#English to ancient latin full

Add “three” ( tri) in front and you have a more potent epithet, trifur (“three-times-a-thief”). You can also get creative to pack a little extra punch. FurĪ perfect everyday insult was to call someone a “thief” ( fur). If you’re looking for a creative way to tell someone they stink, you might borrow this insult from the novelist Apuleius, which translates as “stench of a sewer bottom.” 7. “Disgraceful man” is a simple translation of this, another insult from the playwright Plautus. It looks and sounds like et cetera (“and so on”) but excetra actually means “water snake” and was a term of insult used against “wicked, malicious” women. Forster once translated it in a short story as “silly ass.” “I always brighten the classics,” the narrator of the story, Mr. It simply means “crazy,” and is the root of the English word dementia, but E.M. This term for an executioner (literally a “meat maker”) further demonstrates the Romans’ love for insulting terms associated with crimes and brutal punishments. Use this insult (from Plautus’s play Pseudolus) to accuse someone of being a “grave robber,” a criminal occupation thought to be among the lowest of the low in the ancient world.

#English to ancient latin full

The obscenities Catullus uses are, well, a bit obscene to quote here (as they were for centuries of translators ), but the point is that ancient Latin, despite its reputation as a learned language of science, religion, and philosophy, was in fact a rough-and-ready language full of strikingly frank insults designed to quickly cut to the bone.īelow are 20 of those insults, most of which are (just a shade) more proper than those found in “Catullus 16.” (A translation and brilliant examination of Catullus’s poem can be found here, though, caveat lector (reader beware): It is truly obscene, and uses language that we today consider slurs.) 1.

“Catullus 16,” as it’s blandly known, insults and attacks two of the first-century BCE poet’s detractors.

The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard became briefly notorious in 2009 (though not for the first or last time) when she was bleeped at length on NPR for quoting an ancient Roman poem-in Latin.