Anyone know Latin?

[David Swidler]

My brother-in-law encountered the following sentence:

posito messiam mihi probari iam venisse, non putarem deterior esse judaeus

What's it mean?

[TobiasTheViking]

Well, my best guess seems so off the mark that i would be embarrased to type :(, but i wanna know :D

[sophia8]

Well, I found an online Latin translator (http://www.translation-guide.com/free_online_translators.php?from=English&to=Latin), but it kept crashing when I entered the whole text. So I had to break it down into individual words, and got something like:
For a good harvest, set boundaries for the Jews or maybe:If you have a good harvest, limit the Jews

[Euromutt]

It's been almost twenty years since I last took Latin, and on top of that, the phrase is a bit weird as well. So I'm speculating heavily here, but I figure it's something along the lines of:
"I state that the Messiah has promised me he will come soon, do not think less of [that promise] because he is Jewish."

I could, however, be wildly wrong.

[LibraryLady]

My brother-in-law encountered the following sentence:

posito messiam mihi probari iam venisse, non putarem deterior esse judaeus

What's it mean?

The last part is something about it being unclean and inferior to be Jewish, but the first part is eluding me. Boy is my Latin rusty.

Where did he find the sentence?

[Jorghnassen]

I can't even remember my declinations anymore.

/Rosa, rosa, rosae, rosae, rosa(?), rosae, rosae, rosas, rosarum, rosis, rosis
//C'est le plus vieux tango du monde...
///Damn, can't remember Jacques Brel either.

[Cecil]

My brother-in-law encountered the following sentence:

posito messiam mihi probari iam venisse, non putarem deterior esse judaeus

What's it mean? I'm in the midst of my third semester of latin, so I'll try my hand at it... With the help of Whitaker's Words (http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe)

posito - Dative Perf Pass PPL pono, ponere; Having been placed.
messiam - f acc sg messis, messis; harvest.
mihi - Dative; to me.
probari - pres pass inf probo, probare; to be recommended.
iam - Already.
venisse - perf act inf venio venire; to have come.

non - not
putarem - 1p impf act subj puto, putare; I would think, I might think
deterior - nom sg; inferior
esse - to be
judaeus - nom sg; A Jew

The one thing that jumps out at me is that there are too many verbs and not enough nouns. Latin does this a lot... and it usually means the verbs are being combined in some strange way that eludes me. My attempt:

The harvest having been placed (sown? reaped?), I would not think an inferior Jew to have already come to be recommended to me.

er... what???

I'll send it to my prof for deciphering. ;)

[Chaos]

My Latin has had almost 10 years to gather rust, but I´d say Euromutt´s translation is good - maybe not absolutely accurate, but it gets the point of the sentence across.

However I´d change the second part to ", and I do not think less [of that promise] because of [him] being jewish."

[Kaylee]

I love puzzles. I don't know any Latin but based on Cecil's translation of the individual words, I'm willing to guess as to what the mystery sentence means.

Could the author be punning the Latin word meaning to save with the Latin word meaning to harvest?
Then depending upon who the author was:

1) If the author was a Christian leader in a Church --
"I have already been saved at the recommended time (by Jesus), I am not an inferior Jew (a person that doesn't even realize that the messiah has come and is therefore still waiting for him.)."

2) If the author was an upper class Roman during the time that the Romans were in control of what is now Israel --
"I have already harvested (my crops) at the recommended (implication: usual) time (implication: jeesh! like every other landowner!), I am not a Jew (a person that doesn't even know when to get their harvesting done)."

I think that at one point the Romans did not distinguish between the Jews and Christians. This sentence could have been expressing disdain for a conquered people's culture. If I remember my history correctly the Romans expected the people they conquered in war to be cooperative and demonstrate it by not trying to rebel and also by agreeing to worship the Roman gods -- not necc. out of true belief but as a show of political cooperation. The Jews at that time were doing neither.

3) Or perhaps even, if the author was an early Christian --
"Its been recommended for me to be saved; perhaps it would not be a bad idea to be Jewish. (of the "Jews for Jesus" type)."

Just writing out Cecil's translations literally for the second half of the sentence I get "not I would think inferior to be Jewish". So is the author saying I don't need to be an inferior Jew, or its not inferior (i.e., a bad idea) to be a Jew?

I understand that some early Christians in Rome did a lot of their teaching and worshipping in secrecy to avoid being fed to lions. Perhaps this was an oblique way to teach potential converts. I also understand that the Talmud doesn’t have any punctuation marks or vowels. With that as a cultural background, using puns and mixing word order (how should the word "not" be understood in this sentence?) might not have been a stretch for the early Christians. Confusing early writings would have made good crib sheets and would have been just as confusing to their enemies as it is to us now.

Like Library Lady, I would like to know where David's brother found that sentence and what the historical context of the writing was.

Well this was fun. Time to go back to my boring work.

[Kaylee]

The one thing that jumps out at me is that there are too many verbs and not enough nouns. Latin does this a lot... and it usually means the verbs are being combined in some strange way that eludes me.


And I guess this is why even though quite a few folks in this forum have been educated in Latin, its difficult to come up with a translation? Just curious, are most of the ancient Latin writings this difficult to translate? If yes, I wonder if this was characteristic of the language itself or of the writing styles of the time?

[LibraryLady]

And I guess this is why even though quite a few folks in this forum have been educated in Latin, its difficult to come up with a translation? Just curious, are most of the ancient Latin writings this difficult to translate? If yes, I wonder if this was characteristic of the language itself or of the writing styles of the time?

It could also be that most of us are educated in Classical Latin, and this could be Ecclesiastical Latin.

[Lord Muck oGentry]

My brother-in-law encountered the following sentence:

posito messiam mihi probari iam venisse, non putarem deterior esse judaeus

What's it mean?

I'm going to take a wild lunge at this. " If it be proposed as something proved that my Messiah has already come, I should not think of being a wretched Jew".

The analysis would be:
- posito probari; ablative absolute construction, with probari as gerund (verbal noun, not inflected but notionally ablative to agree with posito)

- messiam mihi; my Messiah. I have a vague notion that this construction is the "dative of benefit".

- messiam iam venisse; accusative + infinitive, = the Messiah having come

- non putarem deterior esse judaeus; deterior judaeus is nominative, as complement to esse or as subject of 1st-person verb putarem.

I'm not at all confident of this translation. But, however it comes out, I'd love to know where this quotation comes from. It conjures up visions of mediaeval debate, with a learned rabbi having an ironical laugh at Christian opponents. Or perhaps a Christian zealot being rude about an earlier tradition.

[Jorghnassen]

Yeah there is much difference between medieval and classical latin. My brother learned this the hard way...

[Lord Muck oGentry]

Sorry. I should have said the latter part could read:" I should not think being Jewish wretched".

[LibraryLady]

Sorry. I should have said the latter part could read:" I should not think being Jewish wretched".


Oy

[Chaos]

I'm going to take a wild lunge at this. " If it be proposed as something proved that my Messiah has already come, I should not think of being a wretched Jew".

The analysis would be:
- posito probari; ablative absolute construction, with probari as gerund (verbal noun, not inflected but notionally ablative to agree with posito)

- messiam mihi; my Messiah. I have a vague notion that this construction is the "dative of benefit".

- messiam iam venisse; accusative + infinitive, = the Messiah having come

- non putarem deterior esse judaeus; deterior judaeus is nominative, as complement to esse or as subject of 1st-person verb putarem.

I'm not at all confident of this translation. But, however it comes out, I'd love to know where this quotation comes from. It conjures up visions of mediaeval debate, with a learned rabbi having an ironical laugh at Christian opponents. Or perhaps a Christian zealot being rude about an earlier tradition.

I disagree with how you "deconstructed" the first part.

"Probari iam venisse" - "probari" has been literally translated as "recommended"; "venisse",as infinitive, would fit with "probari", to mean "recommended to come", and I think that, in this context, "probari" means "foretold" or "prophesied" or "promised" - so "probari iam venisse" means "promised to come" or, loosely, "prophesied that he would to come"

"Mihi" refers to "probari", so it means "promised [to] me"

"messiam" is the right form to be the one who did the "probari" - the one who made the promise/prophecy.

"Ponere", the root of "Posito", in my opinion, means "bear witness" here, as in "deposition", either in the sense "in a court of justice", or in a religious sense - the latter of course would make more sense in this context.

So, I would translate the first part as "Having borne witness that the Messiah foretold his coming to me,"...; this coming, apparently, is seems either refers to his returning from the dead, or this "second coming of Christ" thing that´s supposed to herald the end of the world.

[LordoftheLeftHand]

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=30904&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

While I can't swear to this guy's accuracy, he does appear to be well versed in the translation of Latin to English.

LLH<O:p
<O:p

[neutrino_cannon]

And I guess this is why even though quite a few folks in this forum have been educated in Latin, its difficult to come up with a translation? Just curious, are most of the ancient Latin writings this difficult to translate? If yes, I wonder if this was characteristic of the language itself or of the writing styles of the time?

I don’t know what’s going on here. Classical Latin usually doesn’t give me problems, excepting of course that pretentious windbag Cicero. I translated a bit of Revelations from the Vulgate for the heck of it once too, and that wasn’t too bad either.

If somebody could get out a quality Latin dictionary like Cassel’s, they could check the scansion of this. If it’s in a poetic meter, that could go a long way explaining the convoluted grammar.


Let’s see here:

posito messiam mihi probari iam venisse, non putarem deterior esse judaeus


The biggest problem is that there is no obvious subject, not the profusion of verb forms. In fact, this sentence would benefit a lot from an indicative verb.


I think Cecil’s analysis of the words is a good starting point, so I’ll go from there (and thank you Whitaker!).

I’ll start with the shorter clause near the end.


Putarem is an independent use of the subjunctive, and is in the imperfect tense. That usually means something contrary to fact in the absence of an ut clause (the subjunctive mood is such a pain in the ass, it’s a trash drawer just like the ablative case is). I think it is therefore best to translate it as “I would not have been thinking,” since the imperfect tense indicates past, but ongoing activity.

The construction at that point looks like an indirect statement along the lines of “I would not have been thinking a jew to be inferior.” However, this cannot be because the subject of an indirect statement is always in the accusative case. Judaeus is a regular second declension masculine noun, and therefore clearly nominative here.

Probably the person making the sentence either screwed up the voice of the verb, since putarer would render the much more sensical “I would not have been thought to be an inferior jew,” or they simply forgot to put “judaeus” in the accusative.

Also, deterior is in the comparative degree, but cannot be comparing anything within the second clause. There is no “quam,” which is the rough translation of “than,” and the only other possibility is that “posito” is in the ablative singular being used as a substantive for comparison.

Going with everything at face value, the subject of the indirect statement of the second clause (thank whomever for commas!) must lie in the first clause. This is a little bit strange, but not unheard of.

The best candidate for the subject of an indirect statement would be “messiam.” The dictionary entry is given as messis, messis n. (third declension not first, Cecil, look again) however, which means that messiam can’t be translated as “harvest.” Indeed, “Messiam” would not even be a legitimate form of the noun (although “messia” would). Whitaker’s gives some sort of note about a suffix, but I can’t really see what relevance it could possible be here.

More likely this is supposed to be Messiah, so I’ll accept Cecil’s interpretation of this as a first declension noun in the accusative case.

It’s clear to me that either I’m missing something enormous or the person who wrote this didn’t know very good Latin.

Posito must agree with mihi in the dative or be a substantive either ablative or dative. A substantive participle may seem a little out there, but it’s not unheard of. In any case it means “having been placed” or “placed”. Probari is a present passive infinitive “to be revealed”. Venisse is a perfect active infinitive “to have come/gone” or, if this is poetry or otherwise strange, a syncope of “to have sold.” Iam is obviously now.

Assuming the second clause to be an indirect statement re-using “messiam” as its subject, I get:

“to stationed me to be shown the messiah now to have come, I would not have been thinking the messiah to have been an inferior jew.”

It’s still convoluted, horrible grammar.


originally posted by chaos
“Having borne witness that the Messiah foretold his coming to me,"

This is a loose interpretation at best. “having borne witness” would be rendred (by a sensible Latin writer, which this one clearly was not) as an ut clause or an ablative absolute. “Coming” would be best rendered as a gerund, as you have in your English. An infinitive would not be impossible, but a perfect infinitive such as we have here would be. Also, “probari”, which could well mean foretold, is in the passive voice here. Messiah is also in the accusative, which doesn’t fit with your interpretation.

Yours would look more like this:

Indicio Posito ut messia probavisset veniendum mihi

Your translation might well be what the author intended, but the literal Latin just doesn’t come close.

My conclusion is that this is anti-Semitic and bad grammar to boot.

[bruto]

I'm also guessing that Euromutt's interpretation is pretty close - more or less, "Since he's already proven to be the Messiah, we can't count it against him that he's Jewish."

ETA Too late to rummage around forthe big latin dictionary but I'll see if there's any help there tomorrow.

[bruto]

That "posito" is problematic, but it appears possible that it's a verb; even though it doesn't get an entry of its own, it looks as if it might be a variant from the root verb "pono," meaning, more or less, what "posit" means in English. I'm guessing here, based on little microscopic sub-entries in my Lewis & Short dictionary, which is so comprehensive and finicky that it's virtually impossible actually to use - not made any easier by the huge lapses in my memory of Latin grammar.

So my next stage of semi-educated guessing comes up with something along the lines of "I propose that my savior having been shown already to have come, one would not consider it worse to be (for him to be) Jewish."

The suspected anti-semitic undertone here is that if he had not been the messiah, then his being Jewish would have sent him to Hell but because he was, he's exempt.

[Soapy Sam]

It is not a sentence one encounters every day.

David- where did your brother in law's encounter occur? (ie in what context- was this in a book, an inscription, on a coin or medallion etc) any clue to provenance might throw light on the best translation.

(For example, the subject might be a monument bearing the inscription).

[Lord Muck oGentry]

Good stuff from Neutrino Cannon and Bruto. The only quibble I want to raise is which person " non deterior judaeus" applies to. If it were the Messiah, I should have expected "deteriorem judaeum", persisting with the accusative + infinitive construction. So, for the moment, I'm going to stick with the thought that it applies to the speaker.

[bruto]

Good stuff from Neutrino Cannon and Bruto. The only quibble I want to raise is which person " non deterior judaeus" applies to. If it were the Messiah, I should have expected "deteriorem judaeum", persisting with the accusative + infinitive construction. So, for the moment, I'm going to stick with the thought that it applies to the speaker.

A good point, but a part of this sentence still eludes me because whoever is the subject of "esse" should be in the accusative whether it is the speaker or the messiah who is the Jew (I think). Is it then, "to be worse a Jew" with "Jew" just sort of hanging? That doesn't quite make sense. "Worse to be Jewish" seems more likely, and the possibility arises that the case mismatch is either a misprint or an error or some odd medieval usage. Either way, though, it does end up ambiguous as to who is the Jew. I'm guessing it's the referenced messiah, because we know that he was, whereas we can only guess at the speaker, and assuming he is a Christian, it doesn't make a lot of sense to suggest that he's saying that since the messiah has come, you might as well be Jewish. If we assume a medieval Christian context, it sort of makes sense as a possible counter-argument to some question of how Jesus, being a Jew, could get to heaven if Jews were the bad guys.

[Lord Muck oGentry]

A good point, but a part of this sentence still eludes me because whoever is the subject of "esse" should be in the accusative whether it is the speaker or the messiah who is the Jew (I think). Is it then, "to be worse a Jew" with "Jew" just sort of hanging? That doesn't quite make sense. "Worse to be Jewish" seems more likely, and the possibility arises that the case mismatch is either a misprint or an error or some odd medieval usage. Either way, though, it does end up ambiguous as to who is the Jew. I'm guessing it's the referenced messiah, because we know that he was, whereas we can only guess at the speaker, and assuming he is a Christian, it doesn't make a lot of sense to suggest that he's saying that since the messiah has come, you might as well be Jewish. If we assume a medieval Christian context, it sort of makes sense as a possible counter-argument to some question of how Jesus, being a Jew, could get to heaven if Jews were the bad guys.

Yes, the awkward question for me is : why not the accusative + infinitive, whoever the subject may be? I am not sure that verbs of assertion like "puto" will permit nominative + infinitive. However, if we take the object of "putarem" to be the whole of " being a mere Jew", my guess is that the nominative construction is possible. If it is, then an ironical reading looks plausible: if the advent of the messiah were an established historical fact, then I wouldn't choose to be a mere Jew ( but I do, so it isn't!). This would make sense as a joke from a Jewish scholar forced to debate with Christians but forbidden to make an explicit denial of Christian dogma.
Still, this is pretty wild guesswork. To be frank, I'd be happy to learn I was wrong, if only for the pleasure of knowing that someone had managed to locate the quotation!

Regards

[Euromutt]

Yes, the awkward question for me is : why not the accusative + infinitive, whoever the subject may be?I agree; I would have expected an AcI there as well. I suspect you may be being too charitable by assuming the Latin is correct in the first place. Given the trouble this sentence is causing everybody here, I'm inclined to think that someone along the line, be it the author or someone who later transcribed it, didn't actually have a very good command of Latin and allowed some errors to creep in.

Count me among the people who would really like to know where this phrase came from. The only thing that comes up on Google is this very page.

[Lord Muck oGentry]

I agree; I would have expected an AcI there as well. I suspect you may be being too charitable by assuming the Latin is correct in the first place. Given the trouble this sentence is causing everybody here, I'm inclined to think that someone along the line, be it the author or someone who later transcribed it, didn't actually have a very good command of Latin and allowed some errors to creep in.

Fair point, Euromutt. I'm trying to keep that possibility in mind, as I stretch and saw the facts!
There is also the possibility-nay, nay, perish the unworthy thought!- that this is a "Romans, go home" sketch.

[Skeptic]

And I guess this is why even though quite a few folks in this forum have been educated in Latin, its difficult to come up with a translation?

Er, no.

The real reason the Latin experts on this forum have a difficulty with the translation is that being educated in Latin (as in "I took Latin for years in high school and/or college!") is one thing, and actually knowing Latin, quite another...

:D

Latin is a bit like chess in this respect. Tons of people (myself included) are educated in chess and know all there is to know about, say, the Schveshnikov variation of the Sicilian or the Philidor sixth-rank defense method in rook-and-pawn endings. When it comes to actually winning games by playing good moves, however... well, that's a whole different story! I mean, what the heck does that have to do with being an expert on the game?!

The witty chess master Siegbert Tarrasch once put it this way: "to win a tournament, it is not enough to be a connoisseur of chess; one must also play good moves".

P.S.

Chess "experts" are, of course, also good at finding mistakes in masters' play--at home, at their leisure, after the fact, of course. Znosko-Borovsky, (who, to be fair, was actually a very strong player, but not absolutely top rank) once wrote an article called "Capablanca's Mistakes", giving a few examples of Capablanca's games where Capablanca could have played better. Capablanca--who was chess world champion at the time--remarked that he was going to write an article, "Znosko-Borovsky's Good Moves", but he "hasn't found any material for it yet."

[bruto]

And I guess this is why even though quite a few folks in this forum have been educated in Latin, its difficult to come up with a translation?

Er, no.

The real reason the Latin experts on this forum have a difficulty with the translation is that being educated in Latin (as in "I took Latin for years in high school and/or college!") is one thing, and actually knowing Latin, quite another...

:D


True. I did pretty well in high school latin 40 or so years ago, but have had little opportunity to chat with any ancient Romans or even medieval scholars since then, and even then, what we learned was to read it, not to speak it or even, except in the most rudimentary ways, to write our own. I would have enjoyed continuing in it but the opportunity was not there, because Latin is generally considered a foundation for other things, rather than an end in itself, and I was way too much of an educational sluggard to take it up on my own. For me even to open a thread addressed to anybody who "knows" Latin, much less respond to it, requires a certain amount of bluff.

And of course, probably like everyone else, I learned classic, Roman Latin, not medieval Latin, and that sentence we're debating sure isn't out of Tacitus or Cornelius Nepos. I bet that even when it was uttered it was ambiguous without some context.

Thank goodness we're not being graded on this.

[Euromutt]

Er, no.

The real reason the Latin experts on this forum have a difficulty with the translation is that being educated in Latin (as in "I took Latin for years in high school and/or college!") is one thing, and actually knowing Latin, quite another... Well, thank you so much for your input. Now that you've got the condescending remarks out of the way, would you care to take a stab at the text in question yourself, and maybe explain to us lesser mortals why it couldn't possibly just be bad Latin?

[David Swidler]

OK, I have more information. My brother-in-law says the sentence comes from one of the many disputations that the Church forced Jews to conduct in the Middle Ages. Rarely was the Jewish side permitted to speak freely or to disparage Christianity in any way, so these "debates" seldom had any surprise endings. As in many other cases, the "debate" was instigated by an apostate Jew who claimed to be able to prove that the messiah had already come. After hearing the "proof" the principal member of the Jewish "team," Rabbi Yosef Albo (a Biblical commentator of some note) said that line. So indeed it seems to mean something like, "Even if the messiah has already come, I still think no worse of remaning a Jew."

Thank you for your help, everyone.

[neutrino_cannon]

Err, it's a bit off from how I would have done it, but I can so totally see that now.

[a_unique_person]

"Even if the messiah has already come, I still think no worse of remaning a Jew."

Thank you for your help, everyone.

I can understand why he would think that, everyone these days is just waiting for the second coming. Makes the first coming seem a total waste of time.

[Skeptic]

Well, thank you so much for your input. Now that you've got the condescending remarks out of the way, would you care to take a stab at the text in question yourself, and maybe explain to us lesser mortals why it couldn't possibly just be bad Latin?

Er, the smiley at the end showed my remark was a tongue-in-cheek joke...

[Pauliesonne]

Er, the smiley at the end showed my remark was a tongue-in-cheek joke...

me Lke jok