Tuesday, July 02, 2024

To Be or Not To Be

 Sigh.

I do appreciate the effort.

But.

If you are going to do this thing, please do it correctly.  The internet should make this easy.


εἶναι is the infinite of the Ancient Greek word for "to be".  Somebody just looked up "to be" in some dictionary, saw "εἶναι" and plopped it right in the sentence, with no thought as to conjugation.  I realize that English has fewer ending changes than Greek, but it is not Chinese; English does have conjugations, so this is quite naive and sloppy.

It is especially egregious in that the sentence correctly uses the genitive plural of "the monsters", which is the kind of thing comics always mess up.  How did they get that right and mess up the more obviously infinitive?

The correct form of the verb should be εἰσί; actually, since it is followed by a vowel, it should take a euphonious nu:  εἰσίν.

Not that anyone will read this, let alone take me up on it: I offer my consultation on Latin and Greek to any DC writers who want to use them in their stories.

Hm.

Except Tom King. Futuite istum.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The people called Monsters, they go the house?

- HJF1

Scipio said...

"he" the "hora" hour "ton" of the "teraton" monsters "einai" to be (sic) "edo" here.

Scipio said...

I appreciate that they used "hour" instead of "time" because "time" is how WE would say it, but "hour" is DEFINITELY how the Greeks would say it.