In case someone reads this in the future, I'd like to add a summary as I myself had trouble getting all this right.
Sorry but I don't mention everyone who helped in this.
I'll be glad for any corrections, suggestions, etc. Thank you as I've learned a little bit of latin as this was fun
What is said in the movie
according to the script (
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/e/event-horizon-script-transcript-neill.html) is:
------------------------------------------
I thought it said "liberate me"...
"Save me. "
But it's not "me. "
It's "liberate tutemet"...
"Save yourself. "
And it gets worse.
Liberate tutemet ex inferis.
------------------------------------------
According to wiktionary (Latin)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libera#Latin
libera = second-person singular present active imperative of līberō
and
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberate#Latin
liberate = second-person plural present active imperative of līberō
So
"liberate" is used for a plural subject, so "liberate me" correctly means "save me".
"tutemet" = tute+met is the empathic version of "tute", "tu", the second person singular pronoun.
So "
liberate tutemet" is grammatically wrong because either you are talking to many and tell them to save themselves or to one and tell him to save himself.
The correct would be "libera temet", being "libera" the second-person singular present active imperative of līberō and "temet" the empathic version of "te", accusative singular pronoun.
I don't know latin, but for what I see in conjugation tables, I think
"libera te tutemet" would be correct because "
te" would be the
accusative (who you have to save) and "
tutemet" would be the
subject who saves someone (yourself).
It
surely is what Stefan Bach meant here:
THREAD: liberate-tuteme-ex-inferis
---------------------------------------------------
"Libera te tutemet ex inferis!" - "Free you YOURSELF from hells!"
libera - verb, 2nd person singular present active imperative
te - pronoun, accusative singular (of "tu")
tutemet - pronoun (emphatic form of "tu")
ex - preposition (with ablative)
inferis - noun, ablative plural
---------------------------------------------------
And I don't know if "tutemet" could also be considered the vocative here (it also declines like this) and still be correct.
So the only error in the script (if the captain was talking to a single person) would be they wrote "liberate" instead of "libera te"!! No big deal in the movie as sounds the same (unluckily, they do not accentuate correctly).
In case one doesn't like that "tutemet" because it's "superfluous" and makes the sentence to differ more from the one it was mistaken by,
the other closest sounding correct latin sentence would be
"libera temet ex inferis" = "free yourself from the Lower Regions (Hell)" (talking to one person)
that in the movie is first mistaken by
"liberate me ex inferis" = "save me from the Lower Regions (Hell)" (talking to several people)
as
Abbatiſſæ Scriptor indicates in
THREAD: liberate-tuteme-ex-inferis.
As Abbatiſſæ Scriptor notes, both sentences only differ by one "t", instead of a whole "tute(me)t", so I think this solution would've been much better :s
As an extra, if the former gorged-out-eyes captain talked to several people I imagine it would have been "Liberate vos vosemet ex inferis" with the first approach, or "Liberate vosemet ex inferis" with the second, being "vosemet" the emphatic version of "vos", accusative plural pronoun.
And as
Bitmap noted, the accentuation should be "líbera" (I add this) and "ínferis", as in latin (at least classic as long as I know, not in the "oldest one") the accent usually goes in the that syllable, with some exception rules.