"Latin help" Topic

Hi

is anyone good at Latin who can help me with a simple translation. I am doing a small assignment for next week, and am stuck on the phrase

Nihil me mouet

now I know Nihil is nothing, and me is me. and mouet is move, 3rd person single in the present tense, so literally that would be

Nothing me he moves.

Now for the life of me, I can't work out how to turn it into an intelligible sentence. Nothing he moves me? or Me he moves nothing. It has to be subject verb object but I just can't seem to get it.

Can anyone help?

cheers

Jacqueline

Don't try to make it more complex than it is. Hint: try "Nihil" as the subject.

Good old Erasmus…

Allen

Now I never learnt English grammar, so the best I can come up with as Nothing as the subject is

nothing, he moves me. or is it trying to say, nothing moves me. but if it did, what has happened to the 3rd person bit (ie he moves)

That mean Allen. I search for Erasmus and I can see the quote, but my google fu wont let me find a translation.

Ok, my current translation is

Nothing moves me.

my logic being, that rather that the 3rd person being He, the third person is 'it'. so it would be. Nothing, it moves me. But in english we would see the it as a given, so we wouldn't say it. Is that close?

Subject: or agent that goes with the verb. So if nihil is the subject, the nihil, the nothing, goes with moves.

Nothing moves me.

perhaps its idiomatically….

He doesnt do anyting for me. (doesnt move me)

shouldn't that be movet? the v pronounced to sound like mo-wet?

mouet isn't a word I can find in my latin dictionary or online.

movet means "to move"

Then the translation becomes nothing me to move, which may be nothing to move me…seeming to support your "nothing moves me"

Though arguably…it's been 26 years since I took my latin classes. (yuck!)

It's been over 40 years since my Latin so bear with me. I do remember that my teachers always told me not to take phrases out of context but see them as they act in the text.

It is from Erasmus' Dialogue " Julius excluded from heaven"

The Latin Original phrase is nam pall quidem ista nihil me mouet,…

link

translated to Your cloak does not impress me either,…

link

Hope this helps. Thanks for the intellectual exercise.

Sorry, not the same context!

Try it on its own, as a separate phrase.

Allen

with movet and mouet. it is the same word, pronounced mouwet. we are being taught that the Roman's didn't use a v, and that the v in inscriptions is just a convention to make it easier to carve.

the u has 2 forms, the vocalic u and the consonantal u. So we have to look at the word and try and work out how to pronounce it because "if we are reading/translating any primary source latin it will have the u and not v"

Having the u and not v is a change in the last few years. personally I think this is silly and they should just be putting the v in when the sound is a w. It makes it easier to retain as we aren't used to seeing three vowels in a row. So its easier to read.

Generations of Latin scholars weep (including my teachers).

"What's the use of teaching them to say 'Kick-a-row' when for the rest of their lives they'll say 'Siss-a-row', if indeed they say it at all?"

why learn to say iulio (oolio) kaiser, when we call him Julius Caeser.

Books published years ago, they put the v and they put the j, then recently they decided to change. I can't understand why a convention that has been used for centuries when printing and writing latin is changed and makes things harder for the students? useful when translating texts from original sources, but how may original sources are found theses days that need first time translating? most have already been translated and are showing the v and the j.

and I really need to get back to work, I'm just avoiding writing about Cato.

"Caeser"

<tap>

<tap, tap>

<tap, tap, tap>

Thanks for that Mrs…I don't feel insane anymore. Well, at least no more insane than usually. Sounds like some scholars needed to justify some grant money or something. *chuckles*

It is a modern idea to try to get the written latin to sound more like the spoken. But just like in the English language, phonetics do not always work.
I believe the idea comes about because some of the names for example have carried over across the years and it is presumed the pronounciations have done the same. This new approach to ancient languages has come about from the realisation that Egyptian was a partial phonetic language in the sense that it took the first part of the pronounciation of each hyrographic symbol to form a whole spoken word.
The idea of Oolio for Julius comes from modern ideas that some spoken Spanish is closer to origial latin than Italian. With Latin being a dead language, its hard to know if they are right or not. Apart from that the only spoken latin pronounciation we know is from its use in the Catholic church, but even there the amount of 'conversational' Latin is limited because they are using it for prayers repeated down the centuries.
There are some lively and quite academic discussions of all this on the internet. I read several a couple of years ago, but I dont have the links any longer.

One thing I do remember being told, is to always try to use Latin in the context of the whole phrase words appear in. This is because just as we do, Latin speakers seem to have used various words to suit what they were trying to say rather than the rigid meaning of that word. For example we might conversationaly say 'Hey man' and it is a greeting, or depending on pronounciation can be a question, or of an explicative intent. Whereas the two words taken seperately have much more specific meaning. Therefore you translate the two together as one phrase, rather than idividually and then added together.

I dont know if that helps, but it was 45 years ago when I was taught Latin in order to understand many legal phrases.

"Hey man" is likely to be the guy that pitches hey up onto the hey wagon with a hey fork.

Of course there is one Latin phrase that needs no introduction and probably should be the motto of " Fruit of the Loom"

"Semper ubi, sub ubi"

Incidentally, I was quoting a movie, but all these arguments have merit. As Horatius at the bridge do I defy the Tarquin hordes of so-called "modern scholarship"! I learned The Aeneid in high school and I *liked* it, by Jove!

Well, not really…it was a slog, but still.