(no subject)

[redbird]

Please, Habeant papam. He is not my leader.

Update: the current consensus appears to be "habent papem." Can anyone confirm that? (I got a C in my one semester of Latin, and cattitude isn't home to ask.)

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

..and not a leader anyway. But then, who understands enough latin to translate "pontifex" these days?

Damn. If only we had a Coronal as well...

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

In that case, I definitely want a word with the King of Dreams.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

As a Discordian pope who lives on Valentine St., I am the Valentine Pontifex.

[redbird]

"Bridge-builder," which I rather doubt will fit Pope Rat. It's the old title of the pagan high priest of Rome, which the Bishop of Rome grabbed when they became the state religion. ("Pontifex maximus", in full, and it was more bridge maintainer, but the -fex part means "maker".)

(I can go from Latin to English a lot more easily than the other way around.)

[king-tirian.livejournal.com]

People called Romanes they go the house?

[redbird]

The problem is, I got hopelessly confused by the Spanish irregular verb haber, which is "have" in the auxiliary-of-time sense.

Your Latin's wrong

[dakiwiboid.livejournal.com]

It's "papem". I think what you have there says "They have a potato."

Re: Your Latin's wrong

[redbird]

Well, they're welcome to some potatoes--they've had a busy few days, they can use a nice dinner.

Re: Your Latin's wrong

[zsero.livejournal.com]

There's a Latin word for potato?

Re: Your Latin's wrong

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

There's a Hebrew word, why not a Latin word? It's not like they don't still use Latin in the Church, presumably they update it from time to time.

Re: Your Latin's wrong

[zsero.livejournal.com]

Only if they use it for everyday conversation. If it's only used for ceremonial purposes, I'm not sure why they'd ever need to mention potatoes.

Oh, and modern Hebrew doesn't really have a word for potato either; it's called tapuach adama, 'earth apple'. I think there was once an attempt to contract that to tapud, but it doesn't seem to have stuck.

Re: Your Latin's wrong

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Which is analagous to the French pomme de terre (which means roughly the same as the Hebrew).

Re: Your Latin's wrong

[ckd]

Earth apple, earth apple, will you be mine?

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Habent. Second conjugation.

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is habent. "Habeant papam" would be "May they have a pope." (Yeah, thanks a lot, guys.) "Papa" is first declension, so "papam" is correct; "papem" sounds like an third declension accusative implying "papis" or some such, which is just wrong.

I can't find an online Latin-English dictionary with "potato" in it, but I would think it would be something like "patata."

pontificem habent

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

The Latin version of the familiar term 'Pope' is, according to Wikipedia, papa, though Lord knows how that declines. But I suspect in Latin they stick much more to good old fashioned pontifex, sepecially in anything official.

Re: pontificem habent

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

Papa is first declension, one of the rare masculine first declension nouns, so if one was going to use that word, one would indeed say papam habent. But I don't think they would.

Re: pontificem habent

[redbird]

Well, the elementary Latin dictionary has nothing for "papa", only "papai" meaning "how strange!" and "pappas," a tutor, both of which are glossed first with Greek equivalents.

Re: pontificem habent

[bugsybanana.livejournal.com]

That may be, but I wouldn't trust a classical Latin dictionary with church Latin any more than I'd use a Shakespearean concordance to make sense of rap lyrics.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Sigh. You may habent him, but we definitely habemus, wether we like it or not. For example, we've got this referendum coming... But come to think of it, when Italians hear somebody order them around with a German accent they tend to want to do the opposite.

[redbird]

Well, this is New York, so yes, a lot of my neighbors are Catholic, but a lot more aren't, and even the Catholics may not have much interest in Rome, unless it orders Cardinal Egan to re-open the parochial schools he's closing for lack of funding.

Interesting point about the German accent.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think it is accurate to say that we have a pope, in the same sense that we have liftoff, or a fiscal crisis, or 10 degrees C. That is, we live in a world in which a pope exists. He's not our pope, but he's the pope, so in a sense 'we', that is collective humanity, 'has' him.

The people who should really be pissed off at 'habemus' are members of other religions that are headed by popes. The only one that comes to mind is Coptic Christianity, but there may be others. In any case, if I were a Coptic Xian, I imagine I'd react as you did, saying 'what do you mean we now have a pope; you may just have got a new pope, but I'm still using the one I've had for quite a few years now'. (I have no idea how long the current Coptic pope has been in office, and I couldn't be bothered looking it up. It doesn't matter.)