“Stemus simul” - the Kane family motto Translated here in DC Comics’ D
“Stemus simul” - the Kane family motto Translated here in DC Comics’ Detective Comics #935 (2016) as “we stand together.” But this appears to be a victim of Google translate. “Stemus simul” would be better translated as “let us stand at the same time.” Simul leans toward a temporal meaning, rather than emphasizing a physical unity, which it seems to me was the meaning the writer, James Tynion IV, was aiming for here. Something like “stemus ad unum,” “let us stand as one,” would seem more likely in Latin. The use of the independent subjunctive “stemus” also seems off to me. Yes, it works as a jussive, “let us stand,” but a straight up indicative would be better. “Stamus ad unum,” “We stand as one,” has more impact, being a factual statement (we do stand together and implies we always have) rather than the weaker command implied by the jussive, which reads to me as “hey, it would be great if we could stand united from here on out.” Or are we to go further into the hypothetical waters of the independent subjunctive and read this as a potential subjunctive, “we might stand together;” a deliberative subjunctive, “should we stand together?;” or an optative subjunctive, “if only we stand together…”. Plugging the translation “we stand together” into Google translate suggests that this is how Tynion/DC arrived at “stemus simul”. -- source link
#found latin#dc comics#independent subjunctive