I was at a meeting at the University of Ottawa this past weekend and the motto was prominently displayed on the lectern. My crude knowledge of Latin suggests that it translates as “God is the lord of the sciences”. Is this correct? I might mention that the university started life as a Jesuit institution. I might also mention that the word order was not obvious. It might have read “Deus est scientiarum dominus”, but I doubt that that would make any difference.
Yep…God is the Master of Science.
Word order is mostly irrelevant in Latin. It can change emphasis, and there are a few cases where it can be ambiguous what noun an adjective is attached to or the like, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue here.
I don’t know a whole lot of Latin myself. Would that be “God is the lord of the sciences,” or “God is the lord of knowledge”? Or is that too fine of a distinction to make?
The university’s motto, rarely if ever seen outside the official crest, is “Deus Scientiarum Dominus Est” (“God is the Lord of the Sciences”, per this description of the history of the university, or “God is the master of science”, per this article in the university’s magazine). It reflects the religious ideals of the Catholic order who founded the university in 1848 as the College of Bytown. As with most universities in Canada, it has since evolved into a non-denominational, secular, publicly-funded univeristy, with no substantial connection to any particular church. The motto remains, but I expect most students are largely unaware of it – I don’t recall ever hearing a student even speak it aloud in the five years I spent there. The motto isn’t really part of the university’s branding, public personality, or culture, though as the OP points out, the crest is on many a lectern, motto and all.
Scientia, etymologically and linguistically, means “knowledge”. However once it’s pluralized, as it is here, we need to think a bit more deeply. “Knowledges” is not a meaningful concept in English.
In the plural, scientiae means different fields of knowledge and, now that we are into categorizing and classifying knowledge, it refers to the organized arrangement and methodical study of things that can be known. And it’s from this that our concept of “science” comes - not so much a body of knowledge, but of a disciplined and critical mode of investigating reality.
In English in the nineteenth century “science” came to refer particularly to the investigation of material reality - natural science - and it’s often contrasted with arts or letters. In Latin it has no such connotations - scientiae can be translated as “the sciences”, but it embraces not only the natural sciences like physics, chemistry etc and applied sciences like mechanics but also every other field of knowledge - literature, philosophy, theology, economics, ethics, etc. (And in romance languages it retains much more of this broad scope - there’s a distinguished academic journal published in France, for example, with the title of La Revue des Sciences Philosoophiques et Théologiques.) The English word “science” doesn’t ordinarily suggest this wide scope. And the English word “knowledge” suggests information, but not necessary organized, disciplined, critical study.
So I’d translate this as “God is the lord [or master] of the sciences”.
(Grammatically, you could also defend “the master of sciences is a god”, but in the context that’s a wildly unlikely sense.)
PS: The motto is a quote from scripture. It’s in the Vulgate in 1 Sam 2:3. The corresponding passage in most English translations runs something like “the Lord is a God of knowledge” or “the Lord is a wise God”.
That’s kind of an older usage, though. I suspect this journal may have existed for a long time, or have adopted that name as a throwback from another time. In French, today, “sciences” has basically the same connotation as in English.
IIRC from my medieval Latin courses (so useful now since for some reason I seem to be the translator of old stuff here), medieval Latinists kept the old tradition of putting the verb last (est) but also put the most important noun first. If they’d wanted to emphasize knowledge as opposed to God, it would be Scientiarum Deus dominus est. Of course, this would be medieval Latin so one wouldn’t have been de-emphasizing God, but that would be the principle anyway.
Stolen from Yoda, that was.
No, because then the ancient Romans would have said “Deus scientiarum dominus est, hmmmmm?”
Dagobahi eunt domo!