Latin diplomas and numen lumen

The NY Times this morning has an interesting op-ed piece today by classicist Christopher Francese, called "A degree in English" talking about the difficulties of diplomas in Latin. He writes:

diploma Latin is some of the most depressing and long-winded legalese you can find. Hiding behind the lovely calligraphy are maddening syntax and appalling neologisms. How do you say the name of every college town in Latin? You shouldn’t have to.

All this calls to mind the University of Wisconsin motto, numen lumen. That's a controversy of a different sort: numen is 'divinity', so you have this half-hidden reference to a diety for a public university, a famously secular one. (One version of the story on this is available here.)

But I don't mind this ceremonial use of Latin as much as Francese does. You have to think of it more like heavy metal umlauts or something.

A new (?) threat to English: Latin

English sure is under attack these days from every angle. Check out the headline of this article from the Telegraph:

Councils ban 'elitist' and 'discriminatory' Latin phrases

Yes, that is plural, councils. In more than one place in the UK, local councils are trying to ban stuff like 'etc.' Latin, like a linguistic zombie, rises from the crypt to threaten English!

Of course the piece has at least the usual amount of claptrap about people 'not knowing Latin' (these words and phrases are really part of English), about Latin loanwords as 'the great strength' of English (poor Germanic vocabulary!), blah blah freakin' blah.

The bottom line:

Professor Mary Beard, a professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge said: "This is absolute bonkers …".

Thank you, Professor Beard. Of course, bonkers is probably more obscure than half the Latin terms banned, so maybe that should be rephrased. (The word is recent and etymologically pretty unclear, I think.)

Hat tip to R.

(Image from here. Pictured from left, that's Habeas Corpus, Ipso Facto, Primus Dudus, and Accusativus C. Infinitivo.)

Latin-English codeswitching

I have read Maureen Dowd, at least her NYT columns, for years and never been quite sure what to make of her writing. (I did learn a ton from Polyglot Conspiracy's smart post about Dowd here.) MoDo's column today dispenses with the ultra-gendered and / or faux potboiler styles she often uses in favor of the classics. Half the column, roughly, is in Latin, a loose translation of her play in the Gallic Wars done by the historian Gary Farney of Rutgers. But it's not simply an English chunk followed by a Latin chunk. There's plenty of written codeswitching and language play in both halves, starting with the title: "Are we Rome? Tu Betchus!" Then:

Amo Latinam, so I was happy to see ...

That's pretty simple, a switch at a clause boundary, but it gets more complex:

why the hyperventilating Republicans are not veni, vidi, vici-ing.

Kind of funny, with the three inflected verb forms getting treated as a unit — that's hardly novel — and then verbed. But the Latin half is just gut-bustingly funny, in a classic school-boy way (so I gather): There's all the inflection of names, some anachronistic bits (Sabbatis Nocte Vivo!) and stuff like this:

Ioannes McCainus, mavericus et veteranus captivusque Belli Francoindosinini, et Sara Palina, barracuda borealis …

Or, the not-merely-coined-but-more-like-faked Latin:

Cum Primus Dudus, spousus Palinanus, culpari attemptaret “Centurionem-Gate,” …

And some nice switches to English:

Tamen Sara et Ioannes bury Obama, not praise him.

OK, maybe I'm a sucker for cheap humor, but there's a little point in here: One aspect of this kind of text is the illusion of a Latin text, but something that is readable even if you didn't do too much of the old amo, amas, amat or hic, haec, hoc, huius, huius, huius. Many of the reader comments at this writing seem to take the text very seriously — as if it were Cicero or something.

A lot has been written about "Mock Spanish", most notably by Jane Hill (see Ben Zimmer's very accessible overview here — a key point is the presumed racist intent of such language). Tu Betchus is an example, I suppose, of Mock Latin.

Image from here.