Playing fast, loose with Latin lingo

The first problem I find with her article is the title. “Est optimum ad loquetur et plane” is a horrendous train-wreck of nonsensical Latin grammar. However, it looks suspiciously like the Google Translate results for “It is best to speak clearly,” but as any student of any foreign language can tell you, Google Translate gets a lot of things wrong. The actual Latin for “It is best to speak clearly” would be “optimum est loqui clare.”

The second contention I wish to raise regards Ms. Burke’s attempt to dive into the technicalities of syntax and grammar. She is correct in pointing out that “fulgeat” is a third person present active subjunctive verb, but she apparently does not know that it is a perfectly legitimate translation to render it “let it shine” — in the hortatory subjunctive, in case she is interested in learning more. Furthermore, Latin word order rarely ever matches English word order, and it is ludicrous to say that the actual accurate translation would be “Star Fourteenth Should Shine” - even a first-year Latin student could tell you that. (Again, “Star Fourteenth Should Shine” looks like a Google Translate copy-paste.) Now, the average non-Latin-learner would (of course) easily be forgiven for not knowing these things, but if Ms. Burke is willing to try and play the “grammar stickler” game, she should at least not be wrong about it. The grammar of the proposed motto is correct. It is not “questionable.” The only irregularity about it is that it is not common form to say “quarta decima” — a more common and smoother use of the Latin would be “quartusdecima” or “quartadecima,” with no space in between.

A third issue here is that Ms. Burke’s use of the parenthetical “got that?” seems to indicate that she’s saying the very idea of a third person present active subjunctive makes Latin just too complicated for viable use. This is a foolish objection to make, since the third person present active subjunctive exists in English, and in fact she uses it in her article: “that he be permitted to set up a mint to produce coins.” The fact that something has a complicated technical term to describe it does not make the thing itself impossible to understand — dihydrogen monoxide, after all, is just water.

The history of Vermont and its coin pressing is not something of which I have any knowledge, and Ms. Burke’s facts and objections in that regard may very well be true and valid, respectively. I simply wish to make it clear that Ms. Burke is not enough of an authority on Latin to have that portion of her article carry any weight. I hope that, in the future, she will choose to check her facts more carefully and consult an expert in the relevant field before writing her articles.

Thank you for your time.

David Casper

College Station, Texas

Tamara Burke replies:

Mr. Casper is absolutely correct: I am not an expert on Latin. In fact, any Latin I have has been picked up through my unfortunate habit of perusing 18th-century texts. Latin scholars, surprisingly enough, are not thick on the ground here in Vermont. We cannot turn casually on our bar stool, craft beer in hand, to the person sitting next to us and ask “by the way, how do you say ‘stella quarta decima fulgeat,’ and what the heck does it mean?” Which was the point of the piece. We are spending valuable time and legislative effort to promote a motto which is an incorrect interpretation of an artifact and period of Vermont’s early history, written in a language almost nobody reads or can pronounce correctly, so we can sound more erudite than we actually are. And how do we know this? Because it takes a Latin teacher from the great state of Texas to point out the flaws in the piece.