• Thank you to Carol and Steve Bowman, the forum owners, for our new upgrade!

Latin words in a dream

soulmemory

soulmemory

New Member
Hello everyone :), I need help with translating a possible Latin phrase that came to me in a dream. It was just two words "asper antem". I saw them written, so I remembered them visually, not phonetically. Google Translator tells me that it means "severe blows", but I'm not sure, since there is no such word as "antem", and I clearly saw it, rather than "ante". If anyone out there is fluent in Latin, I would be very grateful for ideas on what it could mean, if it means anything at all.
(Not sure which forum is better to post it in, so feel free to move the topic).
 
Hi soulmemory,
These are my favorite questions. I love decoding language for PL memories. That being said, I don't have a definitive answer for you. So, I looked up the two words separately and came up with different etymologies for asper, but a significant one was that it meant white coin, and refers to a Turkish coin. Don't know if that makes sense to you. Antem...couldn't get anything, either, apart from possibly meaning anthem, but that didn't seem to make sense.
 
Okay. After I posted this, it struck me to look up As per antem...now, I'm not sure if the 'As' got translated as a Latin word, but that being put in google translate, with the separation, gave me As previously. I don't know if you had any other contextual clues, so I'll let you mull the two posts over. :)
 
soulmemory said:
Hello everyone :), I need help with translating a possible Latin phrase that came to me in a dream. It was just two words "asper antem". I saw them written, so I remembered them visually, not phonetically. Google Translator tells me that it means "severe blows", but I'm not sure, since there is no such word as "antem", and I clearly saw it, rather than "ante". If anyone out there is fluent in Latin, I would be very grateful for ideas on what it could mean, if it means anything at all.
(Not sure which forum is better to post it in, so feel free to move the topic).
Click to expand...
The translation given by Google is absolutely wrong. Asper = hard (masculine singular nominative), so the translation canNOT be in plural.
"Antem" is not a latin word, that's all. If it were "autem", could mean "though". The Romans wrote "u" as "v", though (!).
 
Last edited:
BethC said:
Okay. After I posted this, it struck me to look up As per antem...now, I'm not sure if the 'As' got translated as a Latin word, but that being put in google translate, with the separation, gave me As previously. I don't know if you had any other contextual clues, so I'll let you mull the two posts over. :)
Click to expand...

Wow, thank you for this, BethC! This is the only option I hadn’t considered, that the word “asper” could be two words… I tried every other possible combination and writing variant, and it didn’t seem to correspond to the context of my dream. The phrase “as previously” actually makes a lot of sense to me, as it hints at a possible past life connection (that I’m still afraid to even hope for) with the person who wrote these words in my dream.
 
Cyrus said:
The translation given by Google is absolutely wrong. Asper = hard (masculine singular nominative), so the translation canNOT be in plural.
"Antem" is not a latin word, that's all. If it were "autem", could mean "though". The Romans wrote "u" a "v", though (!).
Click to expand...

Thanks, Cyrus! It’s a pity that the whole phrase doesn’t have a real meaning, after all, and is just my imagination, but I suspected as much. Better to know the truth than to cling to false hopes. So the translation "as previously" is also definitely wrong? And if it were written "asper avtem", it would then mean something like "hard, though", right? But that doesn’t seem to make sense, either…
 
soulmemory said:
Thanks, Cyrus! It’s a pity that the whole phrase doesn’t have a real meaning, after all, and is just my imagination, but I suspected as much. Better to know the truth than to cling to false hopes. So the translation "as previously" is also definitely wrong? And if it were written "asper avtem", it would then mean something like "hard, though", right? But that doesn’t seem to make sense, either…
Click to expand...
"As" is not a Latin word, and you cannot treat it as the English "as". "Hard though" might make sense as a PART of a bigger phrase, IMHO.

By-the-by, how do you deduce the phrase was in Latin? It might be in some dialect of Latin (not classical Latin taught nowadays in our universities). The Italian word "vecchio" (= old) doesn't sound very much like the corresponding classical Latin word "vetus". But it turns out that "vecchio" has as it origin not the classical form of "vetus", but the dialectal form of "veclus", which sounds a lot more like the modern Italian "vecchio".
 
Took Latin in high school and college. Remember some but not much. Ante means before. A lot of times you use different endings on words depending on the gender of the word it is used with or even if it is to someone”dative tense”. I would go with “as previously” myself. I strongly feel that the antem is a form of ante.
 
Last edited:
GreyReynard said:
Took Latin in high school and college. Remember some but not much. Ante means before. A lot of times you use different endings on words depending on the gender of the word it is used with or even if it is to someone”dative tense”. I would go with “as previously” myself. I strongly feel that the antem is a form of ante.
Click to expand...
"Ante" is immutable in Latin, because it's a preposition/adverb, which are neither declensed nor conjugated.
 
What if "M" is a shortcut for "Marcus" or means the number 1000?
Still makes no sense, but... something before/in front of Marcus or 1000 (1000 people, the year 1000, what ever)...

Never heard of the single letter R in Latin, but...
"Asper" also could be "A spe R.": From hope, someone whose name starts with R/something starting with the letter R...

What if it is not Latin at all, but a forgotten Medieval Spanish/Italian/French/what ever dialect?
When I read it as one word, "asperantem", it reminds me a lot of the Spanish "esperanza"... hope.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top