[R] Latin in Pterry books.
Ayende Rahien
I was in lspace.org and read there something about dog latin vs Latin.
Can someone explain me this?
Richard Eney
What Terry writes is not Latin but Latatian. "Latatian" on the Discworld
fills the place held by Latin on Earth.
"Dog Latin" is not truly Latin. It is a joke, written as though faked by
someone who doesn't know the grammatical structure of Latin at all but
does have a Latin dictionary, so the root words are usually similar to the
actual meaning (though not always).
For example:
"Illegitimus non carborundum" is an example of dog Latin. It purports
to mean "Don't let the bastards grind you down", because it contains a
word similar to the English word "illegitimate", the English word
"carborundum" which ends with the "um" suffix that occurs in Latin, and
the word "non" which is recognizable as meaning something like "no" or
"don't". Many people who don't know Latin think that or its more recent
form "Nil illegitimus carborundum" is correct Latin.
No doubt someone who knows better will correct me on this: I believe that
in the Middle Ages there were several forms of Latin, in various degrees
of corruption, and that led to some ungrammatical forms being used to
express heraldic mottos. It became an understood joke that a motto is
likely to be in bad Latin, and humorous mottos have been composed by
Latin-studying schoolchildren ever since.
=Tamar