Boing Boing has coverage of 16th century Latin graffiti in on the wall of a church in Dubrovnik.
I have four quibbles: one with the interpretation, one with the transcription, one with the translation, and one with the original author.
First, I'm not sure that the graffito was intended as a threat. The usual meaning
of "memento mori" is not a threat to personally harm the reader, but rather a kind of spiritual reminder (sometimes rendered as "remember that you are mortal"; compare the saying "respice finem").
Second, the transcription should say "ludetis" ("you (pl) play") instead of "ludentis" ("of the player").
I don't know for sure what to do with "pilla", but I suspect it's
ablative and a corruption or later form of "pila", the normal classical word for a ball or a ball-game. In that case the text should be read
Peace be with you and remember that you shall die, you who play ball.
So perhaps we have an indication of what kind of game the children were
playing in the church alley.
The original author should have written "mementote" instead of "memento" to agree with the plural "vobis" and "qui". "Memento" is a singular imperative of memini, and the plural is "mementote".
Last week, I joined the United States Metric Association and got some cool metric paraphernalia, including a bunch of "GO METRIC" bumperstickers.
I think it's sad that the U.S. has yet to widely adopt the metric system, although there are incremental transitions going on in areas like food and beverage labels. I think children could learn the metric system fully and easily in a single generation (as children in many other countries around the world did, often during the 1970s and 1980s) and start using it naturally on a day-to-day basis. Decimalization would make our measurement process a lot easier, and using SI units would help us talk to the rest of the world.
I learned imperial (or customary) measure in elementary school, and learned metric in junior high and high school science classes. But the science classes didn't try to teach us to estimate or think about everyday objects in metric units -- only to use them in calculations and lab measurement. So my housemate who works with electron devices is quite happy to use metric measure at the nanometer scale, but it doesn't come naturally to him at the meter level. I have the same problem: I worked plenty of high school physics problems where an object gained 1 J of potential energy by being moved 1 m against a conservative field producing 1 N of force, but I never got any specific idea how much 1 J or 1 N were in everyday terms. (If I lost 40 pounds of weight, how many newtons lighter would I be? Calculation says about 178, and that would require losing about 18 kg on Earth, but neither of these things is obvious to me as a human-scale metric weight-loss program!)
One of the points made by metric educators is that kids (and adults) shouldn't try to convert conventional units to metric all the time. That's annoying and creates an impression that metric is really hard (because every single time you want to use metric, you have to multiple or divide by some possibly hard-to-remember constant!); it leads to an interpretation of the metric system as some kind of weird code superimposed on top of normal everyday measurement. Instead, metric educators advocate learning metric from scratch as something to think in directly -- much as modern language education often favors immersion over translation. So I'm going to make a bit of an effort to do some measurement exercises for kids in the hope of getting more of a native familiarity with human-scale metric measurements.
Happy World Vegetarian Day! I went to the first day of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society's World Vegetarian Day event in Golden Gate Park on Saturday. I met a bunch of nice people and continued to discover the smallness of social worlds (although they're not necessarily actually that small; they just exhibit birthday paradoxes!).
I also got some good vegan food at the World Vegetarian Day celebration, and continued to think about doing a vegan food photography web site. Perhaps I should learn a little more about photography in order to do a reasonable job with that.
San Francisco has several vegan restaurants that I haven't visited yet, so there's another good project!
Happy Day Against DRM. To celebrate, Mike McCracken has released a beta version of his DRM free music search engine.
While I was in Berlin last week, I did an interview (in English) with Markus Beckedahl from Netzpolitik. Sorry for being somewhat long-winded.
Sometimes it's easy to forget how strongly accented most people's pronunciation of classical Latin is -- for instance, I have a horrible American English accent when I speak Latin. But has Henry Beard said, "memento: nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem corrigant"; he's right, at least with regard to ancient Romans, and the lack of native speakers makes it hard to compare our accents against an obviously correct standard.
I was startled to hear an extremely pronounced French accent in the Latin recording of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights made by a Belgian woman called Ezwa who is a native French speaker. I'm sure that her accent in Latin is no worse than mine, but it really brings out the point that we all do exhibit distinct accents when speaking Latin. Even if you don't speak Latin, I'm sure that you'll be able to tell that the text is being spoken by a native French speaker, because the vowels (and the "r") are extremely French. (Also, she drops initial "h" before a vowel, leading to words like "ominibus"! And I suspect that she may be omitting a few consonants at the ends of words, although I haven't found a specific example.)
I found this recording on the
Librivox UDHR recordings collection, via a post on Boing Boing.
I've spoken Latin with two people who were not native English speakers, but I never before noticed the foreign accent as strongly as I do in Ezwa's case. (One of the two is a native Italian speaker, but he uses church Latin pronunciation, and doesn't sound so dissimilar to American Latin speakers who use the church pronunciation.)
Lik-sang is going out of business because of litigation from Sony (!) over sales of Sony gaming products outside of the geographic regions to which they were originally marketed.
Many advocates of free trade reflexively think that the biggest source of barriers to trade (and the one that needs to be advocated against) is government tariffs and protectionism -- the idea that the government of country X will tax imports at a higher rate than domestic goods or will try to protect a local industry by blocking imports. Increasingly, though, major barriers to trade come from private schemes by original manufacturers who, far from objecting to trade barriers, have marketing and geographic segmentation strategies that lead them to try to prevent downstream resale (including parallel importation) of the products they sold into one market.
This is a barrier to trade. This is not free trade. This is not a globalized or unified market. This is every bit as "artificial" as a tariff.
I never used Lik-sang to import game consoles or games, but I was a satisfied repeat customer of PS/2 to USB joystick adapters to let me and my friends play StepMania on PCs with high-end Dance Dance Revolution dance pads. I think companies like Lik-sang provided an incredible service to the video game enthusiast community by helping enthusiasts get access to a global market.
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Contact: Seth David Schoen
