interretialia:o-eheu:mtulliuscicero:o-eheu:mediocre-latinist:mtulliuscicero:mediocre-latinist:Possum

interretialia:o-eheu:mtulliuscicero:o-eheu:mediocre-latinist:mtulliuscicero:mediocre-latinist:Possum, posse, potui (irreg.): can, be ablePossum stridere ad anum proprium… vvWouldn’t that be more like “Possum vlvlare ad svvm cvlvm?”If we go with the all v’s instead of u’s, let’s at least be consistent. “Possvm“ not ”Possum.“ I don’t really see the need to change the v’s to u’s, even with the :V emoticon considered, though.The infinitive isn’t preferable in either rendition. I recognize the original meme is grammatically incorrect—“He scream at own ass”—and the infinitive is an attempt to portray that “scream.” However, using the infinitive here isn’t really a humorous attempt to be grammatically incorrect„, it changes the meaning of the sentence. The meme is no longer “He scream at own ass” but “For him to scream at own ass.” I would instead use the grammatically correct version, as interretialia does whenever he translates grammatically incorrect memes. Here, this would be the third-person singular form: ululat or stridet.This is a case of personal preference, but I prefer stridet over ululat. Ululare means “to howl” or “to wail in pain.” When it does mean “to screech,” it’s like a war screech. Stridere means screeching amongst other animal sounds, and so to me seems the more natural fit.My suggest for this is Possum stridet ad suum culum.-BeniaminusI can’t speak to mediocre-latinist’s usage, but I was using stridere as a complementary infinitive with possum as a verb. A big part of memes is their changeability, after all, and it seemed natural to me that here we have a new variation on the theme.Also, proprium is certainly better than suum, which I’d argue doesn’t really have the force that “own” has in English. I’d just render suum as his, whereas proprium means own much more effectively.Now that you mention the complementary infinitive, that seems obvious to me. By all means go ahead.I disagree with proprius being better. Eius means “his,” suum is “his own,” and proprius is “particular” or “individual.” It doesn’t really function in the possessive sense that suum does.-BeniaminusFirst of all, I want to make a general comment here about what I think is a sensible way to translate memes into Latin. I have been wanting to say this for a while now, and you’ve all given me the perfect opportunity to say it.Why do I always use (or at least try to use) grammatically correct Latin even when the original meme has grammar that is not correct? Beniaminus gave a brief mention of the reason above, but I’ll expand on it.Things like “I can has Cheezburger” and “He scream at own ass” are not grammatically correct English in the usual sense, but in fact their syntax is correct enough to make their meanings comprehensible. In English, syntax and morphology are not very much tied to each other—you can have “I can has,” and although the “has” has morphological issues, the syntax of that part of the sentence tells us that it means “Can I have” or something along those lines.But Latin is completely different. Latin’s morphology is directly tied to its syntax, and so much so that a one-letter difference can make a sentence either misleading or incomprehensible. This is why materfututor or mater-fututor (matremfututorem or matrem-fututorem, etc.) can’t be “motherfucker.” (That is “a mother who is a fucker [a male one].” I am starting to call this the “ResPublicae [Sic] Problem”; Latin morphology and syntax, indicated by terminations like -em and -es, aren’t nullified even if stick all the words into one word or use a hyphen.) This is why possum habet can’t be the “I can has.” (That is “I can; he has.”) “Grammatically incorrect” Latin often is grammatically correct, but its meaning is not at all what you have in mind. Romanes eunt domus, for instance, is a grammatically correct Latin sentence (with a number of possible interpretations), but it just doesn’t mean “Romans, go home!”Grammatically incorrect English can’t be represented with grammatically incorrect Latin with any real degree of success because while the former can have bad morphology while retaining both meaningful syntax and the overall meaning of the sentence, the latter really cannot retain the meaning of the sentence if you mess up the morphology. One way to remedy this is to use a Latin construction that is not the norm in Classical Latin. With nearly 2000 years’ worth of material to look through, no doubt you can find some precedent of a construction that just happened to be used by the Romans themselves. Thus, for instance, for the “I can has,” the “I can” can be rendered as possum instead of the impersonal licet for two reasons: 1) The possibility and permission ideas of the English verb are often conflated, and I think this is one of those cases; 2) In Medieval Latin, possum can mean “can” in the permission sense, and there are some citable instances of the word being used to have that meaning even in Classical Latin (see the possum entry, section 4, in the OLD.) But I would avoid constructions that are generally seen as Just Plain Wrong in Latin prose, such as the infinitive to express purpose.Now I have some things to say about the Possum stridere thing: It seems to me that Possum stridere ad anum suum should be enough. The “own” is already part of the word suum. (Someone here said that suum doesn’t really have the force that “own” has in English. Right, but it both means “own” and has the ability to refer to the subject of the sentence.) But I can see why someone would be attracted to Possum stridere ad anum proprium—the proprium seems to be a calque or a stand-in for the “own.” However, the first question that automatically comes to my mind after reading Possum stridere ad anum proprium is “Okay, but whose?” And then, having failed to answer that question, my mind assumes that the word means “particular.” When proprius is used for “one’s own,” you’d expect also to see some word denoting a contradistinction, e.g. alienus or communis. None is in that sentence, though. I think that there is a solution: proprius can be used with suus! And so, my suggestion is: Possum stridere ad anum suum proprium.Actually, I like this better: Possum stridere ad culum suum proprium. -- source link

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