![]() ![]() Saturnalia is an ancient Roman festival and holiday in honour of the god Saturn, held on 17 December of the Julian calendar and later expanded with festivities through to 23 December. ![]() Public sacrifice and banquet for the god Saturn universal Phoenix wearing of the pileus In English, people used to say “thou” to mean “you” when they were talking to only one person.Saturnalia (1783) by Antoine-François Callet, showing his interpretation of what the Saturnalia might have looked likeįeasting, role reversals, gift-giving, gambling “Tu” is still used in modern French as the word for “you”. “Memento” (remember) is a word used in English today for something that helps you to remember a person or special event. Latine loqui, memento: pronounced Latin-ay lock-wi, memen-toe (meaning: “Speak Latin, remember”) Tu – demove! Adveniunt: pronounced Too – Day-mow-eh! Ad-wen-ee-yoont (meaning: “You! Move out of the way! They are arriving”) The Latin sentences in chapter 4 should be pronounced like this:Īve: pronounced Ah-weh (meaning: “Hello” or “Greetings”) For example, when Valentia addresses Peregrinus directly, in Latin she would actually use the form “Peregrine” (pronounced Peregrinay) but we have used the English form since her speech is translated into English. In Latin, words change their form according to the grammar of the sentence. Photo Somerset County Council via Wikimedia Commons IMP stands for ‘imperator’, a Roman title translated as ‘emperor’.Īn early 4th century nummus of Emperor Constantine with a wreath on his head. Carotus would have pronounced it as “Yu-pi-ter”.Īt Saturnalia, Perry sees the words IMP CONSTANTINVS written around the edge of a coin, like the one below. ![]() The Romans did not use the letter “J”, but in the book we have written Jupiter (instead of Iupiter) to be less confusing to readers. “ Yo Saturnalia”, the Saturnalia greeting, was actually spelled “ Io Saturnalia”, but we have spelled it with a “Y” to make it easier to read and pronounce. But when historians talk about famous people like Emperor Valentinian or the writer Cicero, they use a modern pronunciation. So Valentia’s name would have sounded like “Walentia” and “ Vale” (Goodbye) was pronounced “Wah-lay”. Different groups of “barbarians” spoke different languages, including early forms of German which also became part of English.Įven though nobody speaks Latin in the modern world, we know that “C” was pronounced like the English “K”, and “V” was pronounced like the English “W”. In many other places in the Roman Empire Greek was used instead of Latin, which is why Valentia wonders if Perry speaks Greek when she first meets him in chapter 6. Anna was constantly asking me to “find me a quote about …” and all of Balbus’s quotes are from the real writings of Roman poets and philosophers: Cato, a late Roman writer of a book of moral teachings the philosophers Cicero and Seneca Plutarch, a writer of moral biographies of great men, who mentions Forum Voconii in his Life of Antony and the poets Juvenal and Virgil. When I told Anna that Roman children learned to write by copying out moral sayings, she created my favorite character, Balbus the tutor, who talks in sayings and quotes from great writers. Image via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)ĭid you notice that none of the Roman characters says “Please”? Latin had no single word for please – instead, Romans used expressions like “I wish” or “I ask”. You can just make out one of the captions “it’s not a 3, it’s a 2” written in Latin on the painting. The painting has speech captions which inspired the scene at the inn, in chapter 21. Scene of a quarrel over a dice game painted on a wall in the Bar of Salvius, in Pompeii. ![]()
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