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tony

09:25

@Joonas: Thank you for looking at this. Interesting is species "minatur", seeming to have involvement in all three tenses. In the past Metellus threatens (in his own present), brought forward to an historic present; A&G said: "Here the main clause, that he will inflict punishment, is contained in "minatur". This, giving a present-cum-future feel. (Seb disagreed that "minatur" was a present tense being used to represent the future.)

@Joonas: The historic present, then, supersedes, in grammatical priority, the expected passive infinitive of the verb, used in indirect speech (here it would have been, "minatus esse" = "he threatened").

4 hours later…

Canned Man

13:19

Anyone here who might have time to have a quick gander at a shorter passage which I am struggling with translating correctly?

It is from Dē obitū Valentīniānī, § 1. Gratian says: ‘aut [nē … vidērēmur] refugisse incentīvum dolendī,
cum doluisse plērumque sōlātium sit dolentis:
simul cum dē ipsō aut ad ipsum loquor,
tamquam dē præsente vel ad præsentem mihī sermō sit.’ The sentence ‘cum doluisse […]’ is what is causing problems. Liebeschuetz & Hill suggest ‘when to give expression to grief is often a comfort to one who is grief-stricken’, but I arrive at ‘when to have grieved may be for the most part soothing for the one grieving’. What am I missing?

cmw

14:07

@CannedMan " Liebeschuetz & Hill suggest ‘when to give expression to grief is often a comfort to one who is grief-stricken’, but I arrive at ‘when to have grieved may be for the most part soothing for the one grieving’. What am I missing?" <- What's the difference? It's the same, just yours is more verbatim and L&H is (slightly) more idiomatic.

Canned Man

14:31

@cmw Alright, I see. Purportedly, this was presented as a sermon of lamentation, hence it must have been easily understood by his auditors. Ambrose was as far as I know further known for speaking in a more straightforward manner. Is it possible that this is a more compressed expression of what he may have said when presenting it? I am still struggling to see how L&H got the ‘to give expression to’, except to make it more legible in English.

Clearly there is a difference in ‘when to have grieved’ and ‘when to give expression to grief’, though I suppose that the act of grieving in and of itself is to express grief. Maybe I am reading to much into it?

cmw

14:48

@CannedMan That's exactly what the translators are doing: making it clear in English what is clear from the Latin, but not so much clear from a word-by-word translation of the Latin.

Canned Man

Excellent! Thanks so much for clarifying it for me!

cmw

@CannedMan It's clarify that the grief is not internal, it's to show grief, vel sim.

Canned Man

One day I will be at the level of Latin knowledge that you, Cerberus, Draconis and Joonas are.

cmw

No problem.

Haha, it's always a journey.

Canned Man

@cmw Indeed it is, and today I am enjoying the journey by passively smoking tobacco infused in my dictionary from 1946. :-D

I've got a newer one, too, but needed to make a comparison both to English and Norwegian to make sure I understood sermō correctly.

cmw

14:52

@CannedMan I seem to recall you mentioning that you speak neither Bokmal nor Nynorsk, is that correct?

Canned Man

Technically, hardly anyone does in Norway; everyone, including on national TV, speak their own dialect. We write in Bokmål and Nynorsk (I do both), but speak our dialect.

Even the prime minister!

cmw

Ah, I get it!

How mutually-intelligible are the dialects?

Canned Man

And then of course there also are the four Sami languages and Kven.

@cmw That depends more on where you come from than the dialects themselves. Those from around the Oslo area tend to struggle more with understanding dialects than most everyone else.

But there are some very interesting grammatical differences going on, as well as phonology.

cmw

Do you see a trend towards homogenization, or will they stay fairly distinct?

Canned Man

My wife, for instance, has ten distinct vowel phonemes in her dialect, whilst most areas of Norway have only nine: a, e, i, o, u, y, æ, ø, å.

Many areas have palatals, not merely as pronunciation changes to words, but that actually carry meaning. In my dialect for example, han means he whereas hannj means hand. And that is both with a short mid vowel and a long final consonant; only the palatalisation carries the difference in meaning.

There most definitely is homogenisation, and many tend to be pulled to the stronger regional urban dialects. Around Tromsø, for instance, most that hail to Tromsø of those of the generations born after 1980 or thereabout are losing their palatalisation.

Grammar example:
In many dialects, the number of syllables in an interrogative pronoun changes sentence structure. With one syllable: Ka klokka e? PrnSV (Kva klokka er? PSV < Kva er klokka? PVS). With two or more syllables: Kors'n går det? PVS (How is it going? (How do you do?) PVS)

cmw

15:02

That's wild.

Canned Man

First question: PSV: What the clock is? (What time is it?) from standardised What is the clock?

cmw

I don't think I've often seen syllable count alter a sentence structure before.

Canned Man

Also, numerous dialects will include a pronoun in front of nouns, including in questions (dialect, Nynorsk, English):
Ka ho e klokka? Kva ho er klokka? _What she is the clock?_
Ka han Jæns sa? Kva han Jens sa? _What he Jens said?_
Han Jæns slo tell han Per. Han Jens slo til han Per. _He Jens struck to him Per_ (Jens struck Per)

@cmw It has been well-documented now, but it seems to be something Norwegian linguists came to be aware of fairly recently. Dialects did had a pretty low status earlier.

Syllable count → sentence structure that is.

cmw

I don't recall seeing any of this in Swedish. I wonder what the origin of both of those phenomena are in Norwegian.

Canned Man

Remind me later, and I’ll pass you some links to some papers studying the phenomenon. I am really sorry I’ve gotta go; I have to carry on writing, though I would much rather continue this conversation.

cmw

15:21

Vale!

Cerberus

Cf. French, ma mère, elle est folle.

Moi, je suis fou.

Johhan Santana

15:34

@JoonasIlmavirta vowel quantity? What do you mean?

Cerberus

@JohhanSantana Quantity is length: you can pronounce an a long (ā) or short (ă).

Which was a significant different to the Romans.

Joonas Ilmavirta

16:26

@tony Please pay attention to who writes what. It was @SebastianKoppehel who answered your question. I was only asking for a clarification but didn't get around to answering.

@Cerberus @JohhanSantana To continue on that comment: The final a in the imperative somnia is long but the one in the neuter plural somnia is short. The two words are pronounced differently.

@cmw I don't recall seeing any of that in Swedish either. I've mostly been taught Finnish Swedish.

It's peculiar that syllable count affects sentence structure, but it does make sense that lighter words behave differently from heavier.

2 hours later…

Johhan Santana

18:08

@JoonasIlmavirta @Cerberus got it. Thank you. That makes sense. How would one distinct them from each other when spoken.

Sebastian Koppehel

@tony Yes, present and future infinitives do not affect the sequence of tenses. There is no future infinitive in the original example (in fact there is none at all, and A&G explains this by saying it is contained in minatur), but there is one in your constructed example (multos interituros [esse]).

Joonas Ilmavirta

18:58

@JohhanSantana By length. Short vowels are simply shorter than the long ones, but otherwise similar.

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