Expert: Maria - 2/6/2011

Question
Hello,

  I've been so impressed by your previous translations, I'm very excited to be able to post this question to you.  I'm working on a drawing and I would like to include some latin about the misunderstood origins of the nursery rhyme, "Ring Around the Rosie".  The three phrases I'm trying to include are:

1. Time of Plagues or Age of Plagues
2. Ashes Ashes (i looked this up and got cinis cineris but I'm not sure if that's two forms of the same word or if they're both necessary)
3. We All Fall Down

Thank you so much for donating your time and efforts to this website and hopeless mono-language louts such as myself.  If you ever have any questions about animation or motion capture, please drop me a line, I would be happy to answer them!  = )

Thank you again,

Ben Watson

Answer
Hello,

here are the three Latin translations you want to include:

1. “Tempus Pestis“ as well as “Pestis Tempus” (“Time  of Plagues”  or  “Age of Plagues “) with a different word order that in Latin can be variable, since Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationships are indicated by the endings of each term, not by the order of the words.

2. “Cineres  Cineres”  (Ashes Ashes )

3. “Omnes cadimus” (We All Fall Down)

See below for grammatical analysis.

Hope this can be helpful to you.

Best regards and thanks for your kind words and your offer of help about animation or motion capture,
Maria
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Note that:

-Time  / Age = TEMPUS (nominative neuter, 3rd.declension)

-of Plagues”  = PESTIS (genitive singular, 3rd.declension).
Note that Latin uses the genitive singular PESTIS instead of the plural as this Latin noun does not use the genitive plural.



-Ashes Ashes = CINERES  CINERES. They both are the nominative plural of the noun CINIS (nominative singular).CINERIS (genitive singular) which belongs to the 3rd.declension.



-All = OMNES (nominative plural of the adjective OMNIS)

-We…Fall Down = CADIMUS (1st.person plural, present indicative of the verb CADO)