Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 April 19

= April 19 =

Latin motto or slogan for a radio operator
I'm looking for a latin motto or slogan for a radio operator. Something similar to 'Cogito ergo sum', replacing 'cogito' with a latin (or fake latin if necessary) word meaning 'I transmit'. If 'transmit' is difficult we can try 'emit' or 'radiate'. Roger (talk) 07:45, 19 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Transmit is pretty much directly from Latin already. You could say "transmitto ergo sum", or just "mitto ergo sum". "Radio" is from Latin too, and it does mean "radiate", so "radio ergo sum" also works. Adam Bishop (talk) 07:51, 19 April 2012 (UTC)


 * Though I think radio doesn't really work in this statement, as it literally means "I give off rays". I think that the first person singular form of this verb would be attributed only to Sol the sun god, and perhaps other celestial deities.  Marco polo (talk) 15:13, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Or Marie Curie shortly before her death... Angr (talk) 16:37, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I think 'Transmitto ergo sum' works best for me. Roger (talk) 21:55, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Not a great motto, though. "Cogito ergo sum" makes sense as a philosophical trope, but "transmitto ergo sum" lacks it. Perhaps "vivere est transmittere": to live is to transmit....? - Nunh-huh 23:02, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I think he was only going for a slogan, not an entry in Bartlett's. "Transmitto ergo sum" is good. Better than "I cogitate therefore I be." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:14, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Proverbs 1 V 4 King James
The word I need a true meaning for is 'Subtilty'. My small oxford also does not show it. The NIV has the word as 'Prudence'. It may not be.41.9.116.48 (talk) 21:46, 19 April 2012 (UTC)


 * The sense intended by KJV is "keenness", "judgment", or "discernment". -- Elphion (talk) 21:59, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * (ec) The OED says it is an occasional variant of subtlety n. in moral and intellectual senses. Meaning include "Acuteness, penetration, perspicacity", "Skill, cleverness, dexterity", "Cunning, craftiness, guile", "A cunning or clever device, artifice, stratagem", and others. If you have a UK library membership number, you can probably access the OED and see for yourself. You might want to check out this site which provides the bible in 20 or more English versions (as well as any number of other languages). --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:06, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * It's hard to say what exactly the KJV translators meant, we can't ask them. However, the word is translated from the Hebrew עָרְמָה, which, according to to Strong's concordance means "trickery; or (in a good sense) discretion:--guile, prudence, subtilty, wilily, wisdom.  1) shrewdness,  craftiness,  prudence". According to Holladay's concise lexicon it means cunning. The BDB lexicon gives craftiness or (in this case) prudence - Lindert (talk) 22:18, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * It's probably worth pointing out that the KJV translates Genesis 3:1a as "Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made", lending support to the "tricky, crafty, guileful" interpretation. However, if you're really interested in Bible study, you should avoid the NIV, whose translators were more interested in adapting the Bible to reflect their own brand of Fundamentalist dogma than in producing an accurate translation. Angr (talk) 01:15, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * The NIV was not produced by Fundamentalists. See our article New International Version for details. Rmhermen (talk) 02:45, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * To be fair to the NIV (and to its opponents) pretty much every widely used translation is critisized by some respected scholars for not being an accurate enough translation of the original language. Differences in translations can be interpreted by some as horrifying biases, and by others as good-faith differences in translation.  There are groups from the King James Only movement to others which hold that only their particular translation is the Truly Correct One.  It is probably a better idea to read several widely-used translations simultaneously, to get different perspectives of the various scholars who produced them.  Besides the NIV (which is the most widely used English-language version) there is the New Revised Standard Version and various updates and revisions of the King James Version, several translations approved for use by Catholic Churches, so-called "paraphrase translations" like The Message, etc.  If you accept that none of these is going to be 100% correct, then it helps to work from several well-respected and often-used bibles simultaneously to sort-of smooth out the errors, and arrive at your own conclusions.  -- Jayron  32  04:07, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * All the modern translations given in Jayron's post are essentially part of a KJV tradition. The NIV is notorious for 'tweaking' lines to fit a more Calvinist view, so when reading it you should be aware of that. The Revised Standard Version and New Revised Standard Version are generally considered scholarly and as accurate as a layperson can hope for, for all the faults that people complain of: there are Catholic versions of these books that add the Deuterocanon back in. An alternative to the NIV is the Good News Translation, which is simple but not generally accused of bias (although some object to it translating some terms literally rather than using the traditional English choice). And there's the Christian Community Bible, which I don't think anyone's bothered to find fault with, as it's largely a developing country thing.
 * In terms of Catholic Bibles, there's the Douay-Rheims Bible, which is the Catholic equivalent of the KJ, and the Jerusalem Bible (Tolkein!) and New American Bible, which are very much lectionary Bibles, for reading out loud, rather than study Bibles. There's also the New Jerusalem Bible, which is not at all the same as the Jerusalem. But for scholarly stuff, just about everyone uses the Revised Standard or New Revised Standard Version. If you're seriously studying the Bible, that's what I'd use. There's really no point in using The Message except for first exposure to Bible Stories, like a Comic Book Bible. 86.140.54.3 (talk) 08:49, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Douay-Rheims is not really the equivalent of the KJV. It's more of a straight translation of the Latin Vulgate. Adam Bishop (talk) 09:04, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * As opposed to what? It's the oldest English translation of the Bible used by Catholics today, it originates from shortly before the KJ and so uses language of a similar age, the version typically encountered was changed to be closer to the KJ phrasing so it sounded better, certain older Catholics are attached to it in the same way certain older Protestants are to the KJ, it is out of copyright and so gets used (like the KJ) as a free translation on the internet. That is what I meant: it is the Catholic equivalent to the King James in the way it is used, and the language it is written in. That it was mostly based on the Vulgate is simply why it is the Catholic equivalent. 86.140.54.3 (talk) 09:26, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * As opposed to a translation of the original text. It's a translation of a translation. Each time you translate a text, you lose meaning. --Dweller (talk) 09:55, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Ah, that is true then. Personally I use D-R a lot because it's the best equivalent of what medieval people were reading and quoting. But I'm pretty sure in Catholic school we used the NRSV. Adam Bishop (talk) 10:08, 20 April 2012 (UTC)


 * 86.140.54.3 -- I bet that English-speaking Catholics today much more commonly use the 18th-century Challoner revision of the Douay-Rheims Bible, rather than the original ca. 1600 version... AnonMoos (talk) 14:50, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Well, yes. As I said, the version typically encountered is closer to the phrasing of the KJ. Nonetheless, that is what people mean when they say "Douay-Rheims", just as a KJ Bible doesn't have to be the 1611 to be a King James. 86.140.54.3 (talk) 08:40, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
 * However, the 18th-century editing of the KJV basically only affected punctuation and spelling, while the 18th-century revisions to Douay-Rheims went some way beyond that... AnonMoos (talk) 10:01, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, as I said... 86.140.54.3 (talk) 10:22, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Latin pronunciation
How is Aemona pronounced? Is the 'ae' supposed to be 'ay' or 'ee'? --108.206.4.199 (talk) 22:21, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * For Classical Latin, the former. See Æ - Nunh-huh 22:54, 19 April 2012 (UTC)
 * To clarify, it is pronounced in Classical Latin as 'ay' would be in Spanish. The pronunciation in English is like the English words eye or I.  In Ecclesiastical Latin, used in the Catholic Church and sometimes in Anglican churches, the 'ae' is pronounced like the 'ay' in English tray. There is also a conventional English way of pronouncing Latin (used in legal contexts and for the English pronunciation of classical names), according to which the 'ae' is pronounced like the 'ee' in English tree.  Marco polo (talk) 01:21, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Isn't it pronounced in Classical Latin as ae would be in Spanish? That's a diphthong that doesn't really exist in English, which is why people might render it as ay (as in "ay ay Captain"); fairly close, to Anglophone ears, but not really right. --Trovatore (talk) 01:45, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * I specified 'ay' in Spanish to clarify Nunh-huh's (since deleted) remark that in Classical Latin the digraph was pronounced 'ay'. I was concerned that, unqualified, that left the impression that it was pronounced like 'ay' in English, which it wasn't. Marco polo (talk) 14:40, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * According to W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina, "[ae and au] had much the same values as those in English high and how. ae was earlier written as ai [...] The new spelling dates from early in the second century [...] The change in spelling may reflect a slight 'narrowing' of the diphthong, with the vowel quality moving less far from its starting-point in a—in fact something very like the comparable English diphthong." Lesgles (talk) 05:30, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Hmm. I'm perhaps even more curious after looking at the diphthong article, which doesn't mention a /ae/ diphthong in either Spanish or Italian.  Maybe in Spanish there really isn't one &mdash; I had heard the second-person plural indicative singular of estar as estaes, but apparently it's estais.  Could that be an instance of "narrowing"?
 * In Italian, though, what do you do with aereoplano? It's clearly not pronounced the same as *aireoplano, so to claim it's not a diphthong, wouldn't you have to make the transition between a and e syllabic?  I don't think it's syllabic. --Trovatore (talk) 08:40, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
 * According to, it's a-e-ro-plà-no. But since it's in (an) unstressed syllable(s), I think the difference would be minimal. I seem to remember seeing ae in Portuguese words, but I can't think of any right now. In German, the diphthong ei has been transcribed as both [aı] and [ae], and German phonology says that there is dialectal variation. Sindarin also has [aɛ]. :) Lesgles (talk) 19:29, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

According to this, the accent is on the penultimate, which means it's really æmóna with a long vowel. Classical Latin would be something like, Ecclesiastical more like. However, according to this, the English pronunciation has stress on the first vowel,, which suggests the Latin had a short o vowel—unless maybe that's not the same "Emona"? [Oops, no, that's a town mentioned in Joshua 18:24 and has n.t. to do with this.]

If you want the English pronunciation of the Latin, how to read it if it were in Shakespeare or English verse, then it would normally be  or. (The second sounds less assimilated into English.) — kwami (talk) 02:07, 21 April 2012 (UTC)
 * Except the first consonant is M, not N. --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  05:59, 21 April 2012 (UTC)