Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2009 June 21

= June 21 =

A house, a tortoise and an ant
I had just translated from the Italian a short inscription placed on the portal of a renaissance palazzo in Casale Monferrato
 * May this house stand until the ant has drunk up all the waves of the sea and the tortoise has completed its circuit of the Earth

when I discovered the Latin original
 * Stet domus haec donec fluctus formica marinos ebibat e totum testudo perambulet orbem.

If anything has been lost (or added) in the double translation I’d be very grateful for corrections. Naturally I would also be fascinated if this trope is known elsewhere: it seems good enough to have become a cliche. Your work should resurface in Palazzo Anna d’Alençon. Thank you. Ian Spackman (talk) 10:14, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * No, that looks complete. The correspondence is:
 * Stet = May it stand
 * Domus = House
 * Haec = This
 * Donec = Until
 * Fluctus = Waves, swell
 * Formica = An ant
 * Marinos = Marine, of the sea
 * Ebibat = It has drunk up
 * e = And (unusual, late, contracted form - et or at are more usual)
 * Totum = All, entire, complete
 * Testudo = A tortoise
 * Perambulet = It may walk around
 * Orbem = The whole world
 * The Latin is late, and rather idiosyncratic, and I'm not exactly sure what verb forms are governed by donec, so I'm not sure if either or both of ebibat and perambulet would be right in classical Latin. Even so, the entire long English sentence is there in the terser Latin. AlexTiefling (talk) 10:37, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh thanks for such a quick and complete response. What a service this is! Ian Spackman (talk) 10:48, 21 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That quote was also inscribed over the door at the school in Tarbes, where Ferdinand Foch was a student. Apparently he liked it. (See this for example.) It's also on Inchcolm Abbey, and the oldest hotel in Krakow, and numerous other places. I can't find a source, other than a vague idea that it is medieval, but it must come from somewhere... Adam Bishop (talk) 13:14, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * This book records its appearance in a 15th-century florilegium in Berne, for what that's worth. Deor (talk) 13:54, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Those are all very helpful: clearly the motto (or whatever one calls it) was widely diffused and was invented before the fifteenth century. I’ve now also found examples from High Sunderland House (near Halifax), from the Lycée de Tournon fondé en 1536 par le cardinal François II de Tournon and various places in Italy, including an apparently fourteenth-century example (not a particularly reliable source) at the Castello di Verrès in Valle d’Aosta. It was also used in 1517 (in the form ‘Stet liber hic…) by a Parisian printer in the end-matter of a book called Pragmatic Sanction: that’s from the Notes and Queries of 8 December 1849; more surprisingly the fact also appears in a wonderfully eclectic page of local and world news from Page 3 of The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser for Saturday 25 March 1826. Ian Spackman (talk) 00:31, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

"Ebibat" looks imperfect, but the verb is "ebibere", so it is a present subjunctive. (I'm not sure if Alex wasn't sure about that or something else, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.) Adam Bishop (talk) 19:11, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Perhaps that’s why I could never get my head round Latin at school…! Ian Spackman (talk) 00:31, 22 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Maybe also because I am talking out of my ass..."future less vivid" and the like is for conditional constructions, so forget that. "Donec" just introduces a temporal clause, and it usually takes the indicative, unless the clause is more than simply temporal and there is some sense of purpose or expectation; I suppose that fits here, because the ant and the turtle are doing other things while the house is just standing there. (This is all according to the Bradley/Arnold/Mountford Latin Prose Composition.) But anyway...I still can't find an ultimate source for this. It seems odd that some random anonymous sentence would become so popular across Europe. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:07, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you! It was the form of 'ebibat' that was particularly bothering me. AlexTiefling (talk) 23:23, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

"An horrific"
Why would anyone use the above two words together? It makes no sense, but news reporters do it all the time... Vimescarrot (talk) 18:56, 21 June 2009 (UTC)


 * There's some discussion at A and an, but I don't think it's adequate. --Anonymous, 19:04 UTC, June 21, 2009.


 * I do this when the stress is not on the first syllable in words that start with H. So, I say "a history", but "an historian", "a hospital", but "an hospitable (whatever)". (I do say "a hotel" though.) Adam Bishop (talk) 19:08, 21 June 2009 (UTC)


 * It may additionally depend on your accent. (Mine’s originally North Wiltshire, but now very impure.) I pronounce ‘a’ as a vague UH and don’t sound ‘h’ very strongly so I have to something to avoid the terrible muddle of UH-UH-riffic. It would be very handy for me (and for anyone who was listening to me) if I said ‘an horrific’. (In fact I don’t—I solve the problem by changing the UH to an AY and interjecting a little pause. And as far as I know I am equally liable to say ‘a hotel’ as ‘an otel’. Ian Spackman (talk) 23:09, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'm from the south-east of England where dropping h's from the beginning of words is very common. I generally find myself making the same distinctions as Ian Spackman, where in words with fairly faint H's such as hotel or historic I either drop the H entirely and say "an orrific" or overpronounce the a to make it "ay horrific". It also wouldn't be unusual for me to simply merge the a into the word, and say something along the lines of "aorrific". Which option I went for would probably depend on who I was talking to and, dare I say it, how drunk I was. ~ mazca  talk 14:29, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

What's in a constitution
What are some alternative words or names for a 'constitution', the fundamental document that defines the rights and responsibilities between a people and their government? Could it be a 'charter', or is that something different? Are there any synonyms for constitution (sure, I tried the synonym dictionaries...w/out much joy)? I want to name a document, which is in effect a 'sub-constitution' for an autonomous region, but the word constitution is politically difficult, and I'm looking for an alternative name for the document. Thanks if you can help.


 * "Charter" works. "Terms of reference" is similar, but normally used for committees rather than autonomous regions. Some countries have a "Basic law". --Tango (talk) 20:27, 21 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes those are both good. ‘Statute’ could also be an option to consider: the 1848 constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia (which later became that of the post-unification Kingdom of Italy) is often rendered literally in English as the Albertine Statute. Ian Spackman (talk) 23:19, 21 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Also "fundamental law" or "basic law" (compare German Grundgesetz). — Kpalion(talk) 12:36, 27 June 2009 (UTC)