Sup y’all,
This year, 2025, I hope to keep a diary of sorts.
Here.
On past performance, this isn’t a cast iron guarantee.
I have however, deleted most of my previous posts, to create a fresh start.
My Latin parsing efforts remain as well as a few others which somehow seem significant to me.
Beso, baci, pax etc.
MF
Sup?
I don’t just have a language website. I’m more rounded than that;) From time to time I create other websites for fun.
Most recently, I’ve been playing around with Solitaireonline.org. This is, unsurprisingly, a website where you can (or will be able) to play different types of Solitaire.
As I am interested in languages, and by extension etymology, I wondered about the origins and original meaning of the word Solitaire.
It sounds Latin, and so I reached for my Lewis and Short Latin dictionary (one of my most treasured possessions), and looked for Solitaire.
The closest word was solitarius.
Solitarius is an adjective meaning alone. Lewis and Short included a few handy Latin quotes some of which I will include here for later parsing🙂
Natura solitarium nihil amat
nature loves nothing solitary.
I’ve given the literal translation. A more pleasing rendering would be ‘nature abhors a vacuum’.
And the pleasing:
Hae apes non sunt solitaria natura, ut aquilae sed ut homines.
I then turned the page in the dictionary and discovered the word solitas. I think that this is a noun. It has the meaning ‘a being alone, solitude’.
I checked my Oxford English Dictionary of Etymology to confirm that the word Solitaire originates from the Latin word Solitarius.
The entry also told me that Solitaire is in fact a word from old French. It is still used in French as Solitaire. E.g. jouer au solitaire ‘to play Solitaire’.
This must have originated from the Latin Solitarius at some point in the dim and distant past, and I wondered when?
I discovered a good French dictionary which includes Etymology (although you need to be able to read French to make best use of it) called littre.
The appropriate page concerning the origins of the word Solitaire is this one.
Solitaire in French has two main meanings (or so it seems to me) and these are:-
D’une pers – “Qui est seul, isolé, esseulé”
About a person – “Who is alone, isolated, lonely”
D’un lieu – “Où l’on est seul, où l’on vit seul, où l’on peut se retirer”
Of a place – “Where one is alone, where one lives alone, where one can withdraw”
I don’t know when Solitaire was first used in modern French to describe the game of Solitaire but the word was used by Sévigné in 1674 with the meaning of aloneness of solitary:
Elle [Mme de Thianges devenue dévote]… est toujours de très bonne compagnie, et n’est pas solitaire.
So, Solitaire came into the English language via the French which in turn absorbed it from Latin.
According to littre, solitarius was derived from solitas, itself derived from solus (alone).
Provenç. solitari, soletari ; espagn. et ital. solitario ; du lat. solitarius, dérivé de solitas, qui vient de solus, seul
Of course, in a way, none of this helps, as in the UK (and I believe France), Solitaire is in fact called Patience.
Solitaire and patience are different games entirely.
I really should have been checking the etymology of Patience;)
Besos et Pax,
MF.
Sup y’all?
As you might or might not know, I’m a big fan of kelllebells (bodyweight exercises as well) but you also need to lift something. It’s satisfying.
Watch this if you are into kettles. It is hands down, the best kettlebell workout that I have seen. None of the others come close.
It looks like he is using a 24Kg bell. Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the cardio fitness and strength needed to do that for five minutes (one armed).
I’m going to add to the swings (one armed obviously) and squats that I do next year.
In other news, I’ve just chopped the wood ready to burn tonight, and I’m feeling pumped
I hope this finds you as it leaves me.
Besos, baci et Pax,
MF.
It’s true.
I was taught by someone who knows about these things. The problem with people who know about these things, in this case cooking something regularly is that they do it by instinct.
You have to get a feel for the ingredients and how they go together before you can guarantee success.
The original recipe will vary depending on what is in the house, the mood of the cook and size of the teaspoon. It is only in books that recipes are static, boring things set in concrete.
So for jerk chicken:
Just add a teaspoon, or maybe a teaspoon and a half of black pepper.
Thyme is very important.
And pimiento peppers. Pimiento peppers? Any particular type?
And so on.
Despite the detailed instructions, it took me at least ten attempts to make it taste as it should. I was adding too much thyme. Thyme has a disproportionate effect on the overall flavour. This is counter intuitive considering the numerous cloves of garlic needed.
I also make a similarly good lamb or goat curry. The ingredients are similar and I finally have a feel for the quantities needed. No accurate measuring for me.
Rice and peas have so far eluded me.
I might give that a go next week.
Besos, baci et Pax.
MoOnFaCe
Sup y’all?
The weather is bad, a new variant of Covid is rife and we all need a bit of cheering up. So it’s time to parse some Latin.
And if that doesn’t cheer you up, or at least focus your mind, then I don’t know what will;)
As I have mentioned before, I have a copy of the Vulgate (a real paper copy) and have even made a frequency list containing the 100 most frequent words used.
And as maybe you already know, terra autem erat inanis and so on above crops up at the beginning of Genesis, so I haven’t had to look far for suitable parsing material.
The Vulgate has punctuation, so let’s make use of it and parse :
Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi
as
Terra autem erat inanis et vacua
and
et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi.
Terra ‘earth’ is a first declension feminine noun.
It looks like a nominative, so without even worrying about declining it, let’s assume that is it is in the nominative and the subject of the sentence. I’m guessing nominative because it makes sense and the Vulgate *wasn’t supposed* to be complicated. Terra could be an accusative but would that work with erat? No it wouldn’t, so let’s ignore that possibility.
Erat ‘he/she was’ is the third person singular imperfect of the verb ‘to be’.
Autem ‘but, moreover, also’ is a conjugation.
Inanis, inanis, inane is an adjective with various meanings. It will come as no great surprise to you to learn that one of these meanings is ‘inane’. There is another which is ’empty, void’.
I’m going to leave the declension of Inanis, inanis, inane for the interested reader;) It might help you to know that back in the day, the model adjective that we used was tristis, tristis, triste, and that these are in the nominative case. In other words, they agree with and describe terra.
Vacuus, vacua, vacuum ’empty, vacant, unoccupied ‘ is a (I think) a first declension adjective. I don’t want to mislead anyone with this, so if you think it is something else, you are likely correct.
However, vacua is a feminine nominative singular, and I am certain of that, meaning that it agrees with terra.
And finally, I’m reasonably certain that the correct grammatical term for the use of vacua and inanis in this context is a predicative adjective. They describe the noun terra and have the verb ‘to be’ in between the two. You don’t need to know that, but it might come in useful when you have to impress the cool kids.
And so we have something like , ‘But the earth was empty and unoccupied …’
Ok. That’s part one complete, and now onto:
tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi
Tenebra, tenebrae ‘darkness, gloom, night and so on’ is a first declension feminine noun.
Tenebrae is the plural form of tenebra which explains why the version of esse ‘to be’ used is the third person imperfect plural. It has to ‘agree’ with the noun in number and gender.
‘Darkness was … ‘
Super ‘over, above’.
‘Darkness was over …’
Facies, ei ‘shape, appearance, aspect’ is a fifth declension feminine noun. Crucially for us followed by the accusative case, and faciem is a very standard accusative singular ending, but let’s decline facies to be sure;)
Facies, facies, faciem, facei, facei, face
Result!
‘Darkness was over the face …’
Abysssus, abyssi ‘abyss, sea, chaos’ is a second declension feminine noun. This gives us various possibilities as Abyssi is either a genitive singular or a nominative plural. Abyssi ‘of the abyss’ as a genitive singular seems the more plausible option to me.
And so we can translate:
Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi
As
But the world was empty and unoccupied and darkness was over the face of the abyss.
Besos, baci and pax.
MF.
Sup?
Or should we say:
Verbum sapienti satis est?
It’s up to you really.
Be that as it may, its time to parse a short Latin phrase which I want to remember.
Verbum (word) is a second declension neuter noun. Back in the day, bellum was used as the model for declining such a noun, and here it is in all its glory in both the singular and plural:-
bellum, bellum, bellum, belli, bello, bello,
bella, bella, bella, bellorum, bellis, bellis.
Let’s assume that verbum is a nominative, and so the subject of verbum sapienti … and parse from there.
sapiens, sapientis (wise, judicious … ) is an i-stem adjective and declines like ingens. Ingens was the adjective used as a pattern that I was forced to learn a lifetime ago, and which has surprisingly remained firmly entrenched in my brain.
And here it is in the singular :-
ingens, ingens, ingens
ingens, ingens, ingens
ingentem, ingens, ingens
ingentis, ingentis, ingentis
ingenti, ingenti, ingenti,
ingenti, ingenti, ingenti
Well look we can use a little initiative here. Sapienti could be either in the dative or accusative case, but dative makes sense as is translated as to giving us:-
Verbum sapienti A word to the wise.
You can use this on its own.
As in:-
Hey you, verbum sapienti, you need to water your geraniums.
Don’t spoil it by adding ‘a‘ as in:-
Hey you, a verbum sapienti …
satis (enough)
est (is) is from the irregular verb esse (to be) which you should know by now, but here it is in the present anyway:-
sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt
The parsed Latin is fairly clear and is :-
A word to the wise is enough.
In other news, I have been planning and starting to build a water feature, as a bid to make part of our garden more interesting.
But, verbum sapienti, solar powered pumps can be more tricky than you think – especially if you want to avoid draining a battery also being charged from the same panel.
The naive implementation of attaching one pump directly to the battery isn’t a great one. The pump can drain the battery, and once a lead acid battery drops below a certain voltage, the charge controller will stop working. This is bad!
The trick, or so I think, is to have two pumps. The first is a more powerful pump directly connected to the solar panel. The second will be activated by a motion detector and is less powerful and only used at night. The sounds of water can then be heard in the darkness. This pump will be connected to the load terminals on the charge controller (fused obvs.), and fall within the allowable tolerance of the controller.
Food for thought!
And finally, I have added a Sindarin crossword to Surface languages, which is possibly the only one on the internet:)
Oh, and just one more observation: I personally prefer Verbum sapienti satis est to verbum sapienti sat est. The second is to my ear a bit chi chi.
Chi chi isn’t acceptable either. It just happens to neatly encapsulate my thoughts.
Besos and baci,
MF
Sup?
Presumably you know the story of Jack and the beanstalk? If not shame on you, and maybe you should look it up. These old amoral fairy tales are perfect for our time. They are truer to life than the sugar coated stories that children are reared on nowadays. There is no messing around with right, wrong and undue moralising. It is left for the reader to decide, and think about.
In Jack and the beenstalk the giant was a bully and thief. Jack kills him. Was Jacks response proportional to the theft of a magic harp committed by the giant or not?
Discuss.
The definition of murder in UK law is ‘one person kills another with intention to cause death or serious injury unlawfully’.
Jack cut the beanstalk down when Gogmagog was on it. There is intent, and it would be very difficult to argue otherwise. He knew the giant was on the beanstalk. He knew the beanstalk would crash to the ground when chopped down. He knew that death or serious injury would result.
I used to love academic law.
Behind our shed something akin to the beanstalk had sprouted. Not as quickly, for sure, taking more like twenty years as opposed to the days required when magic beans are planted.
Gogmagog might have been at the top for all I know and ready to roar:-
Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread
In case you hadn’t guessed, back in the real world, English Ivy had sprouted, unreachable and untouchable growing as it did behind the shed inches from the fence at the Back of Beyond.
The shed has now gone. The ivy hasn’t.
Wondering if there was an easy way to remove english ivy (Hedera helix), I chanced across a post suggesting that it would be possible to gently remove ivy and brush away the leaves.
After smiling to myself about this for the briefest of moments, I moved on, checking my L & S for the meaning of Hedera. I discovered that Hedera is the literal Latin word for ivy, so zero out of ten for the botanists originality quotient.
L & S also told me that Hereda was sacred to Bacchus and hence wound around the thyrssus. Thryssus being a bacchic wand tipped with ivy.
Ignoring the wise words whispered by the internet, I started to gently persuade the ivy to leave the fence with an axe and saw.
The roots are thicker than my arm, and are not keen to be persuaded. Dark and deep they go into the earth, grown and entwined around small pebbles and larger bricks. And this linked to the vulnerable fence is making them difficult to remove.
I’m sawing the roots out in chunks. Good for me physically and probably helping me to develop mental fortitude as well.
I’m digging down to below ground level, removing as many roots as I can, and will spread poison over the stump. I’m not entirely chuffed, in fact distinctly dechuffed with spewing venom in the garden. There is no other way of removing enough of the roots to stop the ivy, resurfacing under the woodshed (and fence) like a phoenix or more likely Hydra.
I have nothing against hedera which is good for wildlife and in the right quantities adds a certain dark something to a garden. Despite our gardens small size (13metres long and 6 metres wide), there is plenty more on the run so its not going anywhere soon. I will keep enough for wildlife purposes.
It gets dark early at this time of year, and when it did and the temperature dropped, it was time to do something inside.
More ivy removal pix coming soon …
Besos, baci and Pax,
MF.
Sup?
The morning is bright and beautiful, and after yesterdays foray into the world of water butt automation, what better way to start the day than to parse some Latin?
I stumbled across the above by chance, and like many good sayings, it seems to have fallen out of use.
But don’t worry, we can resurrect it and use it in meetings, with our nearest and dearest and so on.
Catus amat piscem, sed non vult tingere plantam
The phrase looks like medieval Latin, and like many such sayings is straight-forward to parse and ideal for practice, diversion and learning a few new words such as catus (cat).
I can feel my vocabulary increasing already.
Lets parse away, and get on with the day …;)
Catus (cat) is a second declension masculine noun, which declines as follows in the singular:-
catus, cate, catum, cati, cato, cato.
It is in the nominative case, telling us that it is the subject of the verb:
amo, amare, amavi, amatus (to love)
which is a regular verb of the first conjugation.
For practice, it is conjugated as follows in the present:
amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant.
giving us amat (he, she or it loves).
What do cats love? They love :-
piscis (fish) which is a masculine noun of the third declension and declines (in the singular) as follows:
piscis, piscis, piscem, piscis, pisci, pisce (or maybe pisci).
From this we can see that piscem is in the accusative case (as we would expect for the object of the verb).
Catus amat piscem (The cat loves fish).
As an aside the Italian, Romanian and Spanish words for fish, are pesce, pește and pez respectively.
And what don’t cats love?
sed non vult tingere plantam
thats what!
sed (but)
non (not)
Vult comes from the verb volo (to wish, want) which conjugates as follows (in the present):
volo, vis, vult, volumus, vultis, volunt
It is irregular, common and just has to be learnt, or at least recognised.
The t at the end of vult is a typical second person singular Latin ending.
We now have:-
sed non vult (but he or indeed she does not want) to tingere plantam!!
I didn’t know the meaning of tingere but as often turns out to be the case there is a relation an English word.
tingo, tingere, tinxi, tinctus (wet, moisten, dip or soak) as our metaphorical cat is loathe to do, also means
colour, dye, stain or …
TINT and so gives us tincture, tint, tinge and so on.
Who would have thought that tint comes from the stem of the Latin verb tingere? These are the kind of reasons that dabbling is Latin is rewarding – if you like this kind of stuff.
And not everyone does …
… which I understand but if you don’t I’m surprised that you are still reading;)
And now it only remains for us to look up the meaning of
planta (sole of foot).
This is a first declension feminine noun and declines as follows:-
planta, planta, plantam, plantae, plantae, planta
Plantam is the accusative from and the object of the verb which is what we would expect – as cats don’t like getting wet paws.
The literal translation of
Catus amat piscem, sed non vult tingere plantam
is
The cat likes or loves fish, but he or she does not want to wet (his or her) paws.
The more usual English form is:
The cat would eat fish and would not wet her feet.
This either means:
that often you have to do something unpleasant to get to do something that you want to do
or
that you don’t always do something unpleasant to get to do something that you want.
I have in the past (and I mean in the past) heard it used in both senses.
Finally, I started with an almost rhyme and so will end with an almost rhyme:
Parsing a Latin sentence a day, keeps boredom at bay.
I might work on these.
Besos, Pax & Baci,
MF
Sup?
I’m pretty sure that I don’t have any regular readers, but if I did, and let’s pretend that you are one of them, the question that would be on your lips would be:
Don’t you normally write about parsing Latin?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Mainly. I also have other preoccupations/hobbies/interests and if I can’t write about them here, where can I write about them?
One of these preoccupations is our Garden, and in it half way down on the left hidden by a small yew tree is a water butt.
But I get ahead of myself.
The garden is 13 metres long by 6.6 metres wide, shaded at the far end due to being slightly below ground level and surrounded by other houses.
There is an ash tree at the bottom left, and at the far end tucked against by (the falling down fence) a silver birch (dead centre) and slightly towards the house a eucalyptus tree.
I planted the eucalyptus.
The garden has been neglected for years. I can’t even tell you why, as I like gardens, gardening and being in the open.
Due to various reasons that I’d rather not detail here (but Brexit, pandemic and an idiot surely feature), I became an ex-automation engineer.
I now have time, but more importantly the inclination and motivation to korak po korak (step by step) transform our garden into what it should be.
Today, with assistance from SWP, I placed the new water butt into its new home.
But again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
You are of course wondering why I should want to automate a water butt, what that really means and maybe even how you could do the same.
So, chill and consider the situation I found myself in last summer, when we could still travel, and did, for several weeks.
The garden as a whole has been neglected, but small areas have always been loved and nurtured, and within one of these I had planted a tomato plant and extra geraniums.
While most of our garden is shaded either some or all of the time, luckily there is also an area which receives a fair dose of summer sun, and it is in this area that my tomato plant lived and (briefly) thrived.
The soil in what shall be known as the arid zone dries quickly.
The sun beats down.
Time passes.
No rain falls, and no water is watered.
After two weeks of no water, the tomato plant was more or less history, and the geraniums didn’t thrive as they could have done. Think brown leaves.
And now we find ourselves in December, driven inside because of the rain, with my non-automated water butt slowly filling.
This begs the question as to what I need to do to automate it, or encourage it to dispense water to the needy. Admittedly, at first blush, it is straight-forward :-
Of course, anyone who has ever done, anything oft this nature, soon realises that there is more to the problem domain than meets the eye.
Consider for example, as an illustration the humble teapot, and the steps required to make a cup of tea. Again this looks straight-forward, and in days gone by was used as an illustration as to the complexity off simple tasks.
So we have for starters:-
which is what n00bs tend to come up with as their first attempt.
Hmmm.
If we wonder a little bit more what is appertaining, the following questions might bubble to the surface …
… You are going to pour water into your kettle are you? How will you fill the kettle. How much water? Are you going to fill the kettle to the top? If so, how are you going to detect the kettle is full? How will you get the water into the kettle?
And as it was with the teapot example, so it is with water butt automation.
Simple on the surface, but with hidden depths which become more intricate for any other than the most basic solution.
What am I going to do?
I am going to massively over-engineer the solution, partly for fun, partly because I can, but mainly as an experiment for the later greenhouse automation project.
This is what my system needs to be able to do:
Being wise to such things, and not wanting to bother with a pump, my water butt is balanced on thick pieces of wood about a foot (30cm to you heathens) above the ground. Balanced does not do the construction justice. It is carefully placed within a wooden structure built for the purpose. I used dowels, sleepers and a brace drill from e-bay with a 22mm 😉 bit for this purpose.
I didn’t want a pump because …?
Why do you think?
Why shouldn’t we use a pump here?
No peaking until you have guessed the answer.
I knew that you would know.
I don’t want to use a pump because of the power consumption required.
This is the same reason that I won’t be using a PLC. These are usual in the automation world where reliability is crucial. The current drain from a PLC will be orders of magnitude higher than the system I will build. Now normally that wouldn’t matter, but I want to power my system using solar power and low current which hits power consumption (P=IV) matters.
I’m going for a professional although not properly industrial design – remembering, in the real world, industrial mostly means PLC.
My first step will be to decide on a manifold and appropriate low power consumption electric valves.
I’ll keep you up to date, as and when this project develops further.
Besos and Baci,
MF.
Sup all?
It’s raining. The gardening is on hold although *big* plans are now afoot (for a relatively small garden).
I have been (among other things) an automation engineer (until I suddenly and recently wasn’t), and perhaps unsuprisingly given this nugget not only do I like languages, but I also like building and automating things.
One plan that I have is to automate my greenhouse. This ticks a lot of geek boxes for me – especially now I don’t do robots ‘n stuff anymore.
However, the greenhouse is currently used as a woodshed, necessitating that I build a new wood shed before I can decant the wood from the greenhouse into the new wood shed. Unfortunately, the obvious place for the woodshed contains a shed which has more or less collapsed and needs to …
You get the picture.
Big plans … I shall probably dedicate, a secret hidden section on Surface languages to this project.
But I digress, and so, my friends if you are now suitably relaxed and sitting comfortably, it is time to parse some Latin.
Or, attempt to parse some Latin.
I admit, that prima facie, or at first blush, I don’t know what …
Sepe uorat gnarus canis id quod seruat auarus
… means.
Normally I have an idea and play with parsing because it appeals to my inner geek, but this meaning might in fact elude me.
So let’s parse this sentence and see what’s occurring.
Sepe. OK. I’m initially assuming that it is a contraction of saepe meaning often.
gnarus, a, um (having knowledge of, knowing of, acquainted with a thing)
canis, is (dog) is a third declension noun.
Let us decline canis …
canis, canis, canem, canis, cani, cane
canes, canes, canes, cranium, canibus, canibus
or something like that;)
I did that from memory. No guarantees.
By the way, this is why canis becomes canem in
cave canem (beware of the dog)
A noun following the verb in Latin (normally) takes the accusative case.
One of the reasons that I find Croatian and Croatian grammar so neat, is that all the same issues arise as with Latin but in real-time (so to speak).
While writing this my subconscious must have been buzzing along because I have now remembered, that which I had forgotten:
in Latin there was no distinction between the letters V and U (or for that matter between the letters I and J).
This is why the Latin sentence looked so strange (to me).
Uorat could be written as vorat, and having realising this I wandered over to the bookcase, and extracted my Lewis & short:-
voro, vorare, voravi, voratus (to swallow)
vorat (he swallows)
gnarus looks like a nominative to me, so declining canis earlier was not strictly necessary and this gives us (or me) the clue that gnarus canis is a nominative.
Sepe vorat granus canis often the known dog swallows …
id quod (it that)
Seruat and auaras become servat and avarus respectively when the same U to V substitution is made.
servo, servare, servavi, servatus. (protect, store, keep, guard, preserve, save)
servat is a third person singular meaning ‘he serves/protects’ etc.
avarus (miser, mean or greedy person) and is in the nominative case in the sentence, with the consequence that it is likely to be the subject.
id quod servat avaras ‘it that protects the mean person’.
And so my final translation of, Sepe uorat gnarus canis id quod seruat auarus or Sepe vorat gnarus canis id quod servat avarus becomes:-
Frequently the known dog swallows what the mean person protects.
The archaic English equivalent is :
Cats eat what hussies spare.
and which admittedly I have never heard anyone use.
Spare is used in the sense of remain or save, and hussy is well, an archaic term for a ‘lewd or brazen woman’.
I’ve never heard anyone say ‘hussie’ for realsis either.
Nuff said.
The meaning of both sayings is that what someone tries to save through meanness is likely to be wasted anyway – either by a cat or dog (or a wolf if you are Croatian).
Here is the Croatian equivalent (found on wikiquote), which involves a vuk (wolf) :
I brojne ovce vuk jede, kamoli nebrojene.
This is nothing like our previous examples, but conveys the same somewhat anxious sentiment:-
The wolf eats numerous sheep, (and I’m now guessing) let alone the uncounted (ones).
Besos and baci.
MF