"quod me nutrit me destruit" it is not.
August 10, 2008 12:42 PM Subscribe
LatinMeFitesUnite!: Please doublecheck/translate "keep what you kill" into Latin for me, pretty please.
This will be my first tattoo, and I think it's a good one for me. The basic sentiment I want to put across with it - because I know sometimes this makes a huge difference in other languages - is this saying my aunt has drilled into my head for the last 28 years: "if you don't go for it, you never get it. If you get it and don't claim it, you don't get to keep it."
I found an online translator and it gave me "Servo quis vos iuguolo". I am very skeptical about the online translator things, as I know how horribly they tend to butcher spanish. So, my lovely mefites, please translate "keep what you kill" into latin for me. Please. Por favor.
Gracias.
This will be my first tattoo, and I think it's a good one for me. The basic sentiment I want to put across with it - because I know sometimes this makes a huge difference in other languages - is this saying my aunt has drilled into my head for the last 28 years: "if you don't go for it, you never get it. If you get it and don't claim it, you don't get to keep it."
I found an online translator and it gave me "Servo quis vos iuguolo". I am very skeptical about the online translator things, as I know how horribly they tend to butcher spanish. So, my lovely mefites, please translate "keep what you kill" into latin for me. Please. Por favor.
Gracias.
My first thought was 'tene quod habes' (hold fast what you have), which is actually a quotation from the Vulgate (Rev. 3: 11). But 'tene quod capis' (hold fast what you capture) is probably closer to your meaning. Or you could turn it round: 'quod capio teneo' (what I capture, I keep).
posted by verstegan at 2:45 PM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite]
posted by verstegan at 2:45 PM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite]
'quid necas, edito' (what you kill, you eat), but please wait for someone who is better with tenses to confirm this. I got this hacking around with Whitaker's Words and checking a couple of grammars online.
posted by jquinby at 2:55 PM on August 10, 2008
posted by jquinby at 2:55 PM on August 10, 2008
Just chiming in to second The Bellman--the first thing I thought of was the very common lawyers' expression "Eat what you kill," which is used in my area to refer to the type of partnership where each lawyer works his own cases and takes home the proceeds, and does not get a cut of what the other lawyers are bringing in.
posted by HotToddy at 3:15 PM on August 10, 2008
posted by HotToddy at 3:15 PM on August 10, 2008
Not sure about what it should be, but I can tell you your translation is way off. Servo is 2nd declension (masculine) dative case. Which basically translates it at to/for the slave (the can be switched out for a or even just taken out).
I'm not sure, but I believe quis is who.
According to Wiktionary, vos is the plural of you and can be nominative or accusative (i.e. the subject or the direct object)
Don't know iuguolo. Sorry! Also, it's summer vacation for me and I have only had one year of Latin, I shouldn't have to do this in the summer! So take this with a grain of salt.
posted by Deflagro at 5:54 PM on August 10, 2008
I'm not sure, but I believe quis is who.
According to Wiktionary, vos is the plural of you and can be nominative or accusative (i.e. the subject or the direct object)
Don't know iuguolo. Sorry! Also, it's summer vacation for me and I have only had one year of Latin, I shouldn't have to do this in the summer! So take this with a grain of salt.
posted by Deflagro at 5:54 PM on August 10, 2008
@Deflagro: servo is also first person singular present of servare, meaning to watch or observe (at the root of English words like conservation). It can also mean keep as in keep a promise. But it has nothing to do with keeping in the sense that damnjezebel wants.
Verstegan is on the best track in terms of style; Latin epigrams are pithy. And I think that capio (I take, used in many senses including that of hunting) and teneo (I hold, keep, retain) are more idiomatic, and will convey the sense you want, better than words meaning specifically eat and kill. As a motto or epigram, you want it to express how you act, so first person is appropriate.
posted by brianogilvie at 7:45 PM on August 10, 2008
Verstegan is on the best track in terms of style; Latin epigrams are pithy. And I think that capio (I take, used in many senses including that of hunting) and teneo (I hold, keep, retain) are more idiomatic, and will convey the sense you want, better than words meaning specifically eat and kill. As a motto or epigram, you want it to express how you act, so first person is appropriate.
posted by brianogilvie at 7:45 PM on August 10, 2008
tene qui necas
-"tene" is a command, i.e. telling you to keep something [there should be a bar over the second e in tene, and over the i in qui]
-"necas" is the second person indicative, i.e. saying that you kill something. e.g. I kill, he kills, you kill.
-"qui" (see my comment in the next section)
I was trying to figure out the tense of the each verb: "keep" seems to be imperative, but what should we think of "kill," etc. . When it occurred to me that it would be easier to translate "What I keep, I kill"
qui neco, teno
(with a bar over the letter "o" in "neco" and "teno" and the i in "qui")
But I'm not sure about the conjugation of "Qui," I'm pretty confident the the singuler, masculine "qui" is right, but for whatever reason I want to suggest "quo" instead.
In all honesty I wasn't going to reply because I'm not nearly confident enough in my Latin to suggest something for permanent mark on your body. However, I decided to make a few remarks in the hopes that someone else can improve on what I've said.
posted by oddman at 8:09 PM on August 10, 2008
-"tene" is a command, i.e. telling you to keep something [there should be a bar over the second e in tene, and over the i in qui]
-"necas" is the second person indicative, i.e. saying that you kill something. e.g. I kill, he kills, you kill.
-"qui" (see my comment in the next section)
I was trying to figure out the tense of the each verb: "keep" seems to be imperative, but what should we think of "kill," etc. . When it occurred to me that it would be easier to translate "What I keep, I kill"
qui neco, teno
(with a bar over the letter "o" in "neco" and "teno" and the i in "qui")
But I'm not sure about the conjugation of "Qui," I'm pretty confident the the singuler, masculine "qui" is right, but for whatever reason I want to suggest "quo" instead.
In all honesty I wasn't going to reply because I'm not nearly confident enough in my Latin to suggest something for permanent mark on your body. However, I decided to make a few remarks in the hopes that someone else can improve on what I've said.
posted by oddman at 8:09 PM on August 10, 2008
Response by poster: Ya'll are amazing, thank you. Please keep up the great info. Once we get it down, I'll link a pic of the tattoo. Still not even sure how to get this thing done! I suppose girly font, but who knows.
thanks again and please keep it up! - mia
posted by damnjezebel at 8:59 PM on August 10, 2008
thanks again and please keep it up! - mia
posted by damnjezebel at 8:59 PM on August 10, 2008
My gut reaction is something like "capio praedam". Couple of thoughts:
--There are a bunch of words for "kill", many of them have quite different implications. Notably, necare has the implication "usually without a weapon, by poison, hunger, etc.". I doubt that's what you want. Pay attention to whether a word is used more to mean "kill in battle", "murder", "slaughter/butcher for meat", and so on.
--Latin is all about the participles. You're not necessarily going to need or want to have "you" or "what" translated word for word, that sounds to me too much like the machine translation you want to avoid. Consider "capio interfectos", which would be something like "I take the slain". Including a relative pronoun in there sounds clumsy to me, and a second person verb would only be really necessary if you were emphasizing "you, the other person", which you're not.
--brianogilvie has good advice about using first person, but it would be possible to avoid an explicit agent. Think "that which is taken in a hunt [*one word*], is to be kept". Problem is that hunting and keeping could both point to capere again, which would be repetitive. Consider:
Praeda tenenda est
"Prey is to be held/kept", which uses the passive periphrastic. Praeda also turns up meaning "booty, spoils, etc." which sounds closer to what you want. If you really must have "kill", you'd have the perfect passive participle of that verb, probably in neuter plural, instead of praeda, and then change est to sunt.
--The nice people at Tufts have dictionary resources online.
[Obligatory]
posted by gimonca at 9:10 PM on August 10, 2008
--There are a bunch of words for "kill", many of them have quite different implications. Notably, necare has the implication "usually without a weapon, by poison, hunger, etc.". I doubt that's what you want. Pay attention to whether a word is used more to mean "kill in battle", "murder", "slaughter/butcher for meat", and so on.
--Latin is all about the participles. You're not necessarily going to need or want to have "you" or "what" translated word for word, that sounds to me too much like the machine translation you want to avoid. Consider "capio interfectos", which would be something like "I take the slain". Including a relative pronoun in there sounds clumsy to me, and a second person verb would only be really necessary if you were emphasizing "you, the other person", which you're not.
--brianogilvie has good advice about using first person, but it would be possible to avoid an explicit agent. Think "that which is taken in a hunt [*one word*], is to be kept". Problem is that hunting and keeping could both point to capere again, which would be repetitive. Consider:
Praeda tenenda est
"Prey is to be held/kept", which uses the passive periphrastic. Praeda also turns up meaning "booty, spoils, etc." which sounds closer to what you want. If you really must have "kill", you'd have the perfect passive participle of that verb, probably in neuter plural, instead of praeda, and then change est to sunt.
--The nice people at Tufts have dictionary resources online.
[Obligatory]
posted by gimonca at 9:10 PM on August 10, 2008
I love these kinds of things, because I really want to polish my Latin back up.
Personally, I think it is important to work out the phrasing in a way that people who spoke the language would have used. Not to make things overly complicated and flowery, and pretend that that was normal, but also not to try to force English idioms into another language. I really like gimonca's approach for this, personally.
You are working for a hunting/trapping kind of imagery, so verbs of warfare are fairly ill-suited, as are verbs of pillaging.
Feririe is to strike dead, slay smite, which works in the image of, say, killing a rabbit with a club. Enecare is to kill off, wear out, which works for running down a deer in the forest and exhausting it, and overcoming it. Caedere is to cut, with kill as a tertiary definition, but its noun form is the word for slaughter, so it might be usable (though it seems to battle-oriented, to me.) Necare is to kill, slay or put to death.
Pretty much any of these could be used, but the word i would pick is: exanimare. The most common meaning is something along the lines of "taking [blank's] breath away," or "to knock the wind out of," but the word literally means "to take away the animus," the inner spirit, the breath of life, and, helpfully, the root of the word "animal" both in Latin and in English. I think this manages to convey a poetic, yet visceral killing, as well as incorporating a play on words.
The word for "to hold" is pretty straight forward; it doesn't have to be tenere, but it usually is.
The word for "to release, to let go" is a little harder: relinquish, emancipate and exonerate all come from Latin words and, I think, carry extra meaning we don't want in this case.
Expedire is to free from a snare, disentangle, release, while solvere is to untie, release, both fit well with the "hunting game" concept. Laxare is the root for the English word "relax," and so in the sense that someone holding a stance can release that stance, it means release, but it doesn't mean "set free." Personally, I think this matches the most with the spirit of your grandmother's advice, "once you have it, don't relax and let it be taken away," but there is an argument for all three.
The way I would put that phrase into Latin would be:
"keep what you kill" ->
"Having killed something, don't let it slip away." Or, more strictly: "Having killed, be unwilling to slacken." ->
EXANIMATUS ERAS NOLITE LAXARE. (In all caps, because the Romans knew how to cruise control.)
That said, don't get this inked on your body without somebody else signing off that i didn't make any retarded mistakes. I took a whole lot of Latin classes, but that was a handful of years ago, so it wouldn't be hard for me to have fucked up. I spent a lot of time on this, and I think I did what I meant to do, but it has been 6 years, and a tattoo lasts a lot longer.
posted by paisley henosis at 10:34 PM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite]
Personally, I think it is important to work out the phrasing in a way that people who spoke the language would have used. Not to make things overly complicated and flowery, and pretend that that was normal, but also not to try to force English idioms into another language. I really like gimonca's approach for this, personally.
You are working for a hunting/trapping kind of imagery, so verbs of warfare are fairly ill-suited, as are verbs of pillaging.
Feririe is to strike dead, slay smite, which works in the image of, say, killing a rabbit with a club. Enecare is to kill off, wear out, which works for running down a deer in the forest and exhausting it, and overcoming it. Caedere is to cut, with kill as a tertiary definition, but its noun form is the word for slaughter, so it might be usable (though it seems to battle-oriented, to me.) Necare is to kill, slay or put to death.
Pretty much any of these could be used, but the word i would pick is: exanimare. The most common meaning is something along the lines of "taking [blank's] breath away," or "to knock the wind out of," but the word literally means "to take away the animus," the inner spirit, the breath of life, and, helpfully, the root of the word "animal" both in Latin and in English. I think this manages to convey a poetic, yet visceral killing, as well as incorporating a play on words.
The word for "to hold" is pretty straight forward; it doesn't have to be tenere, but it usually is.
The word for "to release, to let go" is a little harder: relinquish, emancipate and exonerate all come from Latin words and, I think, carry extra meaning we don't want in this case.
Expedire is to free from a snare, disentangle, release, while solvere is to untie, release, both fit well with the "hunting game" concept. Laxare is the root for the English word "relax," and so in the sense that someone holding a stance can release that stance, it means release, but it doesn't mean "set free." Personally, I think this matches the most with the spirit of your grandmother's advice, "once you have it, don't relax and let it be taken away," but there is an argument for all three.
The way I would put that phrase into Latin would be:
"keep what you kill" ->
"Having killed something, don't let it slip away." Or, more strictly: "Having killed, be unwilling to slacken." ->
EXANIMATUS ERAS NOLITE LAXARE. (In all caps, because the Romans knew how to cruise control.)
That said, don't get this inked on your body without somebody else signing off that i didn't make any retarded mistakes. I took a whole lot of Latin classes, but that was a handful of years ago, so it wouldn't be hard for me to have fucked up. I spent a lot of time on this, and I think I did what I meant to do, but it has been 6 years, and a tattoo lasts a lot longer.
posted by paisley henosis at 10:34 PM on August 10, 2008 [1 favorite]
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sharkslawyers.posted by The Bellman at 1:44 PM on August 10, 2008