Qui prior egressus est, Iacobus Rufus erat: A thread for all things Latin

Started as a spur line here: Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

Think maybe my Latin name should have some macrons, so Iācōbus, but was superstitious about how that might effect Zing etc.

In later Latin it became Iacōmus, yet another aspect of the Jacob/James split, two names separated by a common etymology.

Guess this thread should be bring yr own macrons, macrons are optional (not to be confused with the guy on the other threadz)

To summarize: the pinefox was reading a book called The Norfolk Mystery, by Ian Sansom, causing him to bemoan the fact that one of the characters would spout endless, often untranslated sentences in Latin. This caused others among us to start wondering which Latin phrases were common enough to be readily understood by English speakers at various points in time and ask the same for speakers of other languages.

I randomly looked at the first few pages of this book and found this sentence
'I envisage this not merely as my magnum opus, but as a magnum bonum. De omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis—'

Nolite te bastardes caborundorum.

(the vulgate says that esau was HISPIDUS, which means hairy, but a more fun latin word for hairy -- or anyway shaggy -- is HORRIDUS) (which also means what you think it means)

Yes, jimbeaux, I left out the lower hanging fruit like that one for other posters such as yourself.

obv I knew the first Latin expression in that sentence I quoted, the second I could guess the meaning, the third I had to look up.

I enjoy that one because it's probably the best-known "Latin" phrase in current usage. Atwood intended it as kind of an inside joke.

caRborundorum: sorta looks like a latin gerundive (but isn't one)

bastardes: not latin at all

meanwhile carborundum (which also looks like latin) is a modern portmanteau of carbon and corundum (which ALSO looks like latin, but is actually it turns out tamil)

Yeah, that was a typo.

Neither word is actually Latin. Fred actually points that out in the book, but doesn't actually explain anything.

The Vulgate is yet another aspect of this, since there were other Latin translations as well: earlier, pre-St. Jerome versions and later Protestant Latin Bibles, although I know nothing at all about this. I do like to use this side-by-side, Vulgate/Douay-Rheims/Knox Bible, the last one being translated into English by Monsignor Ronald Knox, uncle of Penelope Knox Fitzgerald #onethread
http://catholicbible.online/side_by_side?bible_part_no=1&book_no=1&chapter_no=25

Note that Cod Latin, macaronic Latin...Dog Latin...Canis Latinicus! .. is welcome on this thread (as long as it is identified as such at some point, although we don't necessarily need to go all Tuomas dubitātus on this) since it is part of the story.

De omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis I found mentioned in Italian Wikipedia: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_omnibus_rebus_et_de_quibusdam_aliis

But maybe something was slightly misstyped since I found more hits for a slightly different version, like this one

Oh, the Italian wiki says it a humorous variant, so pretty deep cut.

actually horridus or i guess horridi is sorta kinda not *terrible* for the adjective form of blecchs (whatever that is in english lol)

so that the (plural) noun would be (i think) horriditati

so my bullshit propsal is: iacobus rufus illa horriditatique

kinda more spiky than lovecraftian in soundform

Lol.

Wow, the source of that phrase, The 900 Theses, by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, was the first printed book banned by the Church, but the author later reconciled with his friend, ex-ILX0R Girolamo Savonarola and was welcomed back into the fold.

The pinefox, if you're reading, that phrase can be translated as "about every knowable thing, and even certain other things," a way of mocking a pompous claim to omniscient authority.

Sorry, not quite: the original phrase de omni re scibili et quibusdam aliis can be translated that way. The mockery of it in that book is "of all things that exist and many others as well."

quibusdam is latin for what-the-fuck-ever else, you can tell just by looking

Stop the presses! The original original sentence was: Per numeros habetur via ad omnis scibilis investigationem et intellectionem, "“It is through numbers that we find the way to the inquiry and understanding of everything knowable."

Ha, exactly. I was familiar with the related, derived French word
"quidam" as a form of "what's his name," but not that it was also an English word. Interestinh how as the word went from Latin to French to English it went from meaning "somebody" to "somebody (whose name I don't know or can't say)" to "somebody (unimportant), nobody."
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quidam

Finally onto magnum bonum. As expected, it means "a great good," but it is also the name of a Swedish pop group from the 70s and 80s and a kind of apple grown in the Southern US. I rest my case.

unsurprisingly a lot of the surviving phrases in english come from legal usage

plus some fun stuff comes via religious usage, like hocus pocus derisively mangled from hoc est corpus (as in "hoc est enim corpus meum", "this is my body", from the communion service)

See also:
https://borgestodoelanio.blogspot.com/2015/03/jorge-luis-borges-los-traductores-de.html

¿Cómo surgió esa noche adicional que ya es imprescindible, esa maquette de la irrisión de Quevedo —y luego de Voltaire— contra Pico de la Mirándola: Libro de todas las cosas y otras muchas más?

Which I found because of this: http://www.artandpopularculture.com/De_omnibus_rebus_et_de_quibusdam_aliis

DIdn't know that about hocus pocus. Trying to remember the term for "something and something" expressions as featured prominently in legalese. Ah yes, here they are: coordinated pairs, legal doublets, merisms. Many from Anglo-Saxon origins so somewhat of a derail from this thread but I will indulge myself. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_coordinated_pairs

Oh wait I forgot that some of these are supposed to be a pair featuring one Romance and one Germanic term. Maybe since I couldn't think of an example myself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_doublet

"Free and clear" is one, I think.

the text I most remember from high school is from Catullus, the most famous of his poems, about his conflicted relationship with Lesbia

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris
Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior

I hate and I love. Maybe you ask why I do this
I don't know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2evkTNy1fGo

There’s also– wait for it!– this recent release:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJdtpDLblLw

mostly though I think Latin in high school helped me understand word origins and especially the endings of the most common singulars and plurals of the three genders of Latin nouns (us/i-masculine, a/ae-feminine, um/a-neuter) which are used frequently in English (alumnus/alumni, alumna/alumnae, datum/data, focus/foci, alga/algae, larva/larvae, fungus/fungi, forum/fora, persona/personae, etc etc). there are a lot of exceptions to those singulars and plurals, but those occur most frequently

medical terminology is replete with Latin words and their plural spellings

*Latin nouns

I'm just trying to catch up with with this thread now (obviously with limited understanding).

I'm glad to see that poster James Redd looked into the novel I was reading.

>>> I randomly looked at the first few pages of this book and found this sentence
'I envisage this not merely as my magnum opus, but as a magnum bonum. De omnibus rebus, et quibusdam aliis—'

Yes, I didn't understand most of this. I don't think it was translated in the book. Rather problematic for the reader.

Caesar adsum iam forte, Pompeii aderat.
Caesar sic in omnibus, Pompeii sic inat.

eheu

from the discussion on ILB:

i'm actually quite interested in which phrases have got bedded into which languages -- which of the following do the french or the dutch or the swedes also say?

I think sussing this out runs into the problem of English influence on other European languages - i.e. a lot of latin phrases that are used in English will start getting used in other languages as well, not because they always were, but because they've been imported back in via English.

On a tangent, I think English speakers in general underestimate the extent to which English has colonized other languages. Portuguese Gen Z basically speak as much English as Portuguese at each other, subbing in words with very simple Portuguese equivalents - nice, sad, song. French linguistic protectionism might end up kinda vindicated.

i'm still interesting in this issue even if all the latin phrases used by the danes and the walloons are borrowed indirectly from english not directly from latin

the incidence of the tridentine or latin is still a live political issue in the catholic church (i believe it's one of the issues over which that pope francis and pope benedict differ)

well, at a glance I'd say that all the examples you cited - status quo, de facto, persona non grata, bona fide, sui generis, sine qua non, ad infinitum, et cetera - are used in Portuguese, tho being a Latin language "de facto" is just actual current Portuguese and "et cetera" barely registers as Latin. But stuff like bona fide feels English.

yes, like the line for the romance languages is much more blurred than it will be the germanic languages

(apparently -- sez wikipedia -- 40% of bavarian grammar schools still study latin)

english as like a near-militantly mongrel language offers a strong model for mongrelism as it speards into other languages among the cosmpolitan on-line young (this is my fancy way of rewriting what you said above w/o the use of the i-word)

fancy yet also full of typos

Exoptatus mundum meum advenisti.

Yes, I didn't understand most of this. I don't think it was translated in the book. Rather problematic for the reader.

Convenience link:
https://latinitium.com/latin-dictionaries/

More about this guy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pico-della-mirandola/

After a short stay in Paris, Pico returned to Florence, and then Arezzo, where he caused a scandal by abducting a young woman named Margherita, already married to Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici. Despite the support that came from Lorenzo de’ Medici, the commotion that followed and then a plague kept Pico on the move, just at the time he was writing a Commento on a love poem by Girolamo Benivieni and planning his larger scheme of philosophical concord

Says he was also the first Xtian Kabbalist. No wonder Borges namechecked him.

my larger scheme of philosophical concord does not include abducting anyone, i guess this is my big mistake

https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/mirandola.html

Apparently this was his magnum opus, HI DERE:
https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/mirandola/oratio.shtml

His story is all over this place, and his wiki page is a little more readable than over there at Plato Stanford.

'Quid pro quo' is useful and commonly understood. As with schadenfreude, there's no native English idiom that conveys the meaning quite so succinctly.

Speaking of hybridization, I am fascinated by the influence of Arabic on Spanish. The Wikipedia page has a pretty good list of direct word imports. One of the most frequently used in everyday speech is "ojalá," which roughly translates to "hopefully" and comes from "‘law šá lláh," which means "God willing" (I guess it's an earlier form or variant of "inshallah"). Although it's pretty much lost its religious connotations, surely thought patterns persist.

Arabic influence on the Spanish language

More from the pinefox’s book:
dies faustus, which means “lucky day.”

gradus as Parnassum, literally “steps to Parnassus, and usually intended to mean learning something gradually, and therefore often a common title for instruction manuals.

Aargh gradus ad Parnassum

tempus anima rei, time is the soul of things, so maybe time is of the essence.

Those are all in the book?

Yes

the word parnassus needs a bit more opening up maybe: it's the name of the mountain range in central greece where apollo worked with the muses to make divine music

now we would perhaps say "elevator to beyoncé"

Unusually, I walked past poster Mark S's home yesterday.

My main thought was: actually, this is a tremendous place to live, isn't it?

(No Latin content in this post I'm afraid)

ORIGIN: L tremendus to be trembled at

gerundive of tremere, to tremble

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtCB6fftSwA

the text I most remember from high school is from Catullus, the most famous of his poems, about his conflicted relationship with Lesbia

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris
Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior

I hate and I love. Maybe you ask why I do this
I don't know, but I feel it happening and I am tortured

Have my eye on the reader Familia Romana but have been holding off for a bit.

Noli turbare circulos meos!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtgAtluo9aw

Note that the song is titled “Panis Et Circenses” but otherwise it’s usually “panem et circenses,” with the bread in the accusative.

Contra malum mortis non est medicamentum in hortis.

Although I see other alternate wordings of that.

Just saw on TCM that Walter Matthau used the term sine invidia in a letter to Billy WIlder about The Fortune Cookie script.

Lupus in fabula.

— Em tibi autem!
— Quidnamst?
— Lupus in fabula.
— Pater est?
— Ipsust.
— Terence, Adelphoe 535–539

— But look!
— What is it?
— Talk of the devil!
— It’s my father?
— In person.
(Transl. Barsby, 2001)

obv (and against barsby) i favour "whomst is it?" for "quidnamst?"

Lol

Also have been thinking about posting
Festina lente

Last seen here one and only time on a certain type of very olde thread.

Homines quod volunt credunt.

The Duolingo course is not so great but at least it has audio and I haven’t personally maxed it out like so many others so I have been plugging away at it recently

flumenflue, transitum Eva et Adae, declinationem ab litore ad flectere lauri, commodius ab nobis facit Houuthi vicus de castro et recirculus ad circumstant.

Horror vacui

Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem.

solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant

a palindrome and riddle:

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Aquilam volare, delphinum natare doces.

https://logeion.uchicago.edu/vir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7hd799IznU

Apparently the preferred method by far these days of self-study is a book known as Lingua Latina or LLPSI (in full, LINGVA LATINA PER SE ILLVSTRATA), written by a Danish linguist and high school teacher named Hans Ørberg. It’s 100% in Latin and uses the Natural Method to teach, which I guess means letting the brain what it does naturally. There is all kinds of ancillary material built up around if, including the audio version I just linked to.

Around it

I realized recently I still know the Our Father and Hail Mary in latin which I guess is what happens when you take Latin at a catholic HS.