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I am currently in the process of writing a review and I stumbled over these two Latin phrases in the lyrics that make scratch my head a bit.

Lucis Mortiat (death to the light)
Reginae Gloriae (glory to the queen)

My Latin is a bit rusty, because quite some time has passed since I had this in school, nevertheless the word Mortiat makes me scratch my head. The base of the word appears to be mors, but aside from this I am left a bit in the dark. I would expect something like morte ad regem, like in the case of a king; to name some example. Something that would have an imperative in it.

The second one is also slightly off. It is rather glory of the queen than glory to the queen.

Maybe someone can help me with this.

Joonas Ilmavirta
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ToReplyIsActuallyFree
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2 Answers2

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There is not much to clarify in the first line, mortiat is not proper Latin. One might imagine a word like mortire, but the sentence would still not parse. Proper if perhaps not idiomatic Latin would be: lux moriatur (literally: “may the light die”). Other ways to say “death to X” were discussed in this question.

As for the second sentence, reginae does indeed mean “to the queen” – it is the dative. But it should be gloria, not gloriae. The plural is not forbidden, but it does not mean “glory,” but rather “glorious deeds.” Other than that, it is certainly idiomatic Latin; compare the famous Gloria in excelsis Deo (“Glory to God in the highest”), where Deo is also in the dative.

Sebastian Koppehel
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  • I was not entirely sure about the second phrase; as I says, it has been a while. There was something that bothered me about, but I could not pinpoint it. Well earned accepted answer. – ToReplyIsActuallyFree Mar 14 '21 at 21:03
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To add on to Sebastian's answer, ad is primarily for motion, and should not be confused with an indirect object. It's the 'to' as in 'to/for' (I gave him the ball, I gave the ball to him), and not 'to/toward. You can't say "I gave the ball toward him," which is what you'd be saying with the ad + the accusative. The indirect object (reginae, regi) is what you want here.

Also, I noticed he was going for parallelism, so mortiat is probably just some jumbled transcription. The lyricist was probably going for something like:

Luci mors
Reginae gloria

This is a more literal translation of the English in parentheses. Luci is in the dative like reginae, and mors and gloria are both nominative singular.

cmw
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  • I had Latin for a considerable amount of years and I know ad and its function. Stuff like that is obvious, while other ones are a bit blurred. – ToReplyIsActuallyFree Mar 14 '21 at 21:04
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    @ToReplyIsActuallyFree Ah, your "would expect ad +" was ambiguous then. I thought you meant that you thought it should have been ad + acc. – cmw Mar 14 '21 at 21:45