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