[antir-heralds] Latin for motto

[chrisact at qwickconnect.net]

Wenyeva atte grene wrote:
> 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?

Well, given that voluptuous and voluptuary come from, and resemble, 
voluptas, I'd be inclined not to use it. That's why I suggested 
"gaudium". ;-)

> 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?)

My Latin/English dictionary gives, for the full translation/definition 
of clades:
"disaster, ruin, damage, loss; (mil) defeat; (fig) scourge"

That "(mil)" means "military usage" so, yes, it's the word you want, 
IMO. :-)

> 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!

Hooray for me! ;-D

> 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


Well, the second one looks OK to me, but as I've said, I didn't have all 
that much Latin instruction, and it's been a long, long time since then. 
Let's see what Ursula says. ;-)


~~Basil Dragonstrike

-- 
The current Term of Multitude is:
A passel of brats -- from An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton