Any Dopers fluent in Latin? It is everyone’s favorite dead language, after all. At least, I think that this is Latin. A buddy of mine just sent this to me asking if I could translate and I’m stumped. Is it a religous thing?
In case you can’t see the picture, the phrase is: omnium finis imminet
I can’t speak for the crazies, but it is nice to have a few quick phrases memorized, even if it means spending 10 minutes with a dictionary that has a grammar section figuring out how to decline the nouns and verbs.
you know what really stinks? I took Latin for two freaking years and I couldn’t figure this out on my own. Sheesh.
I was asking a friend of mine about it and he said he saw something similar (we think). Maybe there is a roving band of prep school thugs tagging up the joint.
About 15 years ago I went on retreat during Holy Week to a monastery in France, not far from Orange, near Avignon. It was a traditional monastery, where all of the offices and masses were in Latin according to the 1962 liturgical books. The monks spoke very little English, and my French was similarly limited. We managed to have reasonably comprehensible, if somewhat basic, conversations in Latin, which was the only language we really had in common.
I got lost once in Padova and had to ask directions from a priest. He spoke no English and my Italian was pathetic, so I tried Latin. It worked, and we managed to communicate, but the poor old guy stared at me as if I’d just stepped off of a spaceship.