19 October 2015

Correction

The admirable blog Rorate recently translated the phrase totius fides Ecclesiae as The whole Faith of the Church. Actually, it means The Faith of the whole Church.

8 comments:

johnf said...

Triggered by your post, Father, I decided to bring my rusty Latin up to scratch by investigating the declension of the adjective 'totus'


And behold I have found a feminist Latin grammar website where the feminine form is put first in declining adjectives.
Instead of totus, tota, totum... It goes tota, totus, totum ... I suppose I should be grateful that the author doesn't relegate us males to behind the neuter form.

Liam Ronan said...

Those nouns will get you every time.

Even so, Rorate Caeli is an indispensable read for me every day (along your comments, Father, of course!).

Sue Sims said...

Father, what's the name given to that stylistic device - noun and qualifier split by at least one other word?

Tony V said...

Well, that's one reading. But taking it in context, surely it really means 'the faiths of the whole church'. Because each regional church believes slightly different things, right?

Fr John Hunwicke said...

Can't remember, Sue. In my teaching I just call it Sandwiching. And there is also tmesis, as in Ennius's "cere comminuit brum" or the exasperated expostulation of a Lancing Colleague "Why do you have to be so contra bloody dictory".

Fr John Hunwicke said...

Well, Liam, the root of the error is that people brought up on uninflected languages where the word order is crucial ("the cat killed the rat" and "the rat killed the cat" being two quite different statements), assume that the same is true of inflected languages where it's the endings of the words that make the difference. In this case, totius is a genitive going with the genitive ecclesiae. For it to mean 'The whole faith of the Church', it would need to be tota, nominative going with nominative fides. Actually, the mistake here is not in the original Vatican text, which is accurate, but is due either to Rorate itself or to some intermediate source they used.

Bert said...

Canon 1055 §1 of the Code of Canon Law, in defining what marriage is, uses totius vitae consortium, consortium being in the accusative, and is what a man and woman (vir et mulier) establish (constituunt) between themselves (inter se). Question, Fr. Hunwicke: Does totius vitae in this case admit of the meaning "entire duration of life" or can it only mean "every aspect of life"?

Fr John Hunwicke said...

Well, I suppose both, but I've always taken the phrase basically in your second sense.