Latin phrase... does this make sense?

Hi all,

I took just enough Latin in college to know that I’m terrible at it, so I was hoping to get some help with a translation…

I started a small film production company, and I wanted to use a latin phrase for our motto. I did a bunch of googling, and finally settled on,

“inde lumen, effusio”

Based on what I’ve read, that should translate as something close to, “from light/the lantern, a swelling of emotion.”

So does that make sense to you? Is the sentence structure correct, and do the words work well together? Thanks so much in advance,

Paul

The idiom is a bit off to my eye, but perhaps you could cite the source of the quote, so I can put it in context. Only then can I be %100 sure if it’s correct or not.

Thanks for the reply… It’s actually one I made up, based on a general idea I was going for… I did searches for all of the words I could think of related to the main concept, and chose the latin that seemed to best fit the specific vibe I wanted.

Work any better, in that context?

i think inde is not appropriate here, and that e/ex is better, or perhaps a/ab - someone wiht greater skill and knowledge will have to comment on this. I suppose the nice thing about a/ab could be that it allows for an ambiguous interpretation as to whether the effusio comes ‘out of’ or is occassioned ‘by’ the lantern/light.

For lantern/light you have a number of options. The best, I think, is luminare, -is. This is neo-latin, but then again, there weren’t many cinemas around in Cicero’s time. If you want a more classical term then either lumen, -is , lampas, -dis or lanterna, -ae could be suitable.

Effusio seems good to me.

So all up:

  1. a/e luminare effusio.
  2. a/e lumine effusio.
  3. a/e lampade effusio.
  4. a/e lanterna effusio.

Personally i prefer the first option for your purposes, and would probably use ‘a’ rather than ‘e’.

I suppose luminare would be suitable for a lamp/light, with implications of the sort of lights used in machinery. The ablative of luminare would presumably be luminari, so e luminari effusio, if I may emend Kasper’s contribution.

However, if I saw the phrase I would assume you were talking about a “flood of light”. I can’t think of a single word that means “swelling of emotion” (some clever person could probably think of one), so you may need to add another word or settle upon leaving it vague.

A perhaps too simple alternative: “E luce, motus”

I imagine this (maybe mistakenly), “a swelling of emotion” = “passion” = "amor" or "affectus" in latin in a positive sense/latiné per positivam notionem, = “ira" or "iracundia” (anger/angry passion), negatively/per negativam notionem. For clarity, one might say “animi motus” but “motus” is good, too, I think, ut dicis, thesaure. Nisi fallor, quod benè pote est.