Beware the Classics major

[truepenny]

Sorry, oracne, copperwise, redbird. I deleted the previous entry (about gross errors in Latin in the Signals catalogue), because I became suddenly and monumentally uncertain about my own ability to sort out the parts of speech in ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus. I was hoping I'd moved fast enough that no one had read the post, but such was in fact not the case. Mea culpa.

Mine and redbird's point about the masculine nouns in the Friend bracelent [ ETA: should be "bracelet," of course, but bracelent is such a cool word I'm going to let it stay. ] of the Mother, Sister, and Friend bracelet set stands. And I repeat, the mistake merely serves to highlight the sexist nature of the enterprise.

But, although I still say that there's something wonky with the My Beloved rings, I can't get ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus to sort out in such a way that I can make sense of it. Assuming that the missing verb on both sides is esse (Ego sum dilecto meo et dilectus meus est.), we've got "I am [to] my beloved" (and I think we are allowed the dative of possession) and "[the] beloved is mine." And if I'm right, then it is definitely a man speaking about his male beloved.

But I might be wrong. My Latin is pretty darn rusty. Any thoughts?

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Not the dilectus, the dilecto.

I think my problem is that I can't figure out whether the Latin is saying "I am the beloved of him" or "I am [the thing belonging to] my beloved."

Is that dilecto pointing to the speaker or the beloved?

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

It's saying "I am to my beloved" -- that's a dative. (Well, it could be an ablative, but none of those make particularly good sense.) Only... okay, wait, I just looked at the whole thing. You are so right. That's... weird. It looks like they're trying to translate the Hebrew into Latin and failing.

See, the Vulgate for SoS 2:16 -- at least the Sixto-Clementine one I have in my office, and I'll check the online one in a sec -- has "Dilectus meus mihi et ego illi," which makes much better sense: "My [male] beloved is to me and I to him." The Septuagint, because you never really believe that Hebraica veritas line of Jerome's, is "Adelphidos mou emoi kagO autO" -- I can't take the time to look up the right Unicode, so those capital Os are actually omegas, but the point is that it's basically the same as the Latin. The Hebrew "Ani dodi v'dodi li" repeats the word for "beloved" -- literally it's "I [male] beloved and [male] beloved to me."

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

And the problem with "ego dilecto meo et dilectus meus" is that the assumed phrase at the end is "is to me." I.e., "I [am] to my beloved and my beloved [is to me]." It's decent Latin, but the actual Vulgate is much more clear. So is the KJV, for God's sake.