REQ: Latin translation for HPMOR

Hmm..."victor" probably isn't a good choice here, though. I didn't recognize the ambiguity in the English at first, until I read Dallas' translation. "Champion" in English can mean "winner" or "defender/fighter for a cause", and I went with "winner", but I think Dallas is correct in thinking that Eliezer wanted the "defender" meaning. In that case, make the second line

"nec defensori Dominus"

(propugnatori, as Dallas has it, also has roughly the same meaning (shades up the "fighting" connotation), but ugh, five syllables with a glottal stop; I'd keep it to prose)

Thanks! Here for comparison is Google's translation:

Non habet soter salvator.
Vindex est dominus no,
nec mater nec pater,
modo nihil est.

If "Soter" or "Sotehr" means "savior", as I seem to recall from Aristoi, that might suit the meaning well; and if the first line makes sense grammatically, of which no clue hath I, it has a good ring. "Defensori" does sound closer to the intended meaning than "victori" or "vindex". And whether "modo nihil est" means at all the same thing as "modo nihilitas supera", I've likewise no clue but it sounds like the "above" part was left out. If it actually does convey the same meaning, it is more compact.

If this version works, it would have a powerful ring to it:

Non habet soter salvator.
Neque defensori dominus,
nec pater, nec mater,
modo nihil est.

But one suspects that what's actually needed is:

Non est salvatori salvator.
Neque defensori dominus,
nec pater, nec mater,
modo nihilitas supera.

Excuse me for necro-posting, but the declension of nouns in the second line here made me suspicious and I turned to the dictionary. Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar (1903) entry on the dative of possession* (para. 373, pp. 232-233, online at https://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/dative-possession) states that it is the one for whose sake something exists that is in the dative, e.g. Est mihi domī pater (Ecl. 3.33) -> I (dat.) have a father (nom.) at home, literally there is for me at home a father; est mihi liber -> I (dat.) have a book (nom.) EY's English meaning comes out as "neque domini defensor", whereas "neque defensori dominus" translates back to English as "no champion hath a lord".

* not really possession, as it expresses the idea of something that is there for the benefit of something else, like the Classical Chinese coverb 為.

Would nemo also work in the first line instead of non?

+1

Me too.

Moi.

I did.

(My Latin is very rusty. Take all of what follows cum grano salis.)

Why tenet rather than habet? (I expect I'm revealing extreme ignorance here.)

"Nothing" isn't quite the same as "nothingness". Perhaps inanitas?

Literary Latin tends to be rather terse. I wonder about removing the verbs, producing something like: "salvator sine salvatore. propugnator sine dominum, sine matre, sine patre, supra solum inanitas." but that may be too far from Eliezer's English version.

[EDIT: I also wonder about "soter" rather than "salvator". It's not so common a word in Latin -- it's simply a transliteration from Greek -- but I think it sounds better :-). On the other hand, I don't know what they'd have used for its ablative.]

[EDIT: Wouldn't "salvator salvatorem non tenet" be better than "salvator non salvatorem tenet"?]

That seems to agree with the English.

And it's much better than the version I was trying to compose. Nice work!

Harry got the diary of Roger Bacon, not Francis. Roger was born ~1214.

Well, so much for that!

Note that "insuper" would NOT rhyme with "mater"

Latin poetry doesn't use rhyme anyway. It uses meter.

This is also very good. I like the choice of nullus. A couple of quibbles, the first of which I'm more sure about than the second:

• neque can't be postpositive...it doesn't have the usual word order freedom, it needs to be before whatever it's negating and joining.

• (less sure on this one) insuper is an adverb rather than an adjective, so it can't be used as a predicate for the noun nihilum. The public-domain dictionary I checked Lewis' An Elementary Latin Dictionary has it as a qualifier for the verb in all three of the citations it gives for the relevant sense.

It's because Latin was the default language of scholarship and 'high' literature in 13th century Muggle England, and given the importance of (mangled) Latin for spells this would presumably hold true for wizards as well.

Also, if the piece is from Roger Bacon's diary, he definitely wrote in Latin.

quid quid latine dictum sit, altum videtur?

Nitpick: "quidquid" meaning whatever is one word not two words. While ancient Latin didn't have spacing between words, we can see that in this sort of context it was intended as a single word because Latin allows a lot of word order rearrangement and "quidquid" didn't get split up (as I understand that). "Quid" means "what" but "quidquid" means "whatever" or "anything".

And there's a disclaimer necessary here that I haven't taken Latin in a decade so I could be wrong but I don't think I am.