Surface Languages

Sup?

Today is a typical west country summers day, which in essence means it is raining too hard to be outside.

And so, it’s time to parse some Latin.

I chose de minimis non curat lex, as back in the day, I was involved with the legal profession (oh yes), and not only is it a legal maxim, but also comes bundled with a handy limerick.

There was a young lawyer called lex,
 who had very small organs of sex.
 When done for exposure,
 he said with composure,
 De minimis non curat lex. 

The standard meaning given is :

The law doesn’t concern itself with trifles.

So how do we get there?

De is a preposition which followed by the ablative means ‘concerning’.

Minimus, a, um is an adjective meaning smallest and can also (as is common in Latin) be used as a noun.

Declining minimus in the masculine plural (nominative-ablative) gives:-

minimi, minimi, minimos, minimorum, minimis, minimis.

showing us that the ablative of minimus is minimis.

De minimis translates as ‘of or concerning small things).

I’ve added things so that this makes sense in English, and this is legal;) where a Latin adjective is functioning as a noun.

Lex, legis (law) is a feminine noun, and declines as follows:-

Lex, lex, legem, legis, legi, lege.

Now safe in the knowledge that lex is a nominative, we can now be sure that it is the subject of the verb curat. The verb Curare has various meanings including ‘to trouble oneself about’.

It is a regular transitive verb (i.e. it takes a normal object) which conjugates in the present tense as:-

curo, curas, curat, curamos, curatis, curant. (I trouble myself about, you trouble yourself about …)

So, our final rendering is:-

Of small things the law doesn’t trouble itself.

Pax, besos i baci.

MF

Sup all?

It’s time to parse some Latin, and for reasons that need to remain opaque I have picked something short and sweet.

Porcus ex grege diaboli.

It translates as ‘swine from the devils flock’ and so the question as ever is how do we get this?

Porcus is pretty straight-forward, meaning a tame swine, hog or pig.

Digressing slightly (having looked this up in my Lewis & Short), porculus (the diminutive) means a young swine, pig, porker or porkling.

If you felt so inclined, you could substitute porculus in place of porcus leaving you with the slightly more vitriolic :-

Porculus ex grege diaboli.

By the way, porcus marinus, sea hog was the original Latin name for porpoise.

Ex, taking the ablative as many Latin prepositions do, gives us ‘out of, from’.

And what about grege?

Obviously, we can guess that it means ‘flock, herd’ but that isn’t parsing Latin, it is guessing at a meaning.

In fact, it is a third declension noun with a nominative of grex and genitive of gregis with various meanings.

Knowing this, allow us to decline if, and it declines something like this:-

grex, grex, gregem, gregis, gregi, grege

I say something like this, as there is the possibility that I have mis-remembered my third declension nouns, and I’m not going to check.

So be warned.

However, grex, gregis looks suspiciously like rex, regis to me, a noun which I learnt as a model back in the day.

Grege is as we had hoped an ablative, and so ex grege looks like a good match for ‘from the flock’. No guessing.

That just leaves diaboli and I will give you a clue which is that the literal translation is

Swine from the flock OF the devil.

In other words, diaboli looks at first blush to be a genitive, and a quick glance in my dictionary tells me that it is a second declension masculine noun.

It will decline like so:-

diabolus, diabole, diabolum, diaboli, diabolo, diabolo.

The noun Diaboli is in the genitive meaning ‘of the devil’ and so our final translation is as we guessed.

But we now know that it is correct.

Besos and baci.

MF