is from the Renaissance, at least according  
> to Wikipedia and not from Classical times almost anything is  
> possible. Also, although this certainly doesn't prove much one way  
> or the other, a Google search on both phrases has bonum outnumbering  
> bene by a good margin.
>
> While there is nothing written (and may never have been) from Chiron  
> himself we DO have the source in a way in "Lives of the Emminent  
> Philosophers" by Diogenes and I guess someone more mobile than I  
> could hie themselves to the Library and look in the Loeb Library  
> translation because what passes (after some 2500 years who knows for  
> sure) for the original Greek is there in his discussion of Chiron.  
> Not to mention searching Google books. I leave this to someone whose  
> Greek is bound to be better than mine.
>
> rich
> --
> Rich Hansen
> [log in to unmask] // [log in to unmask]
>