Ad Sumanam
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.
