Expert: Maria - 1/25/2012

Question
Hi, I have recently overcome a life long fear of deep water and I am creating a photo album/scrapbook to record this memory. I would love to have the phrases below translated into latin to include in my book. I have tried several online translator tools but fear they may not be totally accurate.

The phrases are,

Challenge your fears

Let your dreams be bigger than your fears.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Answer
Hello,

“Challenge your fears” and “Let your dreams be bigger than your fears” translate respectively as:
-”Tuas lacesse formidines”
and
-“Maiora tua sint vota quam formidines”.

Read more below.

Best wishes and congratulations on having overcome your fears,
Maria
____________________________________________________________________________________
Note that:

-Challenge = LACESSE (2nd.person singular, imperative of LACESSO, I challenge)

-your = TUAS (accusative feminine plural of the possessive TUUS agreed with FORMIDINES)

-fears= FORMIDINES (direct object, accusative plural of the feminine noun FORMIDO, 3rd.declension).Note that FORMIDO means exactly “fear” as a “lifelong terror”.



-Let …. be = SINT (3rd.person plural, hortatory subjunctive of SUM, I am)

-your= TUA (subject in the nominative neuter plural of the possessive TUUS agreed with VOTA)

-dreams  = VOTA (subject in the nominative plural of the neuter noun VOTUM, 2nd.declension). Note that VOTUM means “dream” as “desire”, “hope”, “aspiration”.

-bigger = MAIORA (comparative neuter plural  of the adjective MAGNUS agreed with VOTA)

-than = QUAM

-your fears = FORMIDINES ( nominative plural of FORMIDO, 3rd.declension). As you can see, I’ve omitted the possessive as it is implied in this context.

Finally I have to point out that Latin word order can be different from English for Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationships are indicated by the inflectional endings, not by the order of the words.