What's all this fuss about?

Latin lyrics in Heavy Metal music are a common phenomenon. The darker the music, the more evil the band wanna be. What's better than using an old, mysterious, hardly understandable, cryptic, medieval and therefore almost satanic language? Unfortunately bands seldom know how to use this language properly. So, instead of evoking the demons of the realm of evil, they just evoke a hop-frog. Clatu verata nicto! - The most of you know what happened after this wrongly spoken spell.

Normally, two questions are the result of the fact that you've just read a latin phrase:
- What does it mean? (almost everybody)
- Is it correct? (just a few latin aficionados)

This page doesn't want to make fun of mistakes in latin lyrics. I wanna answer the first question to everybody who is interested. The second question is just for myself or for the two or three weird guys out there or for bands which are thinking about using a latin phrase as well. You can contact me if you want.

Mittwoch, 2. September 2015

Ghost - Infestissumam

Ghost - Infestissumam (2013)

"Infestissumam" is the superlative form of "infestus - hostile, threatening, dangerous". It's accusative case feminine: whom? - "the most hostile one". Because of the "u" instead of "i" it sounds like archaic Latin - like the English pronouns "thou" and "thee".

The lyrics are written in Latin and Italian, although the grammar isn't always correct:

Il padre - The father
Il filio - The son
Et lo spiritus malum - and the bad spirit
Omnis caelestis - every celestial one
Delenda est - must be destroyed

Anti Cristus - Antichrist
Il filio de Sathanas - Satan's son
Anti Cristus - Antichrist
Il filio de Sathanas - Satan's son
Infestissumam - the most hostile one (again, this is feminine!)

The second song is called: Per aspera ad inferi. This means "Through hardships into the hell." The grammatically correct phrase would be: per aspera ad inferos.

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