Re: FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BRAVE. Help please
What do you mean, ‘which is which’? I gave a definition of each. What more do you want? The words are largely synonymous here. And yes,
‘fortis’ can also mean ‘strong’.
It doesn’t really matter whether you make the
u-v and
i-j distinctions or not. However, I will say that it is utterly senseless to make one distinction but not the other. You’ll see
lots of people doing so, but they are very sadly misguided. It just makes no kind of sense whatsoever.
The form that gives the most information to the reader is one such as
‘fortīs fortūna adjuvat’. Word boundaries are marked; long vowels are marked; semi-consonants are marked. I prefer this because you can take it and strip it down to
‘fortisfortunaadiuuat’ or whatever the hell you like, but if I gave you the latter, you would not be able to reconstruct the former without knowledge of the words involved. I give people the info. Do with it what you will.
If, for fun, you want to make it look like an inscription, then use all caps, don’t use U or J, don’t use spaces (use
medial dots instead, or
nothing), don’t use
macrons (you can use apices if the vowel length seems really important to you), don’t use punctuation, etc.
In your PM to me, you said ‘I am having difficulty confirming which is the correct way to translate "FORTUNE FAVOURS THE BRAVE"’. This sort-of misses the point. It’s ‘fortune favours the brave’ that is the translation. Any of the various combinations and permutations mentioned in this thread can be considered to be the original from which this English translation derives. They are all correct, and were pretty much all attested in Classical Latin. Read above, and you’ll see that people like Cato and Cinefactus have specifically quoted the exact words used by certain authors, allowing you to choose exactly which variant you prefer. It’s pointless to ask which is ‘the right translation’ of your English phrase.
