yeah this is pretty ridiculous, the dative singulars of the third person pronoun are all identical (ei). I got the surrender/ hand over to him/her/it part, but what is the rest of it supposed to mean?
“I” (i dont feel like making macrons) can be the present, singular, imperative: Go!
“quo” i’m guessing would be something like “where”, but given the next verb could be “on which”
“cubit” according to my latin dictionary is not a word. It could be cubat/cubuit = he lays / has laid down.
or quo could signify the introduction of a relative purpose clause and the verb could have been the subjunctive cubet. That would make it something like “go whereby he lays down”? To hell with this, i’m not at work right now.
I never watch tv unless I am at a friend’s house and every time I do I get bored out of my mind because I’d rather talk to them about interesting things than be absorbed in some prime time drama. Probably why i’m here right now instead of out there.
I’ll buy that, though the translation they give didn’t carry that over. I just dismissed it as noise, but you’re probably right.
I use the Maori keyboard layout to make macrons easy to deal with.
I think they meant quod, but I transcribed it to match the way she said it.
What she enunciated seemed very clearly like a ‘b’ in the middle, but the english translation given means the word would have to be ‘cupit’ - he/she/it desires.
I’ve tried to picture the process through which this quote got screwed up in the first place. Did they start by phoning up a Latinist and then by a process like the Telephone game it got garbled? Was it mangled by a coffee stain on the script? A heard of wildebeasts ran through the studio? It got changed at the last minute by a clueless producer? It was a test run to see how many angry nerds they had in their audience?
If the Latinist they called up was native to such another language, that could have led to a transcription error if the hearer was, say, an English speaker. So as long as we’re speculating, how do you suppose the ‘d’ got dropped from ‘quod’? Because coffee stain is still looking pretty good here.
(In other words, you’re quite right: even assuming the remote possibility that an actor’s dialect coach was trying to convey such a nicety of consonental pronunciation and said actor got it right, it’s far, far, far less likely than a genuine error, as suggested by other data such as the quod > quo thing. Though I will point out that the Old Latin word-final ablative -d was dropped by the Classical period, so perhaps an overcompensating time-travelling Old-Latin-speaker was involved?)
This reminds me of a pet hate of mine when reading a learned tome. They quote notables in their original language, sometimes translating it into English but often just leaving it floating. I can speak passable French and a bit of German but it drives me mad when they do this.
Most people who study Latin for its own sake couldn’t carry on a conversation in it. It’s generally just not taught that way. A renaissance scholar or 18th century scientist perhaps could have conversed in Latin. But until recently, the idea of doing so seemed to have been completely abandoned.
One of the best classes I ever took in high school was Latin. It taught me far more about grammar and syntax and the base forms of a huge number of English words than many years of English classes ever did.
Agreed, and it also teaches interpretation of primary sources, which helps the overall study of history and culture. And Latin is a beautiful, rich language. I learned to love Martial, who was the ultimate smartass and Virgil, who made Latin his bitch when he wrote the Aeneid.
