Category: Languages

Okay.

So I’m reading on WorldWideWords.Org and they have this section on (allegedly) "weird words."

On the page for hornswoggle, they state that it is "often assumed to be one of those highfalutin words like absquatulate and rambunctious that frontier Americans were so fond of creating."

WHAT???

I’ll gladly admit (in fact, I’ll proudly insist) that 19th century Americans had a real word-factory going, but by what set of criteria is rambunctious a "highfalutin" word???

That’s a real sockdolager! Those scalawags are trying to hornswoggle us on this one! I’ve a mind to absquatulate their web site and skedaddle! What a bunch of consarned snollygosters!

[DICTIONARY LINK FOR THE 19TH-CENTURALLY CHALLENGED.]

So I was watching this episode of DS9 where Dr. Brashir is whining about the fact he was salutatorian rather than valedictorian at Starfleet Medical (because, as revealed in another episode, he deliberately missed a question on a test [because, as revealed in yet another episode, he is a genetically modified human who didn’t want to blow his cover]).

And I get to thinking about the word valedictorian.

Obvious Latin roots.

Looks like it has the roots to mean "farewell" and "to speak" in it.

And, indeed, it does.

Latin: valedicere = vale (farewell) + dicere (to speak); to bid farewell.

A valedictory is thus a "farewell speech" and a valedictorian is the person who gives it at a commencement, usually the highest scoring student.

Then I started thinking about the word vale.

Where does it come from? Looks like an imperative form of valere. But what does valere mean?

"To be strong, to be powerful, to be healthy, to prevail, to succeed."

To succeed?

So "Vale!" might be translated as "Succeed!"

That’s (more or less) what Klingons say to bid each other as a farewell: Qapla’!

I wonder if on Qo’noS they call valedictory a Qapla’SoQ? (Qapla’ = success + SoQ = speech).

Probably the most combat-proficient student gets to give it.

So I was watching this episode of DS9 where Dr. Brashir is whining about the fact he was salutatorian rather than valedictorian at Starfleet Medical (because, as revealed in another episode, he deliberately missed a question on a test [because, as revealed in yet another episode, he is a genetically modified human who didn’t want to blow his cover]).

And I get to thinking about the word valedictorian.

Obvious Latin roots.

Looks like it has the roots to mean "farewell" and "to speak" in it.

And, indeed, it does.

Latin: valedicere = vale (farewell) + dicere (to speak); to bid farewell.

A valedictory is thus a "farewell speech" and a valedictorian is the person who gives it at a commencement, usually the highest scoring student.

Then I started thinking about the word vale.

Where does it come from? Looks like an imperative form of valere. But what does valere mean?

"To be strong, to be powerful, to be healthy, to prevail, to succeed."

To succeed?

So "Vale!" might be translated as "Succeed!"

That’s (more or less) what Klingons say to bid each other as a farewell: Qapla’!

I wonder if on Qo’noS they call valedictory a Qapla’SoQ? (Qapla’ = success + SoQ = speech).

Probably the most combat-proficient student gets to give it.

Y’all may remember a while ago I mentioned that when I go to the Japanese market for low-carb noodles, that–just to figure out what kind of product I’m holding in my hand–I often have to rely on tiny nutritional labels slapped on by the importer. Sometimes the product name on the label is kind of comically descriptive, like “Corn Snack.”

Well, I can’t eat Corn Snack (too high in carbs), but I just found one I can eat: Beans Snack!

I am so totally amused by Beans Snack. It has so many great things going for it.

1) With only six grams of carb per serving, and three of that fiber, I can indulge in Beans Snack . . . in moderation.

2) It has a really cool package with all these little green pea Japanese warrior-lookin’ dudes performing incomprehensible tasks. They are so cool! I wonder if they’re the Japanese equivalent of the California Raisins (remember those “Heard It Through The Grape Vine” commercials about fifteen years ago?). Maybe the Beans Snack pea-warriors are part of a major advertising campaign over there or something. I sure hope so.

3) The helpful English nutritional label was written by someone who speaks Japanese rather than English as his native language. You can tell because of the Engrish name of the product: “Beans Snack.”

Now, obviously that’s not what we could call such a product in English. We’d have fancy-schmancy made-up name like “Beanoritos” or something. But I assume that’s the case in Japanese, too. “Beans Snack” is probably an attempted description and not a translation of the product’s name (which I assume is either “Calbee” or “Saya Endo Sappari Shio-Aji”; probably the latter). Yet a native-English speaker wouldn’t have called it that, as you can tell by two things:

a) The principle ingredient of Beans Snack isn’t beans at all but green peas (hence the little green pea warrior dudes). A native English-speaker would know that green peas aren’t considered beans (at least the way they are popularly spoken of, regardless of what a botanist might tell you).

b) We’ve got a plural adjective here: “Beans.” The thing is, English doesn’t have plural adjectives. We pluralize our nouns, but not our adjectives. Thus we might have “a bunch of grapes” (“grape” functioning as a noun) but not “grapes soda” (“grape” functioning as an adjective). In Japanese, the rules regarding pluralization are very different: There isn’t any, at least normally. Japanese nouns (and adjectives) don’t inflect (change form) for number, so they are neither singular nor plural (or both singular and plural, depending on how you look at it).

The Japanese-speaking label-writer knew that English does have plural nouns and misinterpreted “bean” as a noun in this case. Since peas normally come in a group, he used what he thought was a proper English plural form, not realizing that here the word is an adjective and adjectives in English don’t inflect for number.

4) Beans Snack actually tastes good! It has a kind of . . . well, green pea taste. A little salty. A little sweet, but not very much. It has a nice, crunchy texture. After sampling it, I find myself thinking “Hey, I’d like some more Beans Snack now!” It’s one of those hard-to-eat-just-one snacks.

Low carb . . . cute package . . . comical and interesting language issue . . . good taste. What more could you want in a snack?

Three cheers for Beans Snack!!!

I wanted to thank everybody for taking the time to look at the experimental Latin lessons and leave feedback. I haven’t done an exact count, but the split seems roughly even between those who like format #1 and those who like format #2, with perhaps a modest majority for format #1 (though that’s just an impression).

Several have asked whether I’m working on a book or web site teaching Latin by this method, and the answer is “maybe.” I initially did the lessons as an experiment–just to see how this teaching technique would work and whether people would find it useful. The response has been quite positive (though that may be because those who didn’t like the lessons didn’t bother to write in).

As a result of the positive feedback, I’m continuing to develop new lessons using this technique. I’m not sure whether I’ll put them together as a book or a website or first-a-website-and-then-a-book. I’ll need to get a few more lessons done before I make that decision.

As far as formatting, I’ll probably continue to write in format #1, which is the easier format to write in. Then, afterwards, I can rearrange the information into format #2 if that turns out to be the way to go.

I’ll let y’all know how it goes, and will share some more lessons soon to get more feedback.

Much obliged, folks!

P.S. To touch on a few things folks raised in the comments boxes:

1) I *don’t* think that Latin needs to be learned before Greek. In fact, I find Greek grammar easier than Latin (the noun system in Greek is *half* the complexity of the noun system in Latin, e.g.), and there are much better Greek textbooks out there. For example, William Mounce’s Basics of Biblical Greek is the best there is (at least until the one I’ve worked on off-and-on over the years gets published maybe someday).

2) I *loathe* John Collins’ Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin. It is the book I learned from, and its pedagogy is horrendous and seems to be designed to make things as difficult on the student as possible. You really need a good teacher if you’re going to get through this one, but it can be done. Unfortunatley, I don’t know of a better text on ecclesiastical Latin to recommend. I know there are some; I just don’t have them and so haven’t looked at them and am thus unable to recommend any. There is one that’s half-classical/half-ecclesiastical Latin that I like, but the author’s name and its exact title escape me at the moment (language textbooks tend to have such similar titles).

3) One person suggested using ecclesiastical texts in addition to Scripture in the course I’m designing, and I had been semi-planning to do that. After working through Mark a logical switch would be to the text of the Mass. Anyway, we’ll see.

No, not that stuff that shows up in your e-mail box. That OTHER stuff. Y’know, that shows up on the dinner table. Sometimes. Maybe.

Actually, let me revise: Three cheers for the Hormel corporation, makers of SPAM!

Why?

Well, they’ve adopted a pretty easy-going stance regarding the use of the term “spam” for unsolicited commercial e-mail. They’ve recognized (a) that they really can’t stop the language from evolving new uses of a term they originated and (b) that the new use doesn’t conflict with their trademark term SPAM. So they’ve published a statement saying that they don’t mind people calling unsolicited commercial e-mail “spam” as long as they leave it in lower-case letters to distinguish it from their trademark term “SPAM” (all caps).

This contrasts with the behavior of other corporations who have gotten really uptight when people started using their terms in new ways. Some (*cough* Lucas, *cough* Disney, *cough* Xerox) have become distinctly prickly and sometimes even sued or threatened lawsuits when people wanted to do things like . . . oh . . . apply the term “Star Wars” to the Strategic Defense Initiative or the term “Mickey Mouse” to inferior or poorly-thought-out things and ideas or “Xerox” to photocopying done on something other than a machine made by the Xerox corporation.

So three cheers for Hormel and their being such great guys about the new use of “spam.”

Makes me want to go out and buy a can of SPAM.

(Which, incidentally, works great on the Atkins Diet.)

READ THE STATEMENT.

A reader writes:

I’ve recently responded to your blog’s Latin lesson entry — and this question was rolling in my mind for the past week, so I figured that you may be able to answer from a linguistic viewpoint.

Fr. Amorth says in [an] interview:

This same Jesus had taught us a prayer for liberation in the Our
Father: “Deliver us from the Evil One. Deliver us from the Person of
Satan.” This prayer has been mistranslated and today people pray
saying, “Deliver us from evil.” One speaks of a general evil whose
origin is essentially unknown. But the evil against which Our Lord
Jesus taught us to fight is, on the contrary, a concrete person: it is
Satan.

My question is this — Is Fr. Amorth’s translation accurate for the Lord’s Prayer?

Based off of your blog’s lesson, I think it’s possible — as you noted there are no articles in Latin:

Latin does not have words for “a,” “an,” or “the.” This means that if
you wanted to say “voice,” “a voice,” or “the voice,” in Latin you
would just say vox. When you translate from Latin into English, you
will have to guess based on the context whether you should add “a,”
“an,” “the” or nothing at all to the word you are translating.

Let me start by saying that I have grave reservations about Fr. Amorth and do not recommend his writings. This Rock published a review of one of Fr. Amorth’s books a while ago (online here, scroll down) which highlights some of the problems with his writings. I would add two thoughts: (1) I think the reviewer was far too kind to Fr. Amorth’s book; he could have (and, to my mind, should have) slammed Fr. Amorth far harder than he did. (2) Nothing I have seen from Fr. Amorth since this review was published has altered my opinion of the matter.

Having said that, there is something to what he is saying in this case. The language that is most relevant to the matter, though, is not Latin.

It would be ideal if we had an Aramaic original of the Lord’s Prayer, but we don’t–at least not an indisputable one, and Aramaic is kind of fuzzy regarding the definiteness of nouns, anyway. Unlike Hebrew and Arabic, it does not have a definite article, but (sometimes) uses a grammatical feature of nouns called “state” to express definiteness. If a noun was meant to be definite, they would put it in “the emphatic state.” Unfortunately, over time Aramaic started to use the emphatic state for nouns even when they aren’t definite (which is to say, even when we wouldn’t put a “the” in front of them in English). In modern Aramaic the emphatic state has almost completely taken over, and this trend was already established in Jesus’ day, even if it had not yet completely taken over.

So we have to use the canonical form of the Lord’s Prayer, which is in Greek. Here we have an advantage, because Greek (like English and Hebrew and Arabic but unlike Latin and Aramaic) does have a definite article (i.e., a word for “the”). When we consult the Greek text of the Lord’s Prayer in Matt. 6:13, we find that the phrase corresponding to “from evil” is “apo tou ponErou,” which would literally be “from the evil” (apo = from, tou = the, ponErou = evil).

That’s not the end of the story, though, because the translator has to make a choice at this juncture. He could translate the phrase as “from the evil one,” meaning the devil, or he could take note of the fact that Greek sometimes overuses the definite article (from an English-speaker’s perspective). In particular, Greek often wants to use the definite article in front of abstract concepts like “Truth” or “Beauty” . . . or “Evil.” (It was the same in Palestinian Jewish Aramaic in Jesus’ day: The emphatic state was often used for abstract concepts.)

Therefore, we can’t say with certainty here. It’s debatable. Different translators render it different ways, and both are legitimate.

The Catechism reflects this uncertainty. When it first broaches the meaning of the phrase, it says:

CCC 2851 In this petition, evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God. The devil (dia-bolos) is the one who ‘throws himself across’ God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ.

But this doesn’t mean that the petition refers only to the devil, for he’s certainly contained within the range of the phrase even if it’s a more generic reference to evil. The Catechism thus also notes:

CCC 2854 When we ask to be delivered from the Evil One, we pray as well to be freed from all evils, present, past, and future, of which he is the author or instigator. In this final petition, the Church brings before the Father all the distress of the world. Along with deliverance from the evils that overwhelm humanity, she implores the precious gift of peace and the grace of perseverance in expectation of Christ’s return By praying in this way, she anticipates in humility of faith the gathering together of everyone and everything in him who has ‘the keys of Death and Hades,’ who ‘is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.’[Rev 1:8,18; cf. Rev 1:4; Eph 1:10]

Deliver us, Lord, we beseech you, from every evil and grant us peace in our day, so that aided by your mercy we might be ever free from sin and protected from all anxiety, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Sounds to me like the Catechism may be hedging its bets. In any event, the biblical text isn’t decisive one way or the other.

One more reason to exercise caution when Fr. Amorth says something.