Diacritiques

Unsettling. The domain name of the young French Catholics’ web portal is, I’m not kidding, inXL6.org. (Hint, if you don’t get it right away: the number 6, six, is pronounced [sis].) The logo looks faintly mathematical: in X L⁶. And the site is even web standards compliant. Hosanna!

Via Tristan Nitot.

There’s another quiz up at Language Log, this time set by Geoffrey Pullum.

The task is to rewrite the USA motto E pluribus unum (”out of many, one”, representing the union of the original 13 states) to signify the converse “out of one, many” — in Latin.

I’m a bit hesitant to offer my solution. The idea to be presented with Dan Brown novels as a prize is just too scary. But still, let’s not chicken out!

First step, e or ex? Well, ex is always fine, e only before consonants, I think, and the next word is a form of unus so it’s ex. And ex takes the ablative case, so it’s ex uno.

Now, how to transform pluribus? It could be in the accusative case here, the object of an elided verb (”Let’s make one[many] out of many[one]”). On the other hand, the nominative case would fit as well (”From the multitude[unity] springs unity[multitude]”). Not that it helps much, as for both the masculine/feminine form plures and the neuter plura, the nominative form is the same as the accusative.

So what gender do we choose? It depends on whether, in the original, unum is the attribute of something (a state, a nation), or if it refers to the abstract, unity, the condition of being one. I’d go for the latter, but we’re not finished, because I’m not sure that Latin would use the neuter plural plura to refer to the corresponding several-ness. In other words, I’d be asking plura/several what, and we are back to the missing noun. If that noun’s gender is neuter — or if the abstract can be used in the plural –, the solution is plura, otherwise it’s plures.

For the elided noun (if there is one), I come up with natio (feminine) or populus (masculine), or civitas (feminine). Neither fits with the neuter unum in the original motto.

Final submission:

1. Ex uno plura (with the original neuter adjective)
2. Ex uno plures [nationes]

P.S.: I’m surprised Geoffrey Pullum doesn’t mention the origin of the motto. It probably came from a sort of 18th century Reader’s Digest called Gentlemen’s Magazine, which was widely read by the elites. This is not a lofty classical quote.

P.P.S.: The title of this post refers to a mnemotechnic aid (Eselsbrücke in German, i.e. a bridge for donkeys) used by German learners of Latin to remember which adjectives/quantifiers take the ending -ius in the genitive case and ī in the dative case. It goes like this:

Unus, solus, totus, ullus,
uter, alter, neuter, nullus,
alius erfordern alle
ius in dem zweiten Falle,
und im dritten setze sie
stets mit einem langen i.

P.P.P.S.: I wonder if I should tell the amusing story about how I got my copy of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language…

The other day, Dr Dave at unknowngenius passionately disputed something I had said earlier. My crime? Having suggested that in Terence’s line

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.

the word homo should be translated as human being.

I should, of course, know better than to reply to a post in which the term “PC” is uttered. On this matter, I wholeheartedly agree with how the Guardian style guide puts it:

political correctness
a term to be avoided on the grounds that it is, in Polly Toynbee’s words, “an empty rightwing smear designed only to elevate its user”

But I know Dave as an all in all great guy who is only sometimes misguided. So I am making an exception.  read the post »

Another WotW, for the only reason that I stumbled over it two days ago. This one is in French, so you might want to read the full story in the French version of this post. Moineau de Lesbie, literally Lesbia’s sparrow is the title of a bust of Rachel (Elizabeth-Rachel Félix, dite Elisa) (1821-1858), who was […]