A Product Listing on Amazon

Years ago, for some period of time, I was obsessed with a problem Amazon was having: they weren't accurately listing the languages in which many of the books they sold were written. Books written in Latin with English prefaces were listed as English; books written in Greek with Latin prefaces were listed as Latin; books written in Latin with facing-page English translations might be listed as Latin or English. The thought of accurately describing a book's language with more than one word, such as "Latin primary text with English facing-page translation, English introduction, footnotes and commentary" seemed to be right out of the question. Whatever computer program Amazon used to fill in the"Language" box in the "Product details" section, below "Publisher" and above the ISBN's and dimensions and weight -- the very idea that a book might be in more than one language, did not seem to compute. The details given for dimensions and weight for all sorts of items sold on Amazon, not just books, continue to be equally divorced from reality, to the point where the information given on the amazon is so unreliable as to be useless.

I actually tried to get a job at Amazon correcting these language descriptions of books. The attempt did not go well. Eventually I was able to just let it go and get on with my life.

Last year I got ahold of Jean-Pierre Mahe's edition of the Coptic fragments of the Perfect Discourse from the Nag Hammadi library and the Armenian Hermetic Definitions, published in the city of Quebec in 1982.

 

So, that's an ancient primary text in Coptic, with, on the facing page, a French translation and passages from the Latin Asclepius almost as lengthy as the Coptic text, showing the relationship between the Coptic and Latin texts; and an ancient primary text in Armenian with facing-page translation in French; with a lengthy introduction and commentary in French, not to mention a bibliography as impressively polyglot as you might imagine. 

How would I fill in that line: "Language," in the product description, if I were Emperor of all Amazon? I think maybe something like: "primary texts in Coptic and Armenian, with ancient Latin for comparison with the Coptic, and facing-page translations and introduction and commentary in French."

That doesn't describe every single thing in this book, but I think it comes close enough to give a potential reader a fairly accurate idea of what would be facing them, if they wanted to read this book.

Amazon describes the language of the book as "English."

Now, I couldn't get away with calling this description 100% inaccurate, because of a few items in English in the aforementioned impressively polyglot bibliography, and a few brief citations from those several English items. Still, it is about as far as an exhaustive modern critical edition -- two critical editions, actually -- can be from being English. The publisher's name, the name of the series in which this volume appears -- Bibliotheque copte de Nag Hammadi -- the copyright notice, all are in French.