Saturday, March 12, 2016

More Latin Memes. How to Emphasize in Latin?




Presumably Latin, like other languages, did allow emphasizing things in the sentence with voice intonation.

 So, for instance, we can imagine the following exchange.

Metella: Quinte, quo is?
                Quintus, where are you going?
Quintus: ad forum eo!
                 I'm going to the forum!

But more often, Latin produced emphasis by either including redundant words, or positioning them in unexpected spots of the sentence.

Latin was a language which preferred SUBJECT - OBJECT - VERB word order, and in which pronouns were redundant to the verb endings.

As such, any divergence from those patterns drew attention to the forms.

For example, adding the subject pronoun, since it was grammatically unnecessary, created emphasis:

Clemens: quis vinum bibit?
                 Who drank the wine?
Grumio: vinum bibi ego
                 I drank the wine!

In the above case, the appearance of ego at all provides emphasis. Placing it unexpectedly last in the sentence constitutes further emphasis.

And that all governs my translation of this Star Wars Meme into Latin:


Darth Vader: Non, pater tuus sum ego.
                         No, I am your father.
Luke: Verum non est. Impossibile est. Nooooon!
            That's not true. That's impossible. Nooooooo!

For Luke's response, note that Latin prefers the neuter for generic statements. As for my choice of non as the word for no, I defend it in this post.



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