Expert: Maria - 4/28/2010

Question
Hi! We are a band, wanting to use a quote from Da Vinci as a part of our "branding name/slogan". The quote is: "Nature never breaks her own laws". Is it possible to help translate it to latin? Have searched the internet for some time, without any result I`m afraid...

Answer
Hello,

"Nature never breaks her own laws“, which is the English  adaptation of “Natura non rompe sua legge”, the  original Italian quote from Leonardo da Vinci, can be translated as follows into Latin:

-“Suas ipsius leges numquam  perfringit natura“ which corresponds literally to the English sentence “Nature never breaks her own laws .

Or:

-“Suam  legem  non perfringit natura” which corresponds literally to the Italian phrase “Natura non rompe sua legge”.

See below for grammatical analysis.

Best regards,
Maria
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Note that:

-Nature (English)  /Natura (Italian)= NATURA (subject, nominative case, 1st.declension)

-never (English)/ non (Italian) = NUMQUAM / NON

-breaks(English) / spezza (Italian) = PERFRINGIT (from PERFRINGO)

-her (English/ sua (Italian) = SUAS (direct object, accusative plural of the possessive SUUS agreed with the plural noun LEGES) or SUAM (direct object, accusative singular of the possessive SUUS agreed with the singular noun LEGEM)

-own = IPSIUS (genitive of IPSE)

-laws (English) /legge (Italian)= LEGES (direct object, accusative plural of LEX, 3rd.declension) or  LEGEM (direct object, accusative singular of LEX, 3rd.declension).

As you can see, Latin word order is different from English and Italian simply because Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationship are indicated by the endings of each term, not by the order of the words.

Finally note that Da Vinci is not correct, as in Italian it is “Leonardo da Vinci” (literally, “Leonardo of Vinci”) where the Italian preposition "da" (English,"of") is not a part of the surname, but simply indicates that Leonardo came from Vinci.

Leonardo (1452-1519) was in fact  born in a little Tuscan town named Vinci near Firenze (Florence) and his full name was "Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci", which means "Leonardo, son of Piero, of Vinci".