Biblia Vulgata

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Do you mean the scio quod?
Yes. In classical Latin, you'd usually expect an accusative-and-infinitive clause instead. However, I think I see where Castellio was coming from because:

1) Pario seems an obvious verb to translate classically whatever was translated as operatur in the Vulgate. It was my first idea as well.

2) Now, of course, if you use an acc.-inf. clause in a literal translation (keeping the active voice), you get something ambiguous, with the two accusatives, which classical authors would surely have avoided.

3) What you usually do in those cases is to turn the construction into the passive, but the passive infinitive pari sounds rather unusual (I don't even know if it's attested at all).

Therefore, whereas I decided to use a different verb entirely, Castellio must have decided to go for something of a stretch to keep all the subjects nominative, while avoiding the slight change in meaning or perspective that I used (namely "X is born from Y" instead of "Y gives rise to X"). Illud scientes quod... = "knowing (that, namely) the fact that..." Unusual in classical Latin, but maybe not entirely impossible.
 
Last edited:

Clemens

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

Location:
Maine, United States.
Many thanks to both Bitmap and Pacifica. :)
I do wish the Vulgate was still available in more Classical Latin!
I think the Vulgate is far more interesting a document as it is, in that it's an artifact of Late Antiquity. It's not just that the language is post-Classical, but that the layers of revisions and translations interplay with the features of Late Latin to create something that takes a lot of teasing apart sometimes. Then add that antiquity and centuries of usage ended up sealing the text as fixed and authoritative, not just in its meaning, but in its wording, which becomes awkward when there are grammatical and idiomatic oddities. Oops, and then in the Roman Missal there are passages which survive from the Vetus Latina.
 

Nicolavs Iacobvs

Member

  • Patronus

Hi Clemens, I’m certainly not complaining about the current version (I have a C21st edition myself); I’m very pleased there is still the demand to justify publishing it! For the sake of comparison though, I would love to be able to access earlier versions more readily, out of curiosity, as much as anything else.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Erasmus retains the scientes quod construction too, but puts the dependent verbs in the subjunctive.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
I thought the fact that rothbard linked to it on this thread implied as much, but I don't actually know.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
The main page of the site does call it a translation "into classical Latin", but I don't know if Erasmus himself professed that intention. Let me see if there's a preface or something.
 
 

rothbard

Aedilis

  • Aedilis

  • Patronus

Location:
London
I thought the fact that rothbard linked to it on this thread implied as much, but I don't actually know.
Yes, I understood it was meant to be a revised version of the Vulgate, closer to classical Latin. However I haven't found a modern transcription, and the PDF copies available online are probably not easy for beginners, since they contain lots of abbreviations.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Of course, Erasmus may have deviated from standard classical Latin in this specific verse for the same reasons as I reckoned Castellio did. It may be that neither of them found it acceptable to change the perspective as I did. They were both dealing with a text that was sacred to them and presumably felt they had to stick rather close to a literal translation.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Erasmus, on the necessity for a theologian to know the three languages Hebrew, Greek and Latin:

Erasmus.PNG


I love the expression unius semilinguae miseranda balbuties.
 

Pacifica

grammaticissima

  • Aedilis

Location:
Belgium
Erasmus didn't believe that Jerome was the author of the Vulgate version.

I think the consensus nowadays is that Jerome is the author of most, but not all, of it.
 
Top