This Latin Is Gibberish

by Hoovaloov, Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 00:29 (4295 days ago) @ ncsuDuncan
edited by Hoovaloov, Tuesday, February 19, 2013, 00:32

I spotted the Latin as well. Having taken it for two years long ago, I still kind of remember the basics of declension and conjugation. So I took a crack at it one word at a time with an online dictionary to give me the root meaning of each word.

Quickly, I discovered that the grammar is all wrong. In a Latin sentence, nouns and verbs are connected using male, female, or neutral endings. So a verb will take on the gender of the noun in order to let the reader know which noun is using the verb. The first line of the ViDoc, "NULLAM ENIM LEO," literally translates to "Truly, the lion no one" or "Indeed, not any lion." The problem is that LEO has a male ending, and NULLAM has a female ending. So that doesn't work at all.

Undeterred, I kept going to the next line, but it's even worse, grammatically speaking. "EGESTAS IS, MASSA" literally translates to "Poverty it, lump" or "Need it, burden." But again, it doesn't work because EGESTAS, ID, and MASSA are all nouns in the Nominative case, which means they are all the subjects of the sentence. This is like saying, "Dog boat, rock." It just doesn't mean anything.

But it all clicked on the third line, "SED ELEIFEND." SED means "but", however, none of the online Latin dictionaries could give me a meaning for ELEIFEND or even what I guessed was the root, ELEIF. The only search results containing ELEIFEND all pointed to the famous "LOREM IPSUM" text used as a placeholder when designing document and website layouts.

So I searched the LOREM IPSUM text for other phrases from the ViDoc text. Sure enough, everything in the ViDoc text has been lifted straight from the third and fourth "sentences" of LOREM IPSUM.

Compare the ViDoc text...

NULLAM ENIM LEO,
EGESTAS ID, MASSA
SED ELEIFEND
NONUMMY DIAMM
ENIM LEO, EGESTAS ID, NONUM CONDIMENTUM
AT, LAOREET MATTIS, MASSA SED ENIM LEO,
ID NONUM CONDIMENTUM AT
DIAM
M ENIM LEO, EGESTAS ID, NONUM
CONDIMENTUM AT, LAOREET
MATTIS, MASSA SED
ENIM LEO, EGESTAS ID,
NONUM CONDIMENTUM AT
MASSA SED ELEIFEND NONUMMY DIAM M ENIM LEO, E

...to this segment of LOREM IPSUM:

NULLAM ENIM LEO, EGESTAS ID, CONDIMENTUM AT, LAOREET MATTIS,
MASSA. SED ELEIFEND NONUMMY DIAM.

As you can see, whoever made the ViDoc opening just copied and pasted pieces from LOREM IPSUM, probably assuming it would be too small to read or people would quickly give up once they saw it was in Latin. :)