Expert: Maria - 5/25/2005

Question
-------------------------
Followup To

I am grateful for your reply as it cleared things up for me, however i am still puzzled as to whether it matters about what order you say angel of death in latin? Is it angelus mortis or mortis angelus or doesnt it matter
Question -
I am currently considering getting a tattoo and i wish to get angel of death in latin. I have tried to translate it myself using internet translation sites bt they seem to have limited results. What I have obtained so far is Angelus of Mortalitas, however the similarities in the sentence structure to the english language has led me to believe that this is incorrect. So can you please email the proper translation.
Answer -
Hello,

The proper translation into Latin for “Angel of death” is:

“Angelus Mortis”

or with a different word order:

“Mortis Angelus”

Please note that ANGELUS(nominative) is ‘Angel' and MORTIS (genitive) is ‘of death'.

Kind regards
Maria
_______________________________________________________
As for your translation “Angelus  of Mortalitas” it is partly wrong.
In fact, ‘Angelus' is right, but ‘of mortalitas' is wrong, first because ‘of' is not Latin, second because ‘mortalitas' means 'mortality' , ‘ not ‘death' which is ‘Mors' in Latin, and moreover it is in the nominative, while it should be in the genitive ( MORTIS).


Answer
Hi,

Both “Mortis angelus” and “Angelus mortis” are correct.

In fact  word order  can be variable in Latin and it is not necessary to adhere to a strictly defined order.

This happens because  word order in Latin differs from languages like English, as Latin declension by cases gets everyone (i.e. a reader or listener) to  discern the case of a word.

Have a nice day.
Maria