Sunday, July 13, 2008

French/ Latin of the Day

Here's a French verb and noun pair:
Tondre: To clip, to shear, to mow.
Tondeur: Shears.

This comes to French almost directly from the Latin Tondere, which also means to clip, shear, mow, or fleece (as in ripping off).

Ovid: Boni pastoris est tondere pecus, non deglubere.

The direct translation is something like: "It is of a good shepherd to shear a sheep, not flay it." I think a better translation would be: "A good shepherd shears his sheep; he doesn't flay them."

(By the way, this is the first Latin sentence that I've translated in about five years!)

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