Re: VMs: Latin extract

[Koontz John E <John.Koontz@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 21 May 2005, JH wrote:
> 1 tercerius orior orsus
> 2 tractus orior orsus

Sadly, I'm not much of a Latinist, but, if you can't get better, the
following may help:

tercerius - I don't recognize it.  There's a certain resemblance to
Spanish tercero 'third', but I think the c there is from earlier -ti-,
as in tertius 'third'.

The rest are all citation forms, i.e., first persons of verbs (orior) or
masculine singulars of past passive participles (tractus, orsus).

tractus - drawn out, pulled; something drawn out or pulled (from tracto
'I pull')

This form leads to words for books or studies, "treatments," e.g, English
tract, French traite.

orsus - begun, attempted (from ordior 'I begin, I undertake')

orior - 'I bestir myself' (which has the past participle ortus)

One might argue that this was intended to convey the idea 'I bestir myself
to begin the work', but I don't think that the pieces together constitute
any sort of a grammatical sentence to that effect - wrong word order,
wrong grammatical forms.  It's beyond my knowledge whether they would
constitute an idiomatic collection of forms, i.e., whether ordior is the
right 'begin' for tractus, or whether some adverb or demonstrative might
be desirable accompaniment.

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