Football season is over of course, but you can use these for any sport. It’s not like Latin had a real equivalent for “touchdown” anyway.
Sequimini, sequimini, facite ut pilam relinquat!
Pursue them, pursue them, make them relinquish the ball!
Illos repellite, expellite, compellite ad fugiendum!
Repel them, expel them, compel them to retreat!
Utinam vincamus!
Oh, would that we would score!
Volebamus atque volemus pilam trans metas deponi!
We have been wanting and shall continue to want a touchdown!
Those are from Latin For All Occasions, by Henry Beard, a Classics major who went on to co-found National Lampoon. For years people gave me books like that.
Here’s a bonus (under “LATIN AT THE AIRPORT”) that might come in handy as we enter the imperial era:
Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!
Stand aside, plebeians! I am on imperial business!
My friend’s favorite football cheer – that he made up – was
“Do More Stuff Like That!”
Please feel free to translate.
Also going to need a pronunciation guide as I don’t want to sound like a doofus.
Somewhere I have a Latin For Dummies sitting around collecting dust. Very apt as “for dummies” implies I may be too dumb to read it.
Can you comment on the language origin tree? If I learn Latin will Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Romanian be easy as pie?
Latin pronunciation is pretty straightforward. No silent vowels, several basic rules, but not nearly as difficult as French in that regard.
Latin makes other Romance languages much easier, but not exactly easy. Each language has its ogre at the bridge. French has the passe compose and difficult pronunciation, and I’m told the Spanish subjunctive system is thorny. Still, if you can master Latin’s subjunctive system, gerundives (forms that do not exist in English), and the passive periphrastic (don’t ask–it requires a whole page of explanation), I’m sure you can master anyting in any Indo-European language.
It’s also helpful with non-Romance languages. Countless students have told me that Latin helped them “get” English grammar. That’s because some English grammar is based on Latin grammatical concepts that aren’t natural to English. I’ve also had a few students end up in college IB programs where they had to learn German, and they found their Latin backgound helpful. I did as well (I had to pass a German reading test in grad school–I’d had some German as a kid but it was not extensive). Though not a Romance language, German, like Latin, has a beastly case system and sentences that can go on and on. That said, there’s nothing like those ridiculous German compound words. For example, if I were swimming laps later at my local sportverein in Berlin, I could probably choose between the upstairsnonbinaryswimmingpoollockerroom or the downstairsbinarymensswimmingpoollockerroom.
According to AI, the longest compound word in German was “Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, which had 63 letters. It was a law that delegated tasks related to beef labeling supervision. However, the word was removed from the German lexicon in 2013 due to changes in EU regulations.”
The banishment of that word somehow did not cause a Gexit.
As for your friend’s chant, I’d go with facite plura istius, although I sort of feel the late Dr. Watkins’ (my most difficult Latin teacher) bespectacled eyes glowering at me from the Great Beyond. So there could be a better rendition.
I did run it across a colleague, who was fine with it. There could be an idiom that’s closer, but it just sounds like something no one would have said.
Much appreciated.
I have ongoing hostilities with the Spanish reflexive verbs so I may threaten to open up a can of gerundives on them.
Like many of my peers, my knowledge of Latin is limited to Biggus Dickus and Naughtius Maximus. And the genus/species appearing in Road Runner cartoons like Velocitus supersonicus and Carnivorus vulgaris.
The entertainment industrial complex has never let me down, but I can’t help but wonder now if this is correct Latin terminology.
Not really. Road Runner terms are very Latinate but are twisted to make comical sense in English. But they’re more plausible than Biggus Dickus and Naughtius Maximus. Excepting Maximus, those are just English words with Latin endings attached.
But this is very accurate. Anyone who took Latin back in the day will remember this sort of drilling.
I wish I’d thought to use “can of gerundives” as a threat when I taught Latin.