Saturday, December 5, 2009

Event retraction

This is a continuation of my post about bad movie Latin.

I think that the auto-blinded captain of the Event Horizon may have seen better than I what he was trying to convey with his movie Latin. If you google his words, you'll find that most people write them as:
libera tutemet ex inferis
And that's wrong, as I explained in the previous post. But it will work if we just adopt a different word division:
libera tu temet ex inferis.
Hey you, free yourself from hell.
Google turns up just 4 hits for the correctly divided phrase.

So I change my verdict: the creators of Event Horizon probably did consult a competent Latinist, and this Latinist probably intended the sentence in the second form written above. (It was never very likely, I guess, that libera tutemet was an incompetent mistake that just happened to reproduce an archaic form of the second-person pronoun...)

My version--libera temet ex inferis--is still nicer, because it's more plausible that you'd mishear it as liberate me. Call me when you need Latin for the sequel.

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I'm less motivated to continue this blog lately.