I tried Google translate first, because often it dioes a fine job for me.
However, when I entered, “blood is thicker than water,” the Latin phrase it spit out looked suspiciously wrong; so I fed it back through from Latin into English and I got, “blood is miserable to have companions.”
**I don’t want an interpretation of the meaning of the phrase in Latin. **
I want a literal translation of the terms, as a sentence.
From what I can tell the meaning of the idiom doesn’t work in Latin. The Latin word for blood is sanguinem but it apparently doesn’t have the idiomatic secondary meaning of kinship that it has in English. When a Latin speaker talks about blood he either means it literally as circulatory fluid or metaphorically as violence or war. A Latin speaker talking about kinship would say genus or stirps. So if you used the metaphor “blood is thicker than water” to a Roman, he might think you were saying stabbing somebody is more effective than drowning them.
But yeah, as an idiom it wouldn’t work with any Latin speaker whose native language doesn’t have the same idiom, although from context they could probably get the intended meaning.
Hey, thanks, guys. It’s a little hard to put this in words, but: it doesn’t matter if the idiom itself is directly translateable into Latin. It’s meant to be a Latin encoding, if you will, of an English-speaking phrase for an English-speaking person.
The same as if, say, it was translated into a rebus. So the literal translation is fine!
Agree with the OP’s reply. IMO nowadays, the “best” Latin mottoes are simple transliterations that can be “sounded out” by English speakers with zero formal knowledge of Latin.
Sanguis crassior aqua fits that mold perfectly. Even a linguistic doofus like me can dig out the meaning.