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I'm writing a novel and at some point, the hero needs to make a sacrifice: "One must die for one to live." He has to chose between two people: only one will survive, the other one will die. (I'm being specific because Google translation thought I was talking about love.) Could you please help me translate this phrase please?

One must die for one to live.

Thank you!

brianpck
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Rory
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3 Answers3

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One possibility:

necesse est alterum mori ut alter vivat.
It's necessary that one (of the two) die in order that the other live.

A variation:

ut alter vivat necesse est ut alter moriatur.
In order that one (of the two) may live, it's necessary that the other die.

cnread
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    Your first option sounds very natural, compared to the second one, which involves a marked simultaneous combination of two ut-clauses that are grammatically different. – Mitomino Mar 25 '24 at 18:33
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Here's another, more concise option:

Alteri moriendum ut alter vivat.

This uses a different way of expressing "must" than cnread's translations, but means basically the same thing. You could also change the word order to Alteri moriendum ut vivat alter if you like the sound of that better -- Latin has lots of ways of expressing any given idea!

TKR
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  • I agree that a relevant virtue of your option is that it is more concise than necesse est alterum mori ut alter vivat. However, a virtue of the latter is that it is not ambiguous compared to your option: grammatically speaking, alteri can be a dative of agent (intended reading) but could also be a beneficiary dative. Cf. the less classical construction Pugnandum habebam non imperatori tantum sed patri (Sen. Con. 10.2.4), which was probably used by Seneca to avoid the ambiguity of the more classical construction (Mihi) pugnandum erat non imperatori tantum sed patri. – Mitomino Mar 25 '24 at 17:49
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    I do like the chiasm in your second option. – cmw Mar 25 '24 at 20:26
  • @Mitomino Syntactically ambiguous, perhaps, but what would alicui morior actually mean? – TKR Mar 25 '24 at 21:08
  • The ambiguity could arise in cases where mori + dative is used agentively, like pugnare + dative above: 'to die/to fight for someone', e.g. for the emperor. – Mitomino Mar 25 '24 at 21:43
  • @Mitomino But are there such cases of mori + dat.? I'd expect mori pro + abl. instead. I doubt it would occur to any Classical Latin speaker to read alteri as anything other than a dative of agent. – TKR Mar 26 '24 at 16:24
  • @TKR Both patterns (beneficiary dative and pro + ablative) can alternate to express the same content: e.g. cf. qui sciret sibi pro omnibus suis pugnandum (Frontin. strat. 1.11.5) and Pugnandum habebam non imperatori tantum sed patri (Sen. Con. 10.2.4). Is this alternation possible with pugnandum but not with moriendum? Or, to be more precise, is Pugnandum est imperatori ambiguous, whereas Moriendum est imperatori is not? Well, I don't think so (as noted, for me both are ambiguous). Was there variation on this point among native speakers? Well, perhaps, but we'll never know. – Mitomino Mar 26 '24 at 17:36
  • The fact that pugnare but not mori can be easily found with a beneficiary dative is because the former is an agentive unergative verb, whereas the latter is a non-agentive unaccusative verb. However, as noted above, mori can also be used agentively (not only in Latin but also in other languages) and it is only in this non-prototypical usage when this verb can be expected to coappear with a beneficiary dative (hence your correct impression above concerning the rarity of this pattern). So imperatori can be a beneficiary dative in Moriendum est imperatori if mori is used agentively. – Mitomino Mar 26 '24 at 19:20
  • @Mitomino Well, maybe it's not impossible (though I'd like to see attestations), but pragmatically speaking the beneficiary reading seems pretty unlikely -- "(some unspecified person) must die for one so that the other will live"? Lots of theoretical ambiguities are visible only to syntacticians. Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. – TKR Mar 26 '24 at 19:44
  • To avoid this problem with pragmatics, I deliberately changed your example into another one where both readings of the dative (agent and benef.) can sound natural: Moriendum est imperatori. According to you, this example is NOT ambiguous (unlike Pugnandum est imperatori), right? On second thought, perhaps you're right & I'm wrong: the lack of ambiguity of Moriendum est imperatori would be coherent with the ungrammaticality of Moriendum est ab omnibus, discussed in https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/21222/on-the-alleged-passive-meaning-of-so-called-miscalled-passive-periphrastic – Mitomino Mar 26 '24 at 20:49
  • @Mitomino I don't have a clear sense of whether Moriendum est imperatori can have a beneficiary reading; I'd want to do a corpus search for examples of mori + dat. with such a reading. (If there are none, of course that wouldn't be probative, but it would be suggestive.) – TKR Mar 26 '24 at 21:22
  • I like Alteri moriendum ut vivat alter. Beautiful. And while we're being linguistically finicky, I wish people would stop saying "compared to" when they mean "compared with." The first marks a similarity, as in "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," the second a difference. – user14904 Mar 27 '24 at 10:07
  • @user14904 This does not add anything to existing answers, except a prescriptivist claim about an artificial difference between two English structures that are not relevant to the question at all. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 27 '24 at 10:33
  • @user14904 If you're taking about Mitomono's comment, do bear in mind that English isn't everyone's first language, and languages change all the time. For what it's worth, that's how I would use those two. – cmw Mar 27 '24 at 16:07
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In Italian we use the concise latin expression mors tua, vita mea to describe self-defence (both literal or figurative).

In your case you may want to adjust the pronouns - mors alicuius, vita alius or similarly.

moonwave99
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