Hi, everyone. I’m working on a humor piece about history geeks using a Ouija board to talk with their favorite Roman emperors. Naturally, the responses they get are in ancient Latin, and I’d like to include the first sentence in the Latin (along with my geeks freaking out as they translate it) before switching to English. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about the language, and the online tools are not very helpful. So, would any of you kind folks like to translate a sentence into Latin for me, please? The sentence is “You have an impressive My Little Pony collection, Douglas.” Yes, that’s a weird sentence to say in Latin, but it’s coming from Caligula, so what would you expect? Thanks!
Bonum equorum, Douglas is as close as I can get, since the only applicable words I know are "good" and "horses."
I can recall bonum equarum from sixth grade Latin (1966, I kid you not), but not the name of the woman who has submitted work to the museum art shows twice a year for the last five years. I think her name is a Latin word, too. Gloria something... sigh. Go figure. I also recall that Caligula means "little boots," so maybe they could discuss the relative merits of Manolo Blahnik and Keds?
I did Latin for the Leaving Cert in 1985, great for English vocabulary, though we mostly translated Latin to English, not the other way around. Due to a misdirect, I then did a few weeks of Classical Civilisation in college before transferring to something that didn't guarantee a lifetime of social welfare dependency, as it seemed at the time. Which is my long-winded way of saying that your local university will have a Classical Civilisation dept or, if not, your computer will find one for you. Great thing is, with such a short translation, they might accept payment in cupcakes, virtual cupcakes if done online. Just one word of warning, you do know Caligula will completely mess up your story?
You have an impressive My Little Pony collection, Douglas. My Latin is rusty and someone else usually springs out with better - but this might help as a start If a piece of idiomatic Latin is inserted into an English story, hardly anyone will be able to read it so the humour value is incredibly limited Latin idiom was different enough from English idiom that there won't be a 1:1 translation, like "Douglas, you have a collection of small ponies who are yours and impress me" The Latin we have left to study is mostly highbrow, educated, adult, and formal - but for comedy (including back then) you'd want to show the Emperor slipping into colloquial or juvenile language - Roman teenspeak - but that isn't so well-preserved Having said that, we do know that teenspeak has always been a thing, and we have quite a lot of Roman schoolboys' notes to each other - so it's possible there's a perfect source where they're talking about someone's marble collection, but I won't have read that unfortunately Starting with the My Little Pony part of the composition Roman children had toy horses too. http://www.grandvoyageitaly.com/uploads/3/7/2/7/37277491/742850_orig.jpg And they were almost certainly used to the idea of them being personified, e.g. "But the horses of the son of Aeacus being apart from the battle were weeping, since first they learned that their charioteer had fallen in the dust beneath the hands of man-slaying Hector. In sooth Automedon, valiant son of Diores, full often plied them with blows of the swift lash, and full often with gentle words bespake them, and oft with threatenings; yet neither back to the ships to the broad Hellespont were the twain minded to go, not yet into the battle amid the Achaeans. Nay, as a pillar abideth firm that standeth on the tomb of a dead man or woman, even so abode they immovably with the beauteous car, bowing their heads down to the earth. And hot tears ever flowed from their eyes to the ground, as they wept in longing for their charioteer, and their rich manes were befouled, streaming from beneath the yoke-pad beside the yoke on this aide and on that." Iliad 17 [423f] Pony in Latin is mannus, and it had a diminutive mannulus, which might appear as a nice rendition of "little pony". But if we're Romans, we need to check if our word mannus has negative connotations compared with pony - for example if we see them to be lowly beasts of burden compared with the purebred horses who win chariot races and fight in wars. So we can go here: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=mannulus&highlight=mannulus and look up all the surviving places the word was used ======= Pliny. Letters - 4, 2, 3 (this one is the diminutive form) It seems incredible, but remember that it was Regulus. Yet now that his son is dead, he is mad with grief at his loss. The boy had a number of ponies, some in harness and others not broken in, dogs both great and small, nightingales, parrots and blackbirds - all these Regulus slaughtered at his pyre. Yet an act like that was no token of grief; it was but a mere parade of it. > This doesn't tell us much about the register of the word mannulus, but it's useful history: a wealthy boy might keep several of them, and they have harnesses so presumably he was learning to ride from a young age (and presumably so he could have entered a well-paid military career). They're valuable. Martial. Epigrams - 12, 24, 8 (diminutive) O carriage, that affords a sweet solitude!----Gift of my eloquent friend Aelianus, more pleasant than open curricle or chariot! Here, Juvatus, you may say to me whatever comes into your head. No black driver of a Libyan horse, no well-girt running footman in front of us, no muleteer alongside; and the horses will not babble. Would that Avitus were here with us; I should not fear his third pair of ears. Thus how charmingly would the whole day pass! > I don't know anything about Martial, but this might be homoerotic: since the carriage has sides it can host a gay threesome. > It's not that little ponies are especially quiet - they're probably in the diminutive to make them absurd "and the little ponies won't tell anyone" Lucretius. De Rerum Natura - 3, 1063 (dimutive) The man who sickens of his home goes out, Forth from his splendid halls, and straight- returns, Feeling i'faith no better off abroad. He races, driving his Gallic ponies along, Down to his villa, madly,- as in haste To hurry help to a house afire. > This might imply ponies are foreign and posh. They might be fast, or the image might be ridiculous: a Gallic pony being made to run like an equus. Horace. Odes - 3, 27, 6ff (this one isn't a diminutive) Let the wicked be led by omens of screeching from owls, by pregnant dogs, or a grey-she wolf, hurrying down from Lanuvian meadows, or a fox with young: May a snake disturb the journey they’ve started, terrifying the ponies like an arrow flashing across the road: but I far-seeing augur, with prayer > So they're used in travelling, but by the wicked, and they're prone to fear (maybe not like a brave equus) Ovid. Amores - 2, 16, 49 (not diminutive) But if you’ve still a true care for me, abandoned, begin to put your promises in action. First your little chariot and swift Gallic horses, crack the whip yourself over their galloping manes! And, as for the ways, you come by, may swelling hills subside, and the winding valleys be easy! > Again they're small and fast. The poem is addressed to a girl who is distant, and the poet is in the role of a solder fretting about his girlfriend (because she doesn't have a man to look after her) - there's possibly an ironic contrast between Sulmo where he's serving as being rural/barbaric and Rome being comfortable (with ponies rather than hardy equi) ======= Based on these, mannulus is probably quite good for "little pony". Children and women keep them, they're a high-status possession. Not much has changed. I don't think we know enough to say that young Roman girls of any specific social class would have found it an odd word for a My Little Pony toy if we went back in time with one. Gender is next. Latin gives nearly all its animal words genders, irrespective of the genders of the animals - mannulus is masculine. For horses, a male horse is equus, and a mare can sometimes be equa, but they are both grammatically feminine. Again: a male horse is grammatically feminine, but a male pony is grammatically masculine. And when both genders of animal are present they go into the masculine. Although it isn't attested among the 5 surviving usages in the literature - I think I'd want to call female little ponies mannulae - and if that's very marked in Latin I'll try and put up an argument it's to mark the personification and the importance of the characters' gender to the franchise. I think Latin would have found it strange to make the ponies singular. I also suspect they would have found putting "My" on the front more jarring than we do. Let's capitalize them. Mannulae Douglas next - this is Scottish but I think we can treat it like Matthias or Judas. So a vocative might be Dougla (cf. the Vulgate - Luke 22:48 - Jesus autem dixit illi: Juda, osculo Filium hominis tradis?) Collection I think to leave out - as conlatio or congeries might not have had such as sense of it being a hobby. It might end up sounding odd, like "a herd of stamps". We could call them a herd - grex, but they're living in a little town. I think it's better to not render collection than to say something strange. So my first attempt at this will be:- Plurimae Mannulae tibi sunt, Dougla! For you there are the most little ponies, Douglas! A superlative of emphasis, it might carry an implication that Douglas has more of them than the Emperor. I suspect colloquially he might drop "sunt" and the word order might slip to: Plurimae Mannulae Dougla, tibi! The most little ponies, Douglas, for you (are)!
That's an excellent idea, and if @evild4ve hadn't been so awesome, it would have been a good next step. Thanks! And while I appreciate the warning, I don't think there's really enough of a story for Caligula to mess anything up - it's basically just a string of jokes. Though I am curious how old Little Boots might ruin a real story, now that you mention it. How did I forget about that? Now I have to find a way to work some piggy latin into this...
Well, it's certainly better than mine, so thank you! That was an impressive deep dive into the language for someone who's "rusty." Yes, it's definitely a minor thing, but I do like to get the little details right (or at least plausible). I know as a reader, I really enjoy finding a little nugget of something esoteric hidden away in a piece that most people would miss. It's like a little in-joke between me and the author. Magnificent! And thanks for the detailed discussion of how you got there, too. I'd give you some cupcakes, as @B.E. Nugent suggested, but I'm afraid you'll have to settle for the virtual ones. Enjoy them! They're calorie-free!
@evild4ve seems to have answered your question, but I believe @Lemex is also quite a capable Latinist.
Excellent post! Martial would have probably been making a gay joke. But I have to disagree with your translation. That reads 'You have very many ponies, Douglas' not 'You have an impressive My Little Pony collection, Douglas.' A translation of OP's sentence might be something like: collectionem de 'Mea Plurima Mannula' bonam habes, Dougla! 'Collectionem' being the accusative form of 'collectio', Mea Plurima Mannula being in the ablative because of 'de' meaning 'of', 'bonam' is 'agreeing' with 'collectionem' and 'habes' just being 'you have'. Bonus/bona/bonum just mean 'good' mind, as in fine or of quality I think. With it using the ablative it might be a good idea to write it 'Meaa Plurimaa Manulaa' because to indicate the ablative the Romans would have elongated the 'a' sound there. Sorry if this is thread archaeology, I don't really come here much and someone mentioned me so I thought I'd give my feedback.
Sorry for so much editing on my post too, by the way, I've been working a lot recently - brain didn't put on the Latin hat fully for a little while there. I think the sentence above is alright though.
Hi Lemex - I explained I wasn't going to render collection in the translation, which was because I don't think collectio had the sense of a hobbyist's collection. The risk being that to use collectio here would read an English derived meaning back into the Latin. Which leads to another interesting question: when did the English loanword acquire the sense of a hobby collection? I'd suggest it's the period in the late 19th century when large numbers of people start collecting stamps etc. The 1915 OED listed this as a modern usage.
I hope you don't misunderstand me, I do understand your reasoning. Collectio means I guess like an accumulation of stuff that looks set to grow, or a collection of arguments. It's applicable I'd say. I can easily imagine Romans, being as logical and mechanically minded as they tended to be, liked amassing collections of things that interested them and they found very useful. While I don't think I'd be able to find an example of its use without going through the corpus of all Roman writing, it is a classical word - not just a later medieval invention. You're not wrong, I guess collecting things feels like a more recent hobby. I guess they would have thought more in terms of usefulness, but it's just a guess. Perhaps that could even be a point of humour in the original poster's story? Calligula could say something like. 'Why does he have so many models? Are they really vital to today? What are they USED FOR!?' And that is an interesting question. I always trust Wiktonary which says it entered the English language through Middle French. So I guess it's been around since Chaucer to Philip Sidney?
OED's first attestation is 1460:- https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.271839/page/n623/mode/2up TLL went through the whole corpus and put all the surviving so nobody else would have to:- https://publikationen.badw.de/en/thesaurus/lemmata#27080 But I'd suggest Lewis & Short is perfectly good for this:- https://archive.org/details/harperslatindict00lewi/page/364/mode/2up I'm contending that OED's a. usage matches TLL's and Lewis & Short's I. usage, but our b. usage is something our language has added to the word since the 1600s, and that since 1865 the b. usage has grown further away from the a. usage. At the same time we have lost Latin's derived usage - which went in a completely different direction: a tumour I think if the Romans went in for collecting things, someone must have dug some of them up. (Coins don't count, of course!) And a collection of art or books is a different sense from a My Little Pony collection. In the former sense, disparate things are "bound together" by the collector, in the latter sense, they are alike, and come from one source, and can be ticked off, with the aim being to get the full set. Surely someone in Ancient Rome must have collected something, I just haven't ever come across it. And there's still the question of whether they had a name for it. The Romans might have really disliked the geekiness that goes along with the post-1860s idea of collecting (non-useful) things. And I think that's part of the humour value in the OP's scene. Edit:- I've cross-posted with Lemex but where Lemex has:- collectionem de 'Mea Plurima Mannula' bonam habes, Dougla! I couldn't find an example of collectio being used with de + ablative. TLL is prone to cause eyestrain at the best of times, but I've made best efforts with it, and collectio seems to want a genitive. De+ablative is usually 'down from' so there is homo de plebe = a man of (taken from) the people, so we could have a mannula de grege = a little pony of the herd, but I don't think that construction sounds right in collectio de 'Mannulā', when Mannula isn't a collective noun and has already been made singular so as to literally translate "My Little Pony." Collectio I think should use a partitive genitive, and I am not a betting man but I think all the attestations in the corpus in fact do. Now of course, "My Little Pony" usually isn't grammatical when we say it in English - and the OP might want to represent that by making their Latin ungrammatical. But I'd suggest that a Roman ear would hear "My Little Pony" and always ask "whose singular little pony? yours? mine?" The grammatical liberty that Hasbro can take in English might have caused confusion and annoyance in Latin, so I feel sure they would have used some other approach to mark the brand name. Edit 3:- Plurima in the above I guess is a transposition error - should be parva? Edit 2:- One of the reasons we aim for idiomatic translations of Latin rather than literal ones is that there isn't a 1:1 correspondence between our words and their words. The Latin word "collectio" doesn't mean a collection, but it does mean a tumour (as one of its derived senses). If a collectio is "de Mannulā" - down from a little pony - we might have to imagine one of those brightly-coloured rectal prolapses that horses sometimes have on veterinary tv programmes.
Owie. Legere hoc facit caput meum malum. (Grammarly remarks should be directed to https://www.utranslated.com/english-to-latin/. Had I been able to actually write Latin myself, I'm sure it would've been perfect.)
I did consider something like 'Numerus Meae Plurimae Mannulae ...' or something like that. To be honest, there's always going to a degree of inexactitude and differences in style with trying to translate something into Latin, just as there is the other way. Look at how many translations of just 'Arma virumque cano' there are. My attempt was probably a bit too literal, and 'Numerus' + genitive feels a little bit more Classical to me now I look at it again. What about De Rerum Natura? I suppose there is a sort of downward feel because Lucretius was trying to write about nature and so being a little objective. Or there's the line in Book 1 of Caesar's Bellum Gallicum 'Qua de causa Helvetii quoque reliquos Gallos virtute praecedunt'. I don't know, I don't think it has to be a sort of downward motion, many words in English can mean different things in different contexts. And I've never thought about it in quite that way whenever I've read it or used it, except in a sentence literally like 'puer de arbore cadit' or something. Got to be honest, after a quick check of different texts in the Latin Library and doing a word search, I couldn't find one use of 'collectio'. I was just checking Classical texts I've been playing a game at the same time though. It's a difficult word to find! Haha. You're right here. That's part of the reason I used 'de' - I feel like it would have been a way they might have introduced a not commonly used word or phrase.
(litterae) de rerum natura = (writings that come) down from the nature of things = (writings) on the nature of things Down from which cause the Helvetii also go in front of the rest of the Gauls by their virtue = for which reason the Helvetii also surpass the rest of the Gauls in valour (W. S. Bohn 1869) ======== "de" is a prepositional particle so it's a much simpler concept than "down from" - in fact it's virtually irreducible. I'd suggest to think of it as a logical descent. There is a good guide to the different senses of de+abl on p.198 of Bradley's Arnold 'Latin Prose Composition', the O-Level (or thereabouts) textbook. https://www.ganino.com/files/Latin Copyright Books/41 Bradley's Arnold Latin Prose Composition.pdf
That does make sense, I've never seen it put like that before. Only ever seen it with regards to De Rerum Natura as meaning like 'concerning' or 'on the subject of'. As the grammar book you linked suggests, it does have 'various derived meanings' but you aren't wrong. & The same line in my Loeb is translated 'For this cause the Helvetii'. You could say the Loeb is aiming for readability though. Personally, I read that as literally 'Of what cause ...'. I honestly don't think that you need to always translate it with having that sort of connotation, but honestly I wouldn't want to go through books of Latin to prove that. I guess my use of it might even be a sort of Vulgar Latin / Medieval thing though. I think the Italian 'di' comes from Latin's 'de' - as in La Divina Comedia di Dante. But - I think debating the use of 'de' is going to be losing sight of the forest for the trees. There's a number of different ways you could translate OP's sentence - such as using the genitive I guess. Or even putting it in English untranslated like 'collectionem illorum My Little Pony crepundiorum bonam habes' or something. ======== Thanks for the link though, I mean that seriously. I checked my James Morwood grammar book, page 29, it just says 'De - down from: about' which isn't helpful, and it's the main grammar book I use whenever I need to check something. That damned supine, ammirite?
On the contrary, I think the OP has cause to be grateful to @Friedrich Kugelschreiber for bringing you onto the thread. One of the huge problems with Latin is there are so many individuals who learn it for a few years at school, and so few who get the opportunity to take it further. And people wanting translations into Latin are often in need of authoritative translations because they're going to be claiming a sort of authority over the reader - but the same education gap leaves them unable to tell the difference even between an MPhil and Philip Pirrip, so they are left vulnerable in turn to show-offs and charlatans. The OP though from their comments I think has some Latin, or at least knew this wasn't going to be a task that s/he could do in five minutes with a dictionary. A back-and-forth discussion shows some of the spectrum of abilities and possibilities this wonderful language has to offer. I think that's invaluable not just to the OP and their confidence in the novel they are drafting, but also to the wider internet. We will soon have Writingforums on the 1st page of Google for "My Little Pony in Latin", and I must pray that if there is now a pile-on from emeritus professors around the world I will have the good grace to give way to them. collectionem illorum My Little Pony crepundiorum bonam habes, Dougla This might be like Latin leaving the title of a popular book in the original language, which they could do - e.g. Fulgentius mentioning Greek poets (e.g. Homer, Mintanor, Hellanicus, Euximenes - http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/fulgentius/fulgentius1.shtml) Fulgentius is very late, but he might be a good example because it's so clear that he's assuming his audience might not know Greek: he's translating lots of words for them - but not the titles of the plays. On the other hand, Cicero seems to prefer to cite Greek works using Latinized titles (e.g. "Platonis Politia" - https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/divinatione1.shtml#60 ; "Epicuri de Voluptate" - https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/divinatione2.shtml#59) Some caution needs to be exercised because the concept of a title was subtly different back then - Politia is a Latinization of "Πολιτεία", but it also still registers as just "that book Plato wrote about politics." Titles in general were more descriptive than they are for us now and less creative. We really would need to read a lot of texts to recreate the Roman attitude to translating the titles of foreign books. That one is beyond me. It might have been a like when we do the same thing in English - if the OP's Caligula is an erudite fellow, a Faust scholar if you will, he might leave "My Little Pony" in English. I'd suggest we'll want to avoid the genitive plural - it's grammatical but they went out of their way to avoid it We should be able to imagine the line actually being uttered by (a juvenile?) emperor Caligula. The natural metre we are after for Latin prose isn't identical to English, but it's pretty similar
Yeah, I would never claim to be an expert or anything like that. I take the attitude of always still learning. I can read, write and speak Latin with some degree of ease, and have been reading a bit of Medieval Latin recently for the book I'm about to have published. Maybe that's why I came up with something that looking back reads a bit like that, haha. There is a lot of show-offs out there though. Latin is one of those subjects that everyone wants to know but don't want to learn about, and I've seen people attempt translations, passing them off as authoritative, and apparently don't even understand the gender system. Like translating 'She's overboard and self assured' as 'perlassus est et superbus'. If you're screaming inside, so am I. Honestly, I think the issue there is that Latin isn't taught as a living language very often. You don't tend to have conversations in it, get to ask questions or be asked questions and respond which is the way I learned it. Latin classrooms seem to treat it more like it's a code to be solved, rather than as a language by itself. So when you leave, say, a school, and don't have to deal with it again if you have forgotten a word it can be lost forever. Which is sad. It doesn't really encourage a casual enjoyment of the language. I'm sure it would be very useful to someone learning Latin I guess, we've used a lot of terms here and kind of alluded to some of their uses - the ablative has so many uses! Sadly I'm not sure I have the time for such a back and forth. Maybe it is worth pointing the OP to a Latinist Classics professor, but then again I've read somewhere that Professors love the Loeb books exactly because the average Latin competency among professors has been on the steady decline in the last century. Sed aliquis hanc sententiam legere potest, satis bonus est - at least in my book. That's to say nothing of the use of accents, using macrons, and how that'd be represented in a text. That's a very different problem too, and I have seen some people say they didn't even learn about them in a classroom setting, which seems like madness to me. Especially in spoken Latin, an understanding of of them is pretty vital. Excellent point. I think Patronius, who was nothing if not an eminently stylish sort of guy, did the second - while Pliny the Younger I think would have done the first more but I've only read some of his letters and he was being more casual. I think that's a major difference there, right? Cicero always strikes me as someone out to prove himself. Maybe because he wasn't Roman, in the sense he wasn't from Rome itself at the time he lived in, but he was always trying to be 'the best Roman' and a lot of the time I find his speeches are just him showing off. I know some Latinists would say 'Whatever Cicero does, follow' and I'm not sure that's always helpful, personally I still find him hard to read but maybe I'm just dumb. But this is totally beside the point you made. I can't think of anything else at the moment, but it is a Friday night. I'll give it a think over though, and see what else can be suggested.
WOW! This thread has progressed far beyond my wildest dreams! Thank you both for using your precious time on my silly little phrase, @Lemex and @evild4ve. I'm glad you seem to have enjoyed the challenge. I figured it might get some bites from language geeks looking to stretch their Latin muscles in an unusual way, but I certainly didn't expect this level of scholarship - and I don't use that word lightly. There's some genuine intellectual work going on here. An old friend I've unfortunately lost touch with bought the complete set of Doctor Seuss books in Latin for her daughter (who would cry for a "Yatin!" book before bed). Surely, the good folks at Hasbro will realize the marketing opportunities for their manulae now that you've made the case for them! Indeed, I have no Latin at all, so your efforts are definitely appreciated. I did take a quick stab with google translate and some dictionary websites, but I quickly realized that the language was far too complicated to fake like that. Thanks again! Now I definitely need to post the project in the workshop so you can see your efforts in context. And I have to get back to doing some critiques and such, to give back to this very generous community. Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
