Anti-Buffoonist gets lost in the madness:
What I don’t get….is the title of Vox’s blog. It’s basically the same set-up…the second word looks like a genitive singular, so it’s “voice of *******”. But “popoli” is either spelled wrong, or where the Greek comes in.
In neither my own real life dictionary, there’s no word spelled p-o-p-O-l-i, only with a U instead of O. An online Latin dictionary doesn’t have popoli. I don’t know Greek or have a dictionary, but an online one doesn’t even give anything for popoli. (The Greek one didn’t gave anything for populi either, but since I already know that’s Latin, I expected that.)
The Latin popUli means “of the people, of the populace.” The nominative singular form of the noun means just that, “people or populace.” If it were an adjective, then it’d have been “Vox Popula.”
So that’s all I got for now. If I went into too much detail and sounded condescending or whatever it wasn’t intentional, but Latin’s one of the few things I know well enough to explain.
I have no doubt that her Latin is superior to mine, especially when it comes to ablatives and other bits of grammar that one might confuse with Traveller equipment. However, an Italian dictionary would have set you straight. The linguistic switch which was necessary to maintain the pattern, for, as you know, “day” is not exactly proper Latin either.
It serves two purposes. One, I wished to avoid confusion with any other uses on the old Latin phrase floating about the web. Two, it offers fair warning that I may, without provocation, drop the occasional translation of an Eco article here. I was actually toying with translating the Riziero book I’ve been reading, as there is no English translation, nor, do I think, is there likely to be. I abandoned that notion after encountering the first embarrassing romantic interlude, wherein the James Bond of the 16th century encounters a nubile young lady-in-waiting.
“Riziero’s member could not have done other than follow and immerse itself in that freshness, just as the August vacationer seeks to plunge his sweating head into a fountain.”
In any event, the Greek comes in elsewhere. Bad linguistic elitist! Bad!