My excellent correspondent Michael V. (gratias ago!) has directed me to the red-light room at the back of Zdravko Batzarov's Orbis Latinus site, namely Forbidden Latin Language. If you're planning to read the seamier Latin authors, or if you've simply always had a yen to know how to say 'to force someone to perform receptive male oral sex' in the language of Cicero, pay it a visit. Just pull your collar up and your hat down, and tell Gaius I sent you. (But don't trust it implicitly; the word "vomerm" should read vomer, and there may be other errors.)
Posted by languagehat at October 31, 2003 09:18 PMI have two books in which the smuttier stories are translated into Latin rather than English. One is von Gullicks well-known book on sex in ancient China, and the other is "Laughable Stories", Bishop John Gregory Abu Faraj Bar Hebraeus's book of stories and jokes (ca. 1300) translated from the Syriac by Budge. But alas, I can't read Latin.
Posted by: Zizka at October 31, 2003 11:26 PMYeah, a couple errors, mainly of the careless variety. Also, I don't think a distinction can really be drawn between cinędus and pathicus, except perhaps register. Overall a good list- I had been worrying you meant http://insultmonger.com/swearing/latin.htm (which oddly seems to be redirecting to amazon.com at the moment, but you can still get it on cash). That site is atrocious, though I note they've fixed it slightly (e.g. cupis homines, though still wrong, used to say cupis homo which is even worse)
Posted by: Justin at October 31, 2003 11:32 PMI know this is a off topic, but I hava a question, in Chinese "xuan ran" is a word meaning exaggerate or embellish a story, but recent year along with growth of computer graphic industry in China, this word has taken on a new sense meaning rendering or renderer, my question is what this phenomenon called in linguistics? thank you.
Posted by: dd at November 1, 2003 05:26 AMI guess "semantic change" covers it, unless you mean some more specific aspect.
Posted by: language hat at November 1, 2003 09:31 AMAnd of course 'scrortum' should be 'scrotum'--unintentional assimilation to 'scortum' just above...
Posted by: Mischa at November 2, 2003 10:23 AMI have some interest in glossaries and dictionaries of obscenities in general. Can anyone direct me to a bibliography of such works?
Posted by: Zackary Sholem Berger at November 2, 2003 05:55 PMThe page in question has since moved.
Zizka's first comment reminded me of a request for translation of a Latin passage that appeared on a private mailing-list in April 1998; it was a footnote in an otherwise English passage about marriage customs, from Bertram Thomas's Arabia Felix.
Posted by: Anton Sherwood at April 14, 2006 01:41 AM