Plus ça change etc.
Jul. 12th, 2004 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetI've glanced a little at some of the materials on worldofdarkness.com and other websites related to the new Vampire game. I'm actually a little disappointed at how familiar a lot of it seems to be.
That includes, of course, White Wolf's Latinity:
The catechism of the Lancea Sanctum (literally, "Holy Spear") is
that the covenant's members are the ideological descendants of
Longinus, the Roman centurion who used his spear to prod Christ on
the cross. According to the covenant's dogma, some of Christ's blood
dripped onto the soldier, and this blood gave the centurion eternal
life. It also carried with it, however, divine retribution, and
though Longinus' act revealed Christ's divinity, it did so after an
act of faithlessness on the soldier’s part. Thereafter, Longinus was
cursed to live eternally, but he could walk only at night and
subsist only on the same blood that had proved his undoing. [etc.]
There is, perhaps, much to provoke one's mockery here, but I am here concerned simply with the phrase "Lancea Sanctum" (it should be "...Sancta"), which involves an adjective-noun agreement mistake that you probably wouldn't even need a whole month's worth of Latin class to avoid making.
In fact, after just three or four classes students should have this notion basically down; they would probably tend to err in the direction of making all adjectives agree with nouns by having them end with the same letter, thereby getting this particular phrase right by sheer accident.
In short, no one who knows anything about the language whatsoever could have made this mistake. Chances are that the writers could have stepped out onto the streets of Atlanta and got some passerby to point it out to them in the time it took to smoke a couple of cigarettes.
Which makes one ask: Why would someone who doesn't know anything at all about a foreign language think it was a good idea to use it in print?
Was this, too, part of God's curse?
That includes, of course, White Wolf's Latinity:
The catechism of the Lancea Sanctum (literally, "Holy Spear") is
that the covenant's members are the ideological descendants of
Longinus, the Roman centurion who used his spear to prod Christ on
the cross. According to the covenant's dogma, some of Christ's blood
dripped onto the soldier, and this blood gave the centurion eternal
life. It also carried with it, however, divine retribution, and
though Longinus' act revealed Christ's divinity, it did so after an
act of faithlessness on the soldier’s part. Thereafter, Longinus was
cursed to live eternally, but he could walk only at night and
subsist only on the same blood that had proved his undoing. [etc.]
There is, perhaps, much to provoke one's mockery here, but I am here concerned simply with the phrase "Lancea Sanctum" (it should be "...Sancta"), which involves an adjective-noun agreement mistake that you probably wouldn't even need a whole month's worth of Latin class to avoid making.
In fact, after just three or four classes students should have this notion basically down; they would probably tend to err in the direction of making all adjectives agree with nouns by having them end with the same letter, thereby getting this particular phrase right by sheer accident.
In short, no one who knows anything about the language whatsoever could have made this mistake. Chances are that the writers could have stepped out onto the streets of Atlanta and got some passerby to point it out to them in the time it took to smoke a couple of cigarettes.
Which makes one ask: Why would someone who doesn't know anything at all about a foreign language think it was a good idea to use it in print?
Was this, too, part of God's curse?
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Date: 2004-07-12 01:51 pm (UTC)Latin
Date: 2004-07-12 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-12 05:12 pm (UTC)Re: Latin
Date: 2004-07-13 06:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-13 07:14 am (UTC)ARGH! And we're losing that battle. In ten years, the phrase actually will mean what the barbarian hordes think it does. Curse you malleability of language!