Tuesday, March 7, 2017

All People Die, But Not All People Live...

A Romanian friend living and teaching in Great Britain has asked me to translate this sentence into Latin.

Because Romanian is descended from Latin, it is interesting to compare that language to my proposed Latin translation.

All people die, but not all people live.
Toți oamenii mor, dar nu toți oamenii trăiesc.

This translates into Latin as follows:

Omnes homines moriuntur, sed non omnes homines vivunt. 

We see here that omnis (all, every) has been replaced by the adjective totus (whole). Sed is replaced by dar; the Latin verb vivere has been replaced by the Slavonic root *trajati.

Otherwise, the Latinate character of Romanian is preserved nicely.

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