Morality is an old-fashioned word, which signifies a code of conduct handed down over the generations. This code of conduct forms the basis of a particular society’s values. Morality is thus rooted in time and tradition. It tends to be a collective concept…
Read MoreThe basic meaning of the root verb—putare—in the word ‘reputation’ is ‘to prune’, as in pruning vines. It can also mean ‘to purify’ and is related to the Latin words putus and purus, both meaning ‘pure’. Reputare would thus be ‘to prune again’ or ‘to repurify’…
Read MoreThe Latin word invidere, from which our words ‘envy’ and ‘invidious’ come, is a compound of the word videre meaning ‘to see’ or ‘to look at’. The prefix in- here gives the sense of ‘to keep one’s eye fixed on an object (with sentiments of secret jealousy)’….
Read MoreOur word Nature comes from the Latin noun ‘natura’, which itself comes from the verb nascor, natus sum meaning ‘to be born’. Therefore the word natura has the primary meaning of ‘birth’. Its secondary meaning is ‘nature’, both as the order and constitution of the universe and as the natural disposition or character of a person, creature or thing…
Read MoreLatin Illuminations: I shall be taking a different English word each week and attempting to cast new light on its meaning by looking at the Latin word or words from which it derives. I begin with the word ‘Altitude’.
Read MoreJuno was an old Italian goddess of central Italy and was related to Astarte, the Phoenician goddess who presided over fertility and war. As Juno Regina, the Queen of Heaven, her cult was brought to Rome from Veii in Etruria in the 5th Century B.C.
Read MoreIt is difficult to imagine two more antithetical deities than Athena and Pan. Athena, one of the Olympian Twelve, was both parthenogenically born and a virgin; was the patron goddess of the two greatest city states of Hellas, Athens and Sparta, and a proctectress of cities in general; was a mistress of strategy in war and stratagems in peace; and invented the plough, rake, ox-yoke, horse-bridle, and chariot, as well as handicrafts for women.
Read MoreThe Latin equivalent of ‘coals to Newcastle’ (ligna in silvam) was the subject of an earlier post. The Greek equivalent is γλαυκ' Ἀθηναζε [ἀγειν], meaning ‘to bring an owl to Athens’. The owl was the bird of Athena, the patron goddess of Athens, and it is said that owls used to roost in the rafters of the old Parthenon, Athena’s sanctuary on the Acropolis (destroyed in the Persian invasion of 480 B.C.).
Read MoreNaris, the word for ‘nostril’ in Latin, is used in the plural (nares) to mean ‘nose’. The Latin word derives from the Greek verb ναω meaning ‘to flow’ (just as the Greek word for ‘nose’ (ῥις, ῥινος) dervies from ῥεω, another verb meaning ‘to flow’). So the nose is associated radically with its flux―a throwback, perhaps, to an ancient theory of humours.
Read MoreThe Perfect Tense in Greek, unlike in Latin, is always a true Perfect and cannot do duty for the Simple Past (i.e. the Aorist). It represents an action as already completed at the present time, such as in the sentence την εἰρηνην σεσωκα, ‘I have saved the peace’. This sentence can never be translated ‘I saved the peace’ (for that would imply nothing as to the completion of the action).
Read MoreAs a child my favourite experience was a bonfire, no doubt partly because it was always a profound mystery and partly because I liked the idea of destruction (purification?). It wasn’t so much seeing the insatiable dragon we call fire consuming endless amounts of wood and leaves and old boxes that was mystifying, but rather the fact that the dragon itself, having consumed all that matter, itself became nothing.
Read MoreThe Latin phrase flumen bibere (lit. ‘to drink a river’) has the idiomatic meaning of ‘to live by a river’ and is often used with the name of a particular body of water. For instance, Virgil in Eclogue X refers to the river Hebrus in Thrace with these words:
nec si frigoribus mediis Hebrumque bibamus
Read MoreThe Vita Merlini, to give it its short title, is an epic poem (carmen heroicum) of 1,529 lines in Latin dactylic hexameter by the British cleric and scholar Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1095—c.1155). It tells of Merlin’s life as a wild man of the woods following his traumatic experience at the Battle of Arfderydd in 573, when he went mad after witnessing the death of Gwenddoleu ap Ceidio, whose bard he had been.
Read MoreI unreservedly recommend Robert Graves’s phenomenal 1944 narrative of the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece as a rhapsodic work packed with adventure, erudition and a profoundly intuitive understanding of Ancient Greek culture.
Read MoreThe Greek adjective αἰγιλιψ (aygilips)―from αἰξ ‘goat’ and λιπειν ‘to forsake’―means ‘deserted even by goats’, i.e. ‘barren’, ‘desperately forbidding’ or ‘too steep’, as applied to landscapes or features of the landscape. There are two known uses of this word in Greek literature.
Read MoreThe Greek word προφητης means literally ‘who one speaks for another’ (from the verb φημι, ‘I speak’) , i.e. a spokesman, in particular for a deity: in other words one through whom a god or goddess speaks. Apollo, for instance, was known as Διος προφητης at the Delphic oracle. This does not mean the interpreter of Zeus, as some maintain, but rather his mouthpiece.
Read MoreThe Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who reigned from 161 to his death in 180, wrote his Meditations, as they have come to be known, while on campaign with his legions on the Danube. He wrote the work in Greek and gave it the title ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣ ΕΑΥΤΟΝ, meaning literally ‘Of the things (addressed) to himself’.
Read MoreMost of you Latin students will have come across the 3rd-declension adjective incolumis, meaning ‘safe after danger’ or ‘uninjured’. There is also an adjective columis, though you won’t find it in your dictionary.
Read MoreAs the Revd. Francis Valpy remarks in the introduction to his Etymological Dictionary of the Latin Language, Latin is intimately connected with Greek and the nature of the connection is not that of sister to sister, but of daughter to mother.
Read MoreInstead of our phrase ‘to carry coals to Newcastle’, Latin has the altogether more delightful ad silvam ligna ferre, i.e. ‘to carry logs [or firewood] to the forest’.
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