One of the talks at the Emerging Technology Conference here in San Diego that I'm going to miss because I'm coming home tomorrow is called "Deus Ex Automata". I found this title jarring because it reflects a misinterpretation of what's going on in the phrase "deus ex machina" (or, if you prefer, an overgeneralization of the apparent pattern in that phrase). The presenter seems to have thought that you can form a Latin phrase of the form "deus ex _____a" with any noun if you just know a Latin noun that ends in "a" (or, to overgeneralize even more incorrectly, perhaps the presenter thought that you could plug any noun in the blank spot after "deus ex _____").
This is not true. The preposition "ex" governs the ablative case, which is a fancy way of saying that noun forms change after the word "ex" to show that they are the particular things out of which something is coming, and so on. For example, the Nicene Creed (in the Western churches' versions) claims that the Holy Spirit "ex patre filioque procedit" (proceeds from the father and from the son), language which has been a point of theological controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity for hundreds of years. But the basic (nominative) forms of those nouns are "pater" and "filius"; they got modified into "patre" and "filio" because they came after "ex".
In a similar vein, if we wanted to translate Mao's claim about the origins of political power into Latin, we might say something like "tota potestas rei publicae ex armis oritur" (I'm not going to try to figure out a more precise way to refer to the "barrel of a gun" at the moment without access to some more skillful neolatinists or their dictionaries). But of course the basic form of the word for weapons is "arma". Now the fact that the first word of Vergil's Aeneid is also "arma" shows a coincidence, because Vergil's "arma" is in the accusative case because it is the direct object of "cano" (I sing [about]). It just so happens that "arma" is a word that doesn't visibly change when you change it from the nominative to the accusative. That's not true of the second word of the Aeneid, "virumque" (whose basic form is "vir" and which did indeed get changed as a result of being the object of "cano").
Similarly, "machina" is a noun which doesn't visibly change when you put it in the ablative case after "ex", unlike, say, "pater", "filius", or "arma". At least, it doesn't change if you're using a writing system that doesn't mark vowel quantity, since strictly speaking the final "a" was originally short and becomes long in the ablative, sometimes written as "māchinā" (thus "deus ex māchinā").
"Automata" can't possibly be in this category, because it's not in the first declension (where all nouns that don't change from the nominative to the ablative are) because it's plural, and the first declension doesn't have any plurals that end in "-a".
If we believe
Lewis and Short and
Wikipedia, "automaton" in Latin is a Greek loanword that must fall into the second declension neuter paradigm, which means that its nominative plural is "automata" but its ablative plural is "automatis". Then the only correct way to say "god from automata" in Latin is "deus ex automatis" (or "deus ex automatīs" if you mark vowel quantity).
Since the Emerging Tech page about that talk doesn't provide any contact information for the speaker and since I'm on my way home, I have no idea to whom to complain about this problem. A few years ago I had a similar quarrel with "magnum opii" as a purported plural of "magnum opus" in a Microsoft ad; this shows three different kinds of confusion about Latin plurals. The correct plural is
"magna
opera".
I'm sorry to see that many other people writing on the web have used "magnum opii" or the more plausible but still wrong "magnum opi". But Microsoft should have been able to pay someone enough to achieve a correct plural!
If you happen to want to see the original Greek word in use in a Greek text, Eva Brann has pointed out that Hephaistos in Iliad 18 is busy making αυτοματοι, which she translates as "robots" (!). From the context, it appears that that's exactly what he's making.
Sumana has gotten at least mock-anxious about what I think of her blog's name. Actually, I think Cogito, ergo Sumana is pretty funny (although I do notice the lexical category mismatch every time I see it!). What gets my proverbial goat is when people try to make a joke on a Latin phrase where there is an actual, specific way to say in Latin what they want to say and they don't make use of that actual way.
My mother, whose mother hated and wanted to blot out the memory of the Old Country as though it were the name of Amalek, grew up learning so little of her family's history that she believed that Yiddish was a kind of jargon or slang that people used in English, a few funny words and phrases like "schlemiel", "shmata", "schlep", "gut yontiff", and "oy gevalt" that you could throw into your English as a kind of coloring. When she heard that some people she knew were planning to teach their children to speak Yiddish, she was genuinely puzzled: why (and how) would you teach people to "speak" a kind of slang?
What my mother didn't know, because her mother didn't think it was important for her to know it, is that Yiddish isn't just a kind of English slang that some people from the Old Country used to use in a certain tone of voice to convey certain emotions, but rather a full-fledged language once spoken as a first language by millions of people, with its own grammar, written literature, and dictionaries, in which you could say anything you wanted. Since Yiddish is a real language and not just a collection of phrases you can appropriate to make your English look down-home or traditional, it's actually possible to teach your kids to speak it fluently, and it's actually possible for things to be grammatical or ungrammatical, plausible or implausible, plausible-sounding or grating, in Yiddish.
The same, mutatis mutandis, is true of Latin; as Reginald Foster says, "in Roma antiqua etiam canes Latine locuti sunt"; in ancient Rome even the dogs spoke Latin. (Presumably they spoke good Latin, or at least as good as modern dogs' English, as opposed to "dog Latin", which is the name for the practice that I'm complaining about here!) In exactly the same way as Yiddish, Latin is a full-fledged language with its own rules, norms, and principles, not just a closed set of funny phrases, proverbs, and maxims (like "mutatis mutandis") that lend dignity or prestige to English sentences. Now, the existence of Latin grammar is a more famous fact in the world today than the existence of Yiddish grammar, since Latin is one of the most prestigious languages ever and is the origin of our models for traditional grammar as well as of many of our traditional grammatical concepts and categories. And Latin grammar is famous for being complicated (although it might be better to say that it just has a whole lot of morphology to memorize). Yiddish, on the other hand, has never been a famous or prestigious language, and not everyone who spoke it was proud of speaking it. The architects of modern Hebrew like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda did not have a particularly high opinion of Yiddish and did not think it would be a good thing for Jews to continue to speak in the future. On the other side, I remember a citation to an article by Uzzi Ornan arguing that "Hebrew is Not a Jewish Language"!
(I pause to try to imagine someone in Spain who wanted to recreate the Roman Empire and wanted to substitute modern Latin for all the Romance languages. It's true that Latin has been suggested repeatedly as a common language for the European Union, but never, as far as I know, with the same kind of antipathy toward modern Romance that Ben-Yehuda had toward Yiddish...)
The most basic consequence of the fact that Latin, like Yiddish, is a language and not a set of slang or stock phrases is that both languages have a grammar that make things you say in them Latin sound right or wrong. If you simply take words from the dictionary and plug them into existing phrases you're likely to get it wrong, especially in a highly inflected language like Finnish or ancient Latin, Greek, or Sanskrit. That is the "dog Latin" phenomenon. Of course, you can run into trouble even without inflection -- for example, English uses infinitives with modal verbs ever so slightly differently from other languages. I once heard a native Spanish speaker say *"I can't to go", obviously by analogy to "yo no puedo ir"; similarly in Latin you could say "nescio natare", or in Portuguese "não sei nadar", but the English version has to be "I don't know how to swim". You could say "possum scribere" or "posso escrever", but in English you have to say "I can write". The alternatives -- "I don't know to swim" or "I can to write" are grating to an English speaker, just as *"deus ex automata" is grating to a Latin speaker. But "I can to write" could be derived by the exact same means that would yield "deus ex automata": just look up "possum" (I can) and "scribere" (to write) in the dictionary and plug them in...
On the other hand, "cogito ergo Sumana" is a pun. It's too bad that it crosses lexical categories, replacing a verb with a noun; it would be a better pun if it didn't. But I think of it first and foremost as a pun.
