Latin vs Greek?

coureur
Fri, 08 Feb 2008 21:03:38 +0000

DS had a teacher who was really into Latin pronunciation. When he called a villa a willa my stomach lurched.<<




I agree with you on that. I believe that the notion that the ancient Latin speakers pronounced V as W is based on a single document in which a passage of Latin was transliterated into ancient Greek, and the Vs were rendered as “OU.” Since Greek has no V, this is an approximation at best. And more telling, in my opinion, is the fact that all the modern romance languages pronounce the V as a V and not as W (although some Spanish dialects render it more as a B). If the mother tongue said it as a W, it’s highly unlikely that all the daughter languages would have separately and independently transformed it into the modern V sound.




However, when she explained that she had published an article that proved that “carpe diem” meant “pluck the day,”<<




On this point I agree with the teacher. Carpe means to grasp with the hand. You can see the same root words at work in the naming of the carpals and metacarpals - the bones of the hand. You would use carpe to describe picking flowers in your garden or fruit off your tree.

A better Latin word for “seize” would be rapere, which means literally to vigorously take hold of - to seize. It’s the root word for our words raptor, rape, rapture, rapacious, rapt, etc.

Rapere diem.