Today I’ve seen several news reports on yesterday’s papal election, and some have the cardinal who introduced Benedict XVI saying “Habemus papam!” while in other accounts he said “Habemus papum!” A Google search seems to indicated “papam” is the more popular spelling, but I’m wondering if “papum” is equally valid, or if it actually means something entirely different. (I just got an e-mail saying that “papum” means “worm”, which is what motivated this posting.) Any Latin scholars care to weigh in?
“Papam”; the word is “papa”, first declension, one of the rare instances of a non-feminine first-declension noun; “papam”, accusative case (“Papa dixit”, the Pope said, but “habemus papam”, we have a Pope - sorry if I’m assuming too little grammar on your part.)
Short answer: The two definitely don’t mean the same thing. Papam is probably the correct spelling.
Medium answer: In Latin, word order isn’t terribly important; rather, sentence structure is indicated through word endings. For nouns, there are five different groups (known as “declensions”) of word endings that describe how a particular noun looks in different situations. Papa is in the first declension, and the appropriate ending for this usage is -am. So it’s habemus papam.
From Slate, Papam? Papem? Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
Likewise, there were a number of sources reporting the Pope’s Latin name as Benedictum XVI. That’s also the accusative case of the name, since it’s also the object of the verb “habemus”; the nominative (unmarked) case is Benedictus XVI. (If you were addressing him directly, it would be O Benedicte!)
So is “papum” even a word with any meaning in Latin, or merely a common typo of “papam”?
It’s not. -um isn’t a valid ending for any first declension nouns. It’s the singular masculine accusative ending in the second and fourth declensions, though.
It’s been very long since I took Latin, but isn’t -um the nomative ending for second declesion neuter nouns?
Yes, but unless papus/papum/papu exists as a second or fourth declension noun, papum is a misspelling.
How does one say “We have a poppy” in Latin?
“Habemus papavereum”?
I believe you’re correct without the last U. Poppy is papaver, 3rd declension, and would add -em to form the accusative. (Your construction is from papavereus, poppylike, or of or concerning poppies.)
According to the University of Notre Dame, papus, papum, or papu are not legitimate Latin words. The closest you could come is pappus, which would make Habemus pappum mean “We have a woolly plant-seed cover.”
To cover all the cases: If I were addressing the Pope, it would be “O Papa” (“Hey, Pope”), or “O Benedicte” (“Hey, Benedict”) (vocative case)
If I’m saying the Pope does something: “Papa agat” (“the Pope takes care of business”) or “Benedictus agat” (nominative case)
If I’m talking about something that belongs to the Pope: “Cartus papae” (the Pope’s car) or “Cartus Benedicti” (genetive case)
If I’m talking about giving something to the Pope: “Dono pecuniam papae” (I give money to the Pope) or “Dono pecuniam Benedicto” (dative case)
If I’m doing something to the Pope: “Amamus Papam” (we love the Pope), or “Amamus Benedictum” (accusative case)
And I can’t remember any examples for the ablative case, but it’s used with some prepositions, and the endings would be “Papa” and “Benedicto” (those are supposed to be macrons over the a and o, but underscore is easier to code).
The closest I can find in Cassell’s is pappus, -i, “the woolly seed of certain plants”. There’s also papula, a pimple, which is the diminuitive of papa, but the first a is short and the a’s in papam are (IIRC) long. (A difference in vowel length changes the meaning of a word in Latin.)
Everything except papam is incorrect, since papa is a first-declension noun. I assume it is masculine, since the office is only open to men; there are other masculine first-declension nouns, such as the words for ‘sailor’ and ‘farmer’. Perhaps some people who learned Latin are assuming that it must be papum – the accusative case of a second-declension noun == because second-declension nouns are usually masculine.
Properly, the quotation should probably be given in quotation marks, though I’m not sure doctrinally who exactly ‘has’ a pope. It would seem that it means ‘We [the College of Cardinals] have a pope [for you, the Roman Catholics]’, though it could also mean ‘We [the Roman Catholic church] have a pope’. Broadly, it could mean ‘We [humanity] have a pope’, but I’m not sure how non-Catholics fit into that. Unless it means that everyone has a pope, then, say, Fox News or USA Today shouldn’t be saying ‘we have a pope’, but rather reporting what the cardinals said.
I think those before me have answered adequately. But to make it clear the only appropriate ending for normal singular first declension nouns are: a, ae, ae, am, a
Latin does not use words like the, of, to, for, by, with, or from to describe nouns, and so these endings take the place of these words. Efficient. Were you talking about historical Popes the plural would apply and a second group of endings could be used: **ae, arum, is, as, is.
**
This is beyond the scope of what most journalists would be expected to know. More confusing yet is that these are feminine rather than masculine endings.
Which is why a male in an alumnus and a woman an alumna.
The masculan versions are: us, i, o, um, o and : i, orum, is, os, is
How one word or another became associated with the “masculine” or “feminine” endings is unclear to me or even why they are called that. Farmer for example is "Agricola. Why? Perhaps some relations ship to mother earth. Perhaps Papa is feminine because he is the head of “Mother Church” a common useage.
Island, which should be neutral is, insula. (He tossed his brother insula bay. A really old one.)
I wonder, haven taken Latin rather than Italian, Spanish or French, whether translations in those languages could confuse things for international journalists.
It could easily be that Papum could be correct in one of those languages, all three, and German having distinct roots in Latin, as does English (perhaps 50-60%).
More likely, bad editing.
Or, as I was often admonished “Semper ubi sub ubi”.
Those who forget such wisdom in winter time, do so at their peril!
Peter, Founder 
The International School of Blog Repair and other satirical nonsense.
My undying thanks to Frank Raispis, deserved holder of the Golden Apple Award for Excellence in Teaching, who is in no way responsible for any errors in the above. He really tried desperately hard to get me to learn this stuff in the 70’s, and through some miracle I retain some of it including “Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Laviniaque venit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae. Musa…”. AMDG
…in any case, the “Habemus Papum” misspelling is probably just a case of someone attempting to transcribe who was quite unfamiliar with Latin, and decided to wing it rather than consult a reliable source, figuring that if it sounded like it ended in (vowel-m), it must be “-um”
It’s interesting that both **Chronos ** and **The Peter Files ** listed the cases in the order:
- nominative;
- genitive;
- dative;
- accusative; and
- ablative.
I was taught to decline nouns in Latin in a slightly different order, namely:
- nominative;
- accusative;
- genitive;
- dative; and
- ablative
I wonder whether this is a regional difference? Or perhaps a generational one?
I too learned the Chronos/Peter version. Perhaps it’s another effect of being Down Under that Latin cases are shuffled, much like your January summers? 
I need to take exception to The Peter Files comments though. Grammatical gender has very little to do with human sex, except that the class of noun that includes most male things is tagged “masculine” and the one that includes most female things is tagged “feminine” To a language with “natural” gender, like English, it sounds contrived. But it’s actually a matter of declensional similarity, not classification that a day is masculine while the concept hope is feminine in some bizarre metaphysical sense.
Most first-declension Latin nouns are feminine, and many of them reference female persons and creatures. But there are a fair-size group of masculine nouns. Did you hear the joke about the Pope, the sailor, and the farmer? If I were telling it in Latin, they’d all be masculine first declension nouns.
Well, I know that Spanish and Italian don’t mess with declensions, and I don’t believe French does either, but just FTR here’s “We have a pope” in each of the three:
Spanish: Tenemos un papa.
Italian: Abbiamo un papa.
French: Nous avons un pape.
The Italian and French are from Google’s translation service, so I’m not 100%.
[aside 1]el papa (masculine) in Spanish is the Pope, but la papa (feminine) is the potato. Papas fritas = fried potatoes, papas fritos = fried popes.[/aside]
[aside 2]It’s interesting that Italian and French have retained habere in some form from Latin to mean to have in the sense of possession, while Spanish uses tener (which is a root shared with English, being the -tain part of words like maintain, contain, etc.) to mean to have as possession. However, Spanish retains habere (as haber), which means to have in the present perfect tense – “I have done something” = “He hecho algo”, where he is the first-person singular conjugation of haber. Even more interesting (to me at least) is that the Spanish future tense uses the conjugations of the word haber as endings on verbs (after dropping the “h”) to conjugate verbs into the future – “Has” (familiar) You have - “H” = “as” + “hablar” to speak = “Hablarás” (familiar) You will speak.[/aside]
Sorry, got a little carried away there. The descent of languages fascinates me.
I think the first is probably a matter of which series of Latin text were chosen at your school. It may or may not go along with the difference in pronunciation between “Church Latin” and “Latin as Spoken in Rome” which we may or may not have right.
As a brief example, Caesars famous line, “I came, I saw, I conquered” pronounced in Church Latin has hard V’s, long e and i (I think( and a “ch” sound for the c. “Veni, Vidi, Vici” = very tough sounding.
The more likely pronunciation at the time had a w sound for the v and a hard c. Why would this be popular for two thousand years of Latin teachers. Imagine getting through the opening of Caesars Gallic wars with the immortal words “Weenie, weedy, weeky”. Remember, now this is high school fodder, a couple of centuries ago this might have been started, for those lucky enough to get any education at all, at a much earlier age.
Then there is declining the verb Scio, which means “to know”. I know is used so often that it got a little mangled over time, became an irregular verb (scholars out there catch me if I am misremembering) and had to be learned separately.
Scio - I Know
Scis - You Know
Scit - He, She or it knows
It does not take a rocket scientist to see why with a whole classromm repeating/drilling aloud the conjugation of the verb scio through all its forms why Latin teachers might prefer the hard Skio pronunciation to the soft Shio pronuniciation. Work it out. :eek:
For some reason I have a dim recollection of an entire class down the hall LOUDLY using the SH pronunciation anyway - and getting away with it because it was technically more accurate, even if very amusing.
As to the second point, this is a case of me conveying the opposite of what I meant to say. My point was in fact that there was nothing connecting the terms masculine and feminine with the actual genders of the objects themselves. So thanks for clarifying that for everyone. If you read my post carefully, you will see how clumsily I tried to say the same thing you did so elegantly.
By the way, for those who don’t read Latin, the key to translating the phrase I used above is that semper = always, sub = under, and ubi = where. Usually the joke you learn on day 1 of Latin 1.
I don’t want to get political, but let’s assume that W. was in fact a good warrior. In that case his dad could proudly state for all the world to hear:
Fili Mi Boni Belli!
(My son is a good Warrior!) That joke is from week 2.
Having shared that stinker, let me finish with the rhyme familiar to Latin students far and wide.
Latin is a Language
As dead as it can be,
First, it killed the Romans
And now it’s Killing Me!
Thank you for your indulgences.
Those of you reading this authorized to grant them that is.
Peter
Like I said in the Title there. Slate reports in detail the fumbling Fox :smack: had with this whole thing. Very much worth the click.
Peter