What's all this fuss about?

Latin lyrics in Heavy Metal music are a common phenomenon. The darker the music, the more evil the band wanna be. What's better than using an old, mysterious, hardly understandable, cryptic, medieval and therefore almost satanic language? Unfortunately bands seldom know how to use this language properly. So, instead of evoking the demons of the realm of evil, they just evoke a hop-frog. Clatu verata nicto! - The most of you know what happened after this wrongly spoken spell.

Normally, two questions are the result of the fact that you've just read a latin phrase:
- What does it mean? (almost everybody)
- Is it correct? (just a few latin aficionados)

This page doesn't want to make fun of mistakes in latin lyrics. I wanna answer the first question to everybody who is interested. The second question is just for myself or for the two or three weird guys out there or for bands which are thinking about using a latin phrase as well. You can contact me if you want.

Donnerstag, 8. März 2018

Arch Enemy - Tempore nihil sanat

Arch Enemy - War Eternal (2014)

The first song of this record actually is just an instrumental, but at the end a choir sings some Latin phrases:

De fumo in flammam - out of the smoke into the flame 
Tempore nihil sanat - literally: nothing heals by time or: time heals nothing 
Noli ignoscere - don't forgive! 
Noli oblivisci - don't forget! 
Odire humanum est - to hate is human.

The infinitive "odire" is an old, archaic form, later the form "odisse" was the normal one.

3 Kommentare:

MyFriendFate hat gesagt…

Brilliant idea for a blog! And, your explanations are very enlightening

cor inquietum hat gesagt…

Unfortunately, "tempore nihil sanat" is incorrect. "tempore" is the ablative of "tempus". However, "tempus" is supposed to be the subject of the sentence and should be in the nominative. "Tempus nihil sanat" would be correct. I wish metal bands actually asked someone who knows Latin before they release such stuff.

Unknown hat gesagt…

Isn't it the PIE instrumental that became ablative in Latin? I don't think it is the subject but expresses through or by what means nothing heals.(native speaker of a Romance language here and I've studied Latin for 2 years)