[antir-heralds] Latin for motto

[Ursula Georges]

> It seems appropriate that we then use the old Wide World of Sports motto:
> 
> The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat
> 
> And like many such things it would be amusing to put it in Latin. :) I 
> could just put it in Middle English, but Latin would be fun. It seems 
> like the sort of phrase that might be relatively easy to translate, but 
> I don't know.

This one is grammatically pretty straightforward.  Tell you what, I'll 
teach you how to fish :)

Let me start with a historical caveat.  We all learned in school that 
Renaissance means "rebirth", and that the Renaissance involved a 
resurgence of interest in classical Greek and Roman scholarship, right? 
  One of the ways that resurgence trickled down to non-scholars is that 
the average guy on the street was much more likely to want a motto *in 
Latin* and to believe that a motto *in Latin* indicated that he was 
well-educated and generally superior.  The preference for Latin mottoes 
is really a late-fifteenth to sixteenth- to out-of-period preference. 
Truly medieval mottoes are just as likely to be English or French or 
whatever other language people were speaking and writing.  So if you 
want to be medieval, please do use Middle English!  We could use some 
more of that around here.

Now, if you want to put it into Latin . . .  Latin uses case-- changes 
to the form of a word-- in many places where English would use 
preposition.  In particular, Latin doesn't have a word for "of". 
Instead, I'd expect a word in the genitive case.  There's also no 
definite article-- the definite modern Romance languages are usually 
derived from the Latin word for "that", ille or illa.

If you look up a noun in a Latin dictionary, you will find it in the 
nominative case.  That's the case that's used for the subject of a 
sentence.  The next thing you'll see is the genitive case, or maybe an 
abbreviation for the genitive case.  For instance, if you look up 
<victoria> 'victory' in a dictionary, it says "victoria, -ae".  That 
tells you that <victoria> is "victory", while <victoriae> means "of 
victory".  See my article on "How to read a Latin dictionary" for more 
examples:

http://www.doomchicken.net/~ursula/sca/howtoreadalatindictionary.html

The general structure I'd expect for "the thrill of victory and the 
agony of defeat" is:

<thrill (nominative)> <victory (genitive)> et <agony (nominative)> 
<defeat (genitive)>

Et is the Latin word for "and"-- maybe you knew that already?

Now all you need to do is find a good dictionary to plug in the words. 
Perseus is one of the best online classics sites in terms of content, 
though it can be extremely unreliable.  Right now it seems to be 
working.  For translation you'll want the English to Latin search tool 
on the old site:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cache/perscoll_PersInfo.html

Sort words by frequency.

Let us know what you come up with :)

Ursula filia Georgii.