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A little help with Latin please, Rex Harrison

Disco is My Class War

00:13 / 01.11.05

As some of you may know, I'm from the colonies, old chaps, and you know what our eddication is like out here. Dreadful, shocking. No cricket, and no Latin neither. Therefore, you see, I'm in a bit of bother with a couple of Latin fragments it would behoove me to understand. Any nice chap or lady with an Oxford degree like to do a spot of translation, sirrah?

The sentences are:

Hoc est corpus meum
Hoc est corpus eorum.

Thank ye kindly.

00:29 / 01.11.05

i think the first one means "this is my body"?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

00:42 / 01.11.05

And the second one is "This is your body." (No Lat. for 17 years, pinch of salt ect ect.)

*

01:13 / 01.11.05

"Sirrah" is a pretty condescending thing to call someone you've asked for help... Yank.

(I took Latin, and don't read it any better than the average American. I can just about get through "Si embili, si emgo" and that's it. But I think those good gentles are correct.)

02:46 / 01.11.05

It's not their body?

Disco is My Class War

03:22 / 01.11.05

Thanks everyone. That makes a bunch of sense.

'Sirrah' is condescending? I thought it was a jolly-English variant on 'Sir'. I should give up on imitations, obviously.

Disco is My Class War

03:31 / 01.11.05

By the way, I'm not a Yank. I'm un-Australian.

08:14 / 01.11.05

Persephone's right. The second translation should be their body.

Their (plural) and body (singular) which seems odd though. Several people own this body apparently.

08:26 / 01.11.05

I think corpus can mean the same sort of thing as corps, like a body of people. In which case it wouldn't be so much "their body" as "the body of them", but in juxtaposition with corpus meum it would become more of a pun - something like "this is my body/corporeal existence, this is the body/collectivity of Them". I might be leaning on the Latin a bit hard there, though - Haus?

Disco is My Class War

12:09 / 01.11.05

That, too, would make sense. The essay in which this is (Ranciere, obscure French political philosopher) talks a lot about the body of the proletarian masses in relation to the second phrase.

I should so learn Latin.

13:29 / 01.11.05

It's also a play on the Mass -- the transubstantiation.

This is my body. Eat this in remembrance of me.

More on the phrase here.

ONLY NICE THINGS

14:10 / 01.11.05

Well, of course it is, although the link there is about the insertion of "enim" into the Mass, not the phrase, so I'd skip it if you're in a hurry, MD.

I think corpus can mean the same sort of thing as corps, like a body of people.

Yeah, pretty much. It can stand metonymically for anything where a group of elements forming a whole - so, a body in the sense of a body of people, or a community, a guild, that sort of thing. I might be stretching, but I think the grammatical difference between "meum" and "eorum" is relevant - "meum" is an adjective, whereas "eorum" is the genitive plural of is - "this person" - so it is not quite "this is my body, this is their body/community" as "this is my body, this is the body of them". Given that it's Ranciere, my best guess without context would be that it was an antiposition of the indiviudal selfhood of the philosopher and the proletariat the philosopher describes without experiencing, viewed both as mass and as unity. Or something to that effect.

*

15:21 / 01.11.05

By the way, I'm not a Yank. I'm un-Australian.

Right, I knew that. I was in an... alternate secret history where someone else started this thread. Apparently. Sorry.

And "sirrah" is an old fashioned term of address for a peasant, from a member of the nobility, IIRC. Like "fellow." So hardly insulting now. I was just being playful.