Lingua mortua...

[oloriel]

You know your brain is a silly place when...

in the light of the papal election, somebody translates "You can has cheezburger" into Latin and makes it Potes habere bubula cum caseus and your first reaction is "But wait, bubula should be in the accusative, so, bubulam, and cum requires the ablative case, so it should be caseoAnd your second

Comments

[hhimring]

I was wondering about that, too, actually!
And another thing: I've never quite figured out what "You can haz cheeseburger" means--but I guess we can rely on the semantic borrowing into Latin working even if nobody else should happen quite to know either?

[oloriel]

I'm not the only one! \o/

"You can haz cheeseburger" is based on the LOLcat gif trend - funny pictures of cats with more or less funny captions in more or less mangled English? I assume the first (or one of the first) had something to do with a cat and a cheeseburger. Or something.

Anyway, even if you wanted to copy the bad grammar, something like Potes habet would make more sense than leaving all nouns in the nominative case (which would confuse the heck out of native speakers of Latin, who wouldn't know which of these things is supposed to be the subject, although they'd probably settle for bubula, considering that caseus would have a separate vocative form -- so it would probably parse as "You can have, oh beef patty, ... I'm lost."

[elenbarathi]

LOL, what native speakers of Latin?

I agree, 'Potes habet' would be better. Not sure about 'bubulam con caseo', though - srsly, didn't the Romans have some sort of cheezburger-equivalent recipe of their own? Surely the Games must have created an enormous market for cheap fast food. Of course, buying a cheezburger at the Games, one might not want to enquire whether it was 'bubulam' or 'equinam', because the answer might be "Neither."

"Extra garum, please."

[oloriel]

All those dead Romans :P Look, when I translate into (or from) any language, I always work on the hypothesis that it's a living language with native speakers and linguistic trends and idioms. What's fair for Quenya is surely fair for Latin.

I agree, though, a more concise and idiomatic term would of course be preferable. Then again, in the written versions that have come down to us, Roman recipes often have rather unwieldy names as well? Isicia omentata means burgers made of minced meat (...whatever meat), so that might be better than bubula, but it's not exactly quick to pronounce, either.
"I'll take the IsOm with bread and cheese. And extra garum!" ;)

[elenbarathi]

"I can haz cheezburger!" is the expression of an emotional state similar to that of a hungry kitten who has successfully stalked, pounced upon and knocked to the floor a Wendy's Triple three times his own weight.

Cheezburger!!

[hhimring]

Ah! Thank you very much for the explanation!