Re: Latin question: "titillandus"
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, March 6, 2002, 10:10 |
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En réponse à daniel andreasson <danielandreasson@...>:
> I'm sorry about a non-conlang question but a friend
> of mine got this Latin message and he's wondering
> what it means. And if it's even grammatical. Here
> we go:
>
> Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus.
>
> "The dragon sleeps never something." ???
>
> ObConlang: I promise to translate it into Cein when
> I know what it means. :)
>
Well, let's see:
Draco: nominative noun: dragon.
Dormiens: present active participle: sleeping.
Nunquam: negative adverb: never.
Titillandus:
Well, this one is a problem. By form, it's easy: it's the verbal adjective of a
verb *titillare. A verbal adjective has a passive and necessitive meaning: have
to be *-ed. The problem is that I don't know of any Latin verb *titillare.
Still, I can easily find what it's supposed to mean, because it's suspiciously
similar to the French verb "titiller". I've checked with online dictionaries
and they give the translation "to tickle" or "to titillate" (didn't know this
one :)) ). Let's take "tickle", since I don't find that a word like "titillate"
has its place along with "dragon" :)) .
The sentence lacks a verb, but in this case it would simply be "est": is, so
leaving it out is not much of a trouble, and makes the expression nicer as a
proverb. Leaving out the verb "to be" in such expressions was usual in Latin
(mainly in poetry, to fit the verse). So the sentence is pragmatically
complete. Adding the verb "to be" would make it grammatically completely
correct, but let's not be more royalist than the king :)) .
Oh yeah! The translation: a literal translation would be: "The sleeping dragon
is not to be tickled". In English you'd simply say: "Don't tickle a sleeping
dragon!". To try and keep the feeling of the original, we could do a Yoda-like
sentence: "The sleeping dragon never you will tickle." :))
A nice translation exercise, especially if peoplem try to go directly from the
Latin original and try to keep its conciseness and non-verbness :)) . None of
my languages have yet a word for "tickle" (nor for "dragon" :)) ), so I'll have
to wait a bit before joining the boat.
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.
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