Pedants' Paradise

[Serial_Apologist]

Or dona eis requiem/dona eis requiem sempiternam as the case may be.


That was Winston Churchill, in My Early Life (I think it's called).

The Romans probably didn't address tables - it was the modern grammarians who thought we needed to be prepared in case we might ever want to.

It's amazing how much one discovers one already knows from these threads! Although I did Latin and English grammar, however, including parsing sentences, I don't now remember what "vocative" is.

BTW, surely it would have been Roman acountants and statisticians who addressed tables?

[handsomefortune]

let's borrow your tuba mirum... when you've finished with it caliban!

[jean]

Here's the very passage:

‘This is a Latin grammar.’ [The teacher] opened [the textbook] at a well-thumbed page. ‘You must learn this,’ he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines …

What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense of it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn it by heart …

‘Have you learnt it?’ he asked.

‘I think I can say it, sir,’ I replied; and I gabbled it off.

He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question …

‘But,’ I repeated, ‘what does it mean?’

‘Mensa means a table,’ he answered.

‘Then why does mensa also mean O table,’ I enquired, ‘and what does O table mean?’ …

“O table,—you would use that in addressing a table, in invoking a table.’

‘But I never do,’ I blurted out in honest amazement.

‘If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely,’ was his conclusive rejoinder.

Such was my introduction to the classics from which, I have been told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit …

[Serial_Apologist]

let's borrow your tuba mirum... when you've finished with it caliban!

It's already out on loan to a friend of our's, handsome...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2VG_sOfA4Q

[mercia]

has one never addressed an inanimate object ?

"oh car-keys, where art thou ? "

[jean]

let's borrow your tuba mirum...

Best not borrow the tuba mirum spargens sonum, though - notoriously translated in one edition of the Verdi as Hark! the trumpet sounds appalling!

(Hi handsome! How are you?)

[jean]

"oh car-keys, where art thou ? "

Surely not if they're plural?

[Serial_Apologist]

has one never addressed an inanimate object ?

"oh car-keys, where art thou ? "

Would that be "vocative"

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

..why did they address tables so often?

Togas don't offer much protection when you bash your shins against them?

[jean]

Would that be "vocative"

Yes it would, if we had a separate form for that in English.

But it should have a plural verb.

[jean]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2VG_sOfA4Q

To be really pedantic, may I point out that that isn't a tuba, which in English would be trumpet...

[gurnemanz]

Re Vocative above. I remember this passage from Alice in Wonderland:

'Would it be of any use, now,' thought Alice, 'to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate, there's no harm in trying.' So she began: 'O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!' (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, 'A mouse—of a mouse—to a mouse—a mouse—O mouse!') The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.

[Nick Armstrong]

It's already out on loan to a friend of our's, handsome...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2VG_sOfA4Q

To be really pedantic, may I point out that that isn't a tuba, which in English would be trumpet...

I'm talkin' about a REAL tuba mirum... I think this would make both S_A and jean happy?



...

...


Cue: vinteuil with his supply of senna-pods...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

As for addressing lambs, did someone not say, on being taught that the vocative of "mensa" was used when addressing a table, "But sir, I never do".

In "The Approach to Latin, Book1", I recall having to translate many such unlikely situations, e.g. Mensam amo.

[mangerton]

In "The Approach to Latin, Book1", I recall having to translate many such unlikely situations, e.g. Mensam amo.

The very book I started with in 1962. We had a weekly ink exercise to hand in first thing every Monday. And in those days that was of course real ink.

jean - thank you for the extract from My Early Life.