Lingua mortua...

[oloriel]

You know your brain is a silly place when...

in the light of the papal election, somebody translates "You can has cheezburger" into Latin and makes it Potes habere bubula cum caseus and your first reaction is "But wait, bubula should be in the accusative, so, bubulam, and cum requires the ablative case, so it should be caseo..."
And your second reaction is "But well, 'You can has cheezburger' is grammatically incorrect, too, so maybe this is intentional?"

... and you still haven't made up your mind whether it should be corrected or not.
*facepalms*
Maybe I should just ask.

Of course, these days you can't be certain that your cheeseburger is actually made of beef, so maybe equinam would be more appropriate anyway?

Comments

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I'm not the only one! \o/

"You can haz cheeseburger" is based on the LOLcat gif trend - funny pictures of cats with more or less funny captions in more or less mangled English? I assume the first (or one of the first) had something to do with a cat and a cheeseburger. Or something.

Anyway, even if you wanted to copy the bad grammar, something like Potes habet would make more sense than leaving all nouns in the nominative case (which would confuse the heck out of native speakers of Latin, who wouldn't know which of these things is supposed to be the subject, although they'd probably settle for bubula, considering that caseus would have a separate vocative form -- so it would probably parse as "You can have, oh beef patty, ... I'm lost."

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

LOL, what native speakers of Latin?

I agree, 'Potes habet' would be better. Not sure about 'bubulam con caseo', though - srsly, didn't the Romans have some sort of cheezburger-equivalent recipe of their own? Surely the Games must have created an enormous market for cheap fast food. Of course, buying a cheezburger at the Games, one might not want to enquire whether it was 'bubulam' or 'equinam', because the answer might be "Neither."

"Extra garum, please."

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

All those dead Romans :P Look, when I translate into (or from) any language, I always work on the hypothesis that it's a living language with native speakers and linguistic trends and idioms. What's fair for Quenya is surely fair for Latin.

I agree, though, a more concise and idiomatic term would of course be preferable. Then again, in the written versions that have come down to us, Roman recipes often have rather unwieldy names as well? Isicia omentata means burgers made of minced meat (...whatever meat), so that might be better than bubula, but it's not exactly quick to pronounce, either.
"I'll take the IsOm with bread and cheese. And extra garum!" ;)