This is one is really, really bad. I was browsing around at some well-known blogs to see what sorts of useful things I might include here, and as I scanned the rather spartan Instapundit I came across this unfamiliar and baffling line in the sidebar:
Sic gorgiamus [sic] allos [sic] subjectatos nunc!
I knew that gorgiare was not a Latin verb, and that allos must be a mistake for alios (others).
The source is apparently the 1991 film adaptation of the Addams Family, and it serves as the family motto (you can see it in the script here), and the translation at least sounds like a motto: “We gladly feast upon those who would subdue us.”
If gorgio, gorgiare meant anything it would mean to speak gutturally, possibly to growl. (I found a reference to DuCange that suggests some authority for this meaning in Late Latin.) What’s really interesting, however, is the meaning of allus: it’s your foot thumb, better known as the big toe.
I feel that gorgiare should take indirect discourse, and so we should understand elision of esse with subiectatos. So what does it sort of mean?
“Thus do we growl that (our) big toes have, at this moment, been thrown up from below!”
Will Hollywood never learn to consult a proper Latinist?
I might suggest something like this: “Laeti vescimur nos subacturis.”
I love that there’s a word in Latin for the “foot thumb.”
Question… How does one say “I gladly feast on those who would subdue me.”?
There are a lot of ways. One might be
libens me domituris vescor.
Technically libens is an adjective describing the subject of vescor (‘i, glad, feed upon’), domituris is the ablative of what you feed upon, but in the future participle to show what their intent is, and me is the object of the participle (‘those-who-are-trying-to-subdue me’).
Thank you so, so, so much for your break down of the movie quote. I saw it in an article on the Addams’ family and even with my cursory 2 year education in Latin I could tell that something was amis – namely from the word nunc.
LOL, I love that verb gorgiare! I should find a way to use it somehow, someday!
And what would be the best translation for the motto on the movie cover:
Weird is relative?
I think mysticus or fatum would be the best word for “weird”.
My translation is “mysticus relativus est”.
Hi Felix,
I might say, “quod alienum proprium est,” or more concisely, “alienum est proprium.” I think this is a clever turn of phrase and feels Roman to me. Literally it means “that which is strange (alien / foreign / not one’s own) is personal (peculiar / not shared with others / one’s own),” in other words, a thing is strange relative to the individual regarding it.
In terms of etymology it’s true that weird and fatum originally meant similar things, weird being how things “turn” in the world and fate being what was spoken by the gods, in each case something beyond your control. But weird here really means strange, bizarre, unfamiliar. You also want to be careful with gender. I think a Roman reading your phrase would understand it as something like, “the mystical man is a private citizen.”
Thank you so much! I’ve been a huge Addams Family fan for a long time and had no idea that it was totally and completely wrong. Thanks for setting me straight!
Google translated your quote like this “Glad we eat subacturis”. Was there a misspelling somewhere (not being sarcastic, actually asking)? it also gave a translation for the English motto like this “Ut biberent in eis qui libenter subicere nobis”. Would that be a closer translation?
Hi Paintchip,
I wrote some mean replies to other people but I appreciate your comment. (Actually, your comment exposes another poster as a fraud. He gave the Google translation as though he were an authority. I was really only mean to him because I’ve gotten so much grief over the years from unqualified people trying to defend this script. It’s weird.)
Google translate misses out on a lot of things, and not just on nuance, figurative language, allusive play, and the like. Because classical languages are highly inflectional, meaning that the meaning of words and clauses depends heavily on the things like word endings and not the order of words as in English, Google can’t piece things together the way a human familiar with the language and able to read contextually can. Google also has trouble recognizing inflected forms and identifying the right root.
There are also known cases of Google Translate being pre-programmed with literary translations of famous lines, etc. That gives a false of its accuracy, and together with the fact that it passes well enough for conversational stuff in modern languages, you can be forgiven for thinking it’s reliable.
But I can assure with absolute confidence that my version is good Latin and what was used in the movie is just the product at best of machine translation and perhaps a passing familiarity with a Latin dictionary.
Laeti is the subject of the verb vescimur, a deponent verb (looks passive but is actually active). It’s common to use an adjective in Latin where we would use an adverb. “We, happy, feed upon.” Vescimur (feed upon) can take an ablative of the thing upon which you feed, here subacturis, which is ablative plural of the future active participle of the verb subigere, one meaning of which is to subdue. Being an active participle in the plural it refers to people doing something in the future or intending to do something. Subacturis are “those who would subdue” and as a participle it can take a direct object, nos “us”.
This is the kind of elegant Latin phrasing that students never construct because they’re still in a phase where they perform “translationese”, matching constructions between languages even when they produce unnatural phrases. They recreate the artificial Latin of their textbooks, which is the only Latin they’ve read. Machines translate the same way: word by word instead of by thought and idiom.
Best wishes.
The words that you say do not exist do show up in Latin.
ExEx: No they don’t.
P.S.: I deleted your other replies because they were dumb.
The correct Latin for the Addams motto would be “Ut biberent in eis qui libenter subicere nobis”
Terry: No it isn’t.
Funny thing about using google translate is that you can very easily spot a problematic translation. Terry went on google, wrote the credo in english and of course it came back as “Ut biberent in eis qui libenter subicere nobis”. If he had bothered to reverse search (which I do often with languages that are completely foreign to me), he would have noticed that by looking up “Ut biberent in eis qui libenter subicere nobis” in latin and asking google to translate it to english, it comes back as “who are very willing to submit to us, might drink from them”. Dead giveaway of a bad google translation. It translates words, not meanings, and latin is a LOT about meaning and inflection. Sorry for the long comment but people suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect bother every last one of my nerves.
Thank you for translating this properly! The motto has always amused me, but it lost some of its shine when I learned it was basically gibberish. Yours is the first site I’ve found that I feel has translated it correctly. And thank you for letting me know I can’t trust Google Translate with Latin at all (though I always do a mirror translation, to check.)
Thanks much! I enjoyed this exploration of Latin. … A friend of mine shared that Addams family crest quote today. Since my MA was in Classics, I noticed that the Latin did not mean what it is supposed to have meant. I assumed it was created for the film by someone who (a) wasn’t so great with Latin (a notoriously grammatically complex language) but wanted a Latin motto in a hurry, or (b) purposely used a quote that didn’t mean what it was supposed to mean, possibly as a joke. It reminded me of the way modern Americans love to get tattoos with Latin phrases, but since they think they can just look words up in a Latin dictionary and put the translation in English word order without changing the noun/verb endings, they regularly garble the grammar and meaning! … So I did some searching, which is how I stumbled upon your post! … “Gorgiamus” seemed to me a made-up verb from modern English “gorge,” coming from old French for “throat” (and originally from Latin ‘gurges’ — whirlpool), and — like you say — is not to be found in an actual Latin dictionary, but at least it is structured correctly as a newly coined verb. If we were very generous and allowed for the creation of this new verb “gorgiare” or “gorgere,” then we could let it mean “We throat-gorge” — or “Let us feast” (if it is subjunctive mood, 3rd conj i-stem). … Thanks for pointing out that “allos” means “BIG TOES,” which is quite funny! I totally agree that the writer was probably thinking of alios (“others”). I even misread it as ‘alios’ at first. Concerning the “subdue” part, lots of novices don’t seem to catch that “subjectatos” is in the perfect passive participial form, and it is not a future active participle as possibly intended. As it stands, “subjectatos” means “having been subdued, having been cast down, subjected,” or (as you said above) “having been tossed (up) from beneath.” It can be used substantively to mean “those who have been subdued or conquered.” However, in order to mean “those who would subdue [us],” it would have to be changed to “[nos] subjectaturos” (a future active participle — “about to subject/ subdue/ toss under”), as you did above with subigere >> subacturīs (abl with vescor). … As it stands, if generously interpreted, I thought the Addams family crest “motto” could mean (A) “Thus we throat-devour the big toes having now been cast down.” or (B) “So let us eat the big toes having now been tossed up from beneath.” … Lol. Hmmm! … IF one did wish to say, “We gladly feast on those who would subdue us” in Latin, I thought it could look something like your suggestion: (A) “Laeti vescimur nos subjecturīs.” (“subacturīs” / “domiturīs” / “subjectaturīs” would also work for the last word.) or could use a subordinate clause, like (B) “Libenter eīs epulabimur qui nos domare velint.” (We liberally feast upon those who [might] wish to subdue us. — using a relative clause of characteristic), or (C) “Laetissime devoramus eos qui nos domitare temptent.” (Very happily we devour those who [might] try to subdue us.) … I wondered if you would like these other two as well. ?? I probably like your future active participle better for its conciseness, appropriate for a motto. Thanks again. Cheers.
Fascinating! Thank you very much for this.
Definitely thinking about taking up latin.
Bright Blessings )O(