"Romani ite domum" (English: Romans go home) is the corrected Latin phrase for the graffito "Romanes eunt domus" from a scene in the film Monty Python's Life of Brian .
"Romani ite domum" (English: Romans go home) is the corrected Latin phrase for the graffito "Romanes eunt domus" from a scene in the film Monty Python's Life of Brian .
The scene features John Cleese as a centurion and Graham Chapman as Brian, at that stage a would-be member of the revolutionary group the "People's Front of Judea". To prove himself worthy to be a member of the group, Brian has to daub the anti-Roman slogan "Romans go home" on the walls of Governor Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem, under cover of darkness, written in Latin for the Romans to read.
He completes the phrase Romanes eunt domus when he is caught by a centurion. Brian is terrified and clearly expects to be killed on the spot. Instead, the centurion corrects Brian's grammatical mistakes in the manner of a traditional Latin teacher, as he has written "People called 'Romanes' they go the house". [1] He forces Brian to use the proper imperative verb form and accusative case and write the correct phrase, Romani ite domum, one hundred times, threatening to "cut [his] balls off" if he has not done so by sunrise. Brian does so, covering nearly every surface of the plaza with the graffiti, while supervised by two guards. When he finishes the task the following morning, one soldier says "don't do it again" and leaves with his comrade. Just as they leave, three other soldiers come round the corner and see the graffiti. Brian realises his position and races off, chased by the soldiers. In subsequent scenes, various Roman soldiers can be seen erasing the seditious graffiti.
The exchange on the case of domus concludes:
Centurion: 'Domus'? Nominative? 'Go home'? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
Brian: Dative, sir!
[Centurion draws his sword and holds it to Brian's throat]
Brian:Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! Oh, the... accusative! Accusative! 'Domum', sir! 'Ad domum'!
Centurion:Except that 'domus' takes the...?
Brian:The locative, sir!
Centurion:Which is...?!
Brian: 'Domum'.
[1]
As a number of works on Latin note, the centurion was mistaken in accepting Brian's answer of the locative case, although the result was correct. The locative case indicates presence at or in a particular place, such as a city, town, or small island. [2] The locative of domus, meaning a house or home, would be domi. [3] But motion toward a place or thing was indicated using the accusative of motion towards, domum being the allative construction correctly used in the final formulation of the graffito. This confusion over the use of the locative case is an example of how even those well-educated in Latin occasionally err regarding grammatical details. [2]
The sketch draws on Cleese's time as a teacher, between school and university. During this time he taught Latin and other subjects at a preparatory school, St. Peter's in Weston-super-Mare, [4] mostly to children around ten years old. He recounts a time where he personally wrote out a word he had as a teacher misspelled, onto his blackboard a set number of times to demonstrate even-handedness, as an inspiration for the sketch. [5]
He has also expressed the view that the sketch must seem incomprehensible today, as its references to learning Latin grammar are no longer a common or normal experience, as they were for grammar school children of his generation. [6]
From the perspective of realism, the scene has been noted as accurately reflecting the ancientness of the practice of writing graffiti on walls as a form of political protest. [7] [8]
As an example of humour derived from the use of language, the scene is discussed in Cognitive Linguistics and Humor Research as an instance where the expected actions of the characters—the Romans detecting a vandal in the act and immediately arresting or punishing him—are replaced by a satirical representation of classroom discourse. The centurion is concerned not with Brian's act of vandalism, but rather with his inept Latin grammar. He proceeds to walk Brian through the process of correcting his mistakes by making him analyse each word in the sentence, thereby determining the proper grammatical form. Once Brian has arrived at the correct answer, the centurion imposes a grammar-school punishment—writing lines—instead of a period-appropriate sanction for vandals or rebels. Rather than punishing Brian for writing the graffito, the centurion instructs him to repeat the act one hundred times using good grammar. The centurion then subverts the humorous substitution of a schoolmaster-pupil relationship for that of soldier and rebel by threatening Brian with castration should he fail to complete his punishment within a reasonable amount of time. [9]
The film's satirical use of classroom discourse as a technical exercise to distract from the realities of Roman imperialism has also been compared with the contemporary political phenomenon of diverting attention from serious social issues by focusing attention on details, such as argument over the use of gender-neutral pronouns as a means of distracting attention from discriminatory practices, harassment, and legal disabilities affecting transgender persons. [10]
In grammar, the accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb.
In grammar, the ablative case is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. The word "ablative" derives from the Latin ablatus, the (suppletive) perfect, passive participle of auferre "to carry away".
In grammar, the dative case is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this example, the dative marks what would be considered the indirect object of a verb in English.
In linguistics, declension is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners to indicate number, case, gender, and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.
A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I/they represent the perceiver and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.
Latin declension is the set of patterns according to which Latin words are declined—that is, have their endings altered to show grammatical case, number and gender. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined, and a given pattern is called a declension. There are five declensions, which are numbered and grouped by ending and grammatical gender. Each noun follows one of the five declensions, but some irregular nouns have exceptions.
In grammar, the nominative case, subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or a predicative nominal or adjective, as opposed to its object, or other verb arguments. Generally, the noun "that is doing something" is in the nominative, and the nominative is often the form listed in dictionaries.
In grammar, the locative case is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases, together with the lative and separative case.
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. The inflections are often changes in the ending of a word, but can be more complicated, especially with verbs.
Case roles, according to the work by Charles J. Fillmore (1967), are the semantic roles of noun phrases (NP) in relation to the syntactic structures that contain these noun phrases. The term case role is most widely used for purely semantic relations, including theta roles and thematic roles, that can be independent of the morpho-syntax. The concept of case roles is related to the larger notion of Case, which is defined as a system of marking dependent nouns for the type of semantic or syntactic relationship they bear to their heads. Case traditionally refers to inflectional marking.
In grammar, an oblique or objective case is a nominal case other than the nominative case and, sometimes, the vocative.
Romani may refer to:
Old Latin, also known as Early, Archaic or Priscan Latin, was the Latin language in the period roughly before 75 BC, i.e. before the age of Classical Latin. A member of the Italic languages, it descends from a common Proto-Italic language; Latino-Faliscan is likely a separate branch from Osco-Umbrian. All these languages may be relatively closely related to Venetic and possibly further to Celtic; compare the Italo-Celtic hypothesis.
In grammar, the prepositional case and the postpositional case - generalised as adpositional cases - are grammatical cases that respectively mark the object of a preposition and a postposition. This term can be used in languages where nouns have a declensional form that appears exclusively in combination with certain prepositions.
In grammar and theoretical linguistics, government or rection refers to the relationship between a word and its dependents. One can discern between at least three concepts of government: the traditional notion of case government, the highly specialized definition of government in some generative models of syntax, and a much broader notion in dependency grammars.
In Ancient Greek grammar, the genitive absolute is a grammatical construction consisting of a participle and often a noun both in the genitive case, which is very similar to the ablative absolute in Latin. A genitive absolute construction serves as a dependent clause, usually at the beginning of a sentence, in which the genitive noun is the subject of the dependent clause and the participle takes on the role of predicate.
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In linguistics, case government is government of the grammatical case of a noun, wherein a verb or adposition is said to 'govern' the grammatical case of its noun phrase complement, e.g. in German the preposition für 'for' governs the accusative case: für mich 'for me-accusative'. Case government may modify the meaning of the verb substantially, even to meanings that are unrelated.
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Conjugate the verb to go. That is something that was hilarious to an earlier generation. And I don't think it means anything at all now. I made a reference on Joe Mars' show to Latin the other day. And it was though the audience went, what's that, you know?