Would any expert here be able to help translate Laplace’s famous quote into Latin?
I tried some of the online translation tools but to my eye the results look like crap.
The quote in English:
I had no need for that hypothesis.
Wikipedia says in French it was “'Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”
Try:
Ratio non mihi necesse erat.
I suspect that Laplace, who could write in Latin himself, would have used the word hypothesis. The scientific meaning may not be classical, but the word is Latin, and came to its current meaning before the time Laplace was writing. I’m being fuzzy, because I can’t pin it down, but Newton’s famous phrase “Hypothesis nōn fingō” dates from at least as far back as 1713.
I’d just like to mention that seeing a Wikipedia in Latin is awesome, and I can even understand the introduction paragraphs. Of course, that probably has more to do with the fact that I know just about what it should say (in English) than my knowledge of Latin from college.
Note: gravitas I’m pretty sure just means “weight” or “heaviness”, thus in Latin there is an explicit connection between the force of gravity and weight. I’m wondering how true this is for other romance language.
Missed edit window.
I don’t like the use of “ratio” here. It means something closer to “reason” than “hypothesis”. I believe hypothesis is a perfectly reasonable Latin word (taken from Greek), meaning something close enough to English’s to work here. I’m guessing that it would be but in the dative(?), but given it’s a Greek word I’m not sure what the declension would be - many Greek-based words had strange declensions preserving some of the Greek forms. You probably also want a form of “illa” in there as well - without it it sounds like you need no hypothesis at all, and the quote refers to a specific one.
Yeah, there are a lot of stubs in Vicipaedia, but it’s nice to skip around and see what has been filled in. More interesting, though, is to look for entries that have Disputātiō. I learn a lot about the language from seeing people argue about how to discuss modern concepts in it, certainly not less when they do so in Latin.
Think of it as ‘reasoning’.
But is it a valid Latin word?
Why not? It appears in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, though not attested before the 16th century, and the more modern sense is attested above in the Latin of Newton during the NeoLatin period.
So if the word hypothesis were used, how would it fit in the sentence given above by Quartz? Would it just replace “ratio” one for one or require other changes (to the word or word order)?
Thanks for the help everybody.
The “hypothesis” should come last, since it’s basically the punchline, but there are multiple constructions that cover that general territory. Also, I do think the pointy-ness of 3rd person pronoun is good here. Some stabs at it:
Necesse mihi nōn erat illud hypothesis.
Mihi nōn opus est illud hypothesis.
Nōn rēfert meā illud hypothesis.
Which derives from Rouse Ball, a distinctly secondary source. My understanding is that there isn’t a direct French source for the quote. There is apparently some version of the story, as told by Laplace himself, recorded by William Herschel in his diary during a roughly contemporaneous visit to Paris. I haven’t seen the text of that, but I suspect that this is the best primary source and I’d guess the quoted French version is a backwards translation from a statement given by Herschel in English (or, just maybe, German).
So hypothesis just happens to be in the right case, or whatever its called when you have to change the last letters?
Well, in all the examples above it is, because they all use the word in the nominative. But it just so happens that being a 3rd declension neuter whose nominative singular ends in -is, which means it’s spelled the same in three cases. Five if you count the vocative and have any idea why Whitaker’s Words gives the same form for the genitive plural.
Anyway, I could as well have written:
Nōn mihi opus est illō hypothese.
And this may in fact be more correct, since the book I’m looking at right now gives the ablative as the case in nearly the exact same construction. Hmmm.
Thanks everybody. Most helpful.
This blogpost gives more detail. (Before posting the above, I’d guessed that The Herschel Chronicle might have the relevant text, but hadn’t spotted the passage in my copy of it.) However, its (understandable) suspicion that E.T. Bell invented the French quote is refuted by Wikipedia’s slightly earlier Rouse Ball cite.