[antir-heralds] Latin for motto

[Wenyeva atte grene]

Ursula Georges wrote:

>> The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat

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

I know just enough to know that the phrase was probably relatively
straightforward, and also enough to know that when it comes to Latin I 
don't trust myself to get the cases right. Or to recognize when 
something that looks entirely innocent to me is actually a rude idiom 
found written on walls in a disreputable part of Pompeii. :)

I see that Basil has gone ahead and figured this out but I am going to 
try to see what I come up with if I try it myself. It might or might not 
match it.

> 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.

Agreed. And ideally, I plan to do both. >;)

"Thrill" in this sense isn't in Middle English, though, so I haven't
decided what to use in its place yet. "Joy," perhaps? "þe ioye of 
victorie and þe agonye of acombraunce." Or something.

We ended up not using this motto on the banner that we made for the 
event, though. Instead, we used the fine Middle English word "Victorie" 
by itself. We'll use this other slogan in some other way.

> 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?

Yup. :) I know a little bit of Latin -- enough to be dangerous and 
muddle through some manor court rolls here and there, but not enough to 
come up with things that make sense.

> 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 :)

Yeah, Perseus is not loading very often for me, and when it does, it's 
very hard to figure out. But I actually have a Cassell's to look at.

For "thrill (of pleasure) it gives me voluptas and gaudium. Do either of 
these have a connotation we *don't* want in this case?

So for the first phrase we have either:

Voluptas victoriae  (nice alliteration there) or
Gaudium victoriae

For "agony", Cassell's suggests aegritudo and dolor. Aegritudo means 
"sickness," it says, and that's not the sense I want... we mean "extreme 
pain," here. So dolor seems to work better.

And then for defeat, we have "clades" with the genitive form "cladis". 
(There is also "defectio/defectionis", meaning "failure," which might 
also work here. But if "clades" is used for a defeat in battle it's 
probably the word we want, isn't it?)

So that would make the second phrase:

Dolor cladis
or perhaps
Dolor defectionis (nice alliteration there)

Results:

Voluptas victoriae et dolor defectionis
Gaudium victoriae et dolor cladis

And I look and see that the latter is what Basil came up with!

My question now is, which one of those makes the most sense in Latin? Do 
any of those phrases mean something other than what we expect?

Thanks,
W

-- 
Wenyeva atte grene * "In tenebris lux"
Armorum Servula, quam Ancoram Caeruleam dicunt
pro multiloquio in Curia, finivit vjd
Per chevron argent and vert, three beacons counterchanged.