See subject. My understanding is that it has multiple meanings depending on its grammatical definition.
Thanks
Literally, “mother’s love”.
Mother love (i.e., the love of a mother for her children).
There is no grammatical ambiguity to it, so far as I can see. Matris is unambiguously the genitive form.
Motherly love, a mother’s love. You can phrase it in different ways in English, but it amounts to the same thing.
Yes, but no. It is a genitive, but the genitive can be a objective genitive or a subjective genitive. Depending on which it is, the phrase can mean ‘love for the mother’ (objective gen - the mother is the object of ‘someone loves the mother’) or ‘love of the mother’ (for someone else) (subjective gen - mother is the subject of ‘the mother loves someone’).
The meaning of the phrase is ambiguous and dependent on context.
ETA: link, moar link (pdf)
I love my bed.
I’m open to correction here, but I’m not sure that you have the subjective genitive in Latin. What in English we can talk of as a man’s “love of his mother”, in Latin we have to call a man’s “love for his mother”, which uses the dative case, not the genitive - so, amor matri, not amor matris.
Did you read the links I posted?
Oops! First time round I couldn’t open your .pdf link, but it works now and I see that it covers the point exactly.
Your other link worked find, but didn’t explicitly address the question of the subjective genitive in Latin.
True, the wiki just discusses it in general terms. In any case, it’s been a while since I’ve dealt with Latin but I distinctly remember discussing subjective and objective genitives when I did, and particularly using the example of love, and a phrase like ‘so and so’s love’ being ambiguous.
Amor = Love
Matris = Mother
So, literally, “Motherfucker”.
Thanks. The word(s) are from a theme in Ulysses, and are identified by the character who says them, Stephen. I wanted to hear it doped out here, but didn’t want to queer the pot, as it were. I apologise if OP seems like a “gotcha.”
It is from the Nestor chapter, and Stephen broods on his love for his mother and her love for him (“the one true thing”). Here, as a paid teacher, he is helping a not-so-bright child, Sargent, do his sums:
In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue of shame flickering behind his dull skin. Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me.
plaudere lusus clava et pila
Latin does have both subjective and objective genitive, and the Romans sometimes used this fact in wordplay. There’s an interesting bit in Gellius’ Attic Nights V.12 that is on point (Latin original here:
It is clear from the Ulysses quote that Joyce wants to press the simultaneous double meaning of Amor matris–it means both “Mother’s love” (subjective) and “Love for mother” (objective).
Thanks for the cite. I might add it (with citation of you) in the Ulysses-List, and pretend I know Latin.