Latin proverbs | Hacker News Reader

Latin proverbs

en.wikiquote.org

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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

Translation: "Everything said in Latin, seems deep."

With the benefit of one semester of college Latin, I understand why I can't find a good online Latin translation service (for all those little gems you run into from time to time). The language has one of the smallest vocabularies, but it's hugely dependent on complex grammar for meaning.

Anyone create a Cleeki accelerator to do lookups on this page?

Because of its rich case system, Latin has fairly free word order. This makes it much easier to parse programmatically than, for example, English, which has to mostly rely on word order and prepositions to indicate subjects and objects. The lack of machine translation tools for Latin has more to do with lack of demand than the technical challenge.

>Because of its rich case system, Latin has fairly free word order. This makes it much easier to parse programmatically

From seeing this, I couldn't help but think of the Perl language filter Lingua::Romana::Perligata by Damian Conway.

http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50...

Word order in statements means nothing and case means everything -- lvalues, for example, are designated as such by being in the dative case.

It's not terribly useful for writing real code, but it certainly was a great cerebral exercise just to read the manpage (it's been 15 years since I took high school Latin and I realized I remembered more of it than I thought!).

Ha, that's very cool, never saw that before. Thanks for posting.

Compared to any other natural language I've ever studied, Latin grammar is a paragon of simplicity and logic.

Obscuris vera involvens.

Translation: Obscurity envelops truth (according to Virgil).

The mock latin section at the bottom is amusing: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Latin_proverbs#Mock_Latin

Excellent section xD I've used Carpe carpio for years, and used to have a phrase for "squeeze the carp"...

Gutta cavat lapidem Translation: "A drop hollows out the stone"

In Italy we study Latin for 5 years in high school if you go to what we call Liceo Scientifico (scientific high school), because it's considered a great mental exercise given it's very logical structure.

What is this then? Romanes eunt domus, "People called Romanes they go the house"?

...And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.

Missing "semper ubi sub ubi". Someone here had to be the first to say it. Might as well be someone who suffered through 4 years of high school latin.

No it isn't. Search - it's under the Mock Latin section.

While we're on the subject, would "Bloggitus, ergo sumus" mean something like "We blog, therefore we are"? I hope it does, I use it as the subtitle of my kids' blog: http://ludvig.eiman.tv/

"Bloggitus" isn't right; it would be something like "having blogged" or "being blogged about". Also, that double g is very un-Latin. I'd think something like "Blogamus" or "Blogimus" depending on how you want the verb to conjugate; the former feels more natural to me.

If you want something a bit more Cartesian, you could make the verb "blogito" rather than "blogo", in which case you need "blogitamus" instead of "blogamus". I'm not convinced it's sufficiently nearer to Descartes to justify such a barbarous coinage :-).

The rest is fine; "ergo sumus" is indeed the right pluralization of Descartes's "ergo sum".

Thanks!

It has been a while ago since I last studied Latin, but from memory it should be something like Blogito (for 'I') or Blogimus (for 'we').

Excusatio non petita, acusatio manifesta (main tool for Columbo)

Certum quod factum. - We believe what we build.

I love the conciseness of Latin.

"Caesar adsum iam forte, Brutus aderat. Caesar sic in omnibus, Brutus sic inhat"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Latin

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