|
First up, we did a Yahoo! search on the phrase "Latin sayings." We chose the word "sayings" since we felt that it would be less ambiguous than "expressions," which has multiple meanings, including some that relate to computer programming. That said, our search only turned up one listed site in Yahoo!, a personal page for computer artist Chris Kawalek. Luckily, the description of his site includes a reference to, you guessed it, "Latin sayings." We were pleased to find a very nice list of Latin Sayings, offering more than 200 phrases and expressions translated into English. We found several of our favorites, including E Pluribus
Unum (One from many) and "Nullum Gratuitum Prandium" (There's no free lunch). Browsing through Chris's list, we spotted many of Latin's "greatest hits," but it would be hard to call the resource "comprehensive." We continued our search by viewing the "Web Site Matches" for our original search. That led us to Latin Language Resources, a tidy page from McGill-Toolen High School in Mobile, Alabama. Here we found several links to Latin-English dictionaries. Though dictionaries are usually better for individual terms than for expressions, we decided, nevertheless, to investigate. We backtracked to Yahoo! and
entered "Latin dictionary" into the search box. The results led us quickly to the Social Science > Linguistics > Languages > Latin category. There we found 20 or so high-quality Latin sites, from dictionaries to classic texts to discussion groups. However, the pièce-de-résistance (that's French) has to be Sententiae Latinae, which means "Latin Maxims" (or "Sayings," we'd argue) in English. It lists hundreds of expressions, their English translations, and even biographical information about the phrases' orginators. And we call that comprehensive indeed.
Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
|
