Tuesday, May 12, 2009

JUNGITE aut PERITE!

i would like to take this opportunity to welcome the philadelphia union into the philadelphia sports family. the union is the name of the philly MLS franchise, and i think the team's owners did a fantastic job of picking the correct colors, look, and symbolic gestures to honor the city, the sport, and our history. see the below image for an explanation of the genesis of the team's name, colors, and crest.



even though the MLS sucks, i am still excited to have the union. soccer is a great sport to watch as anyone who has seen good soccer can attest (i saw a match in italy between as roma and lazio...that was a trip!). the mls still has a ways to go before it reaches the level of play that exists in europe, but i hope that the sport's continued growth in the US means that more talent will be playing on this side of the atlantic.

the only remaining question is why did it take so long for the MLS to add a philadelphia franchise? is the 4th largest television market in the country not good enough for the MLS? i guess they needed TWO franchises in LA before they put one in philly (on one hand, LA has a HUGE hispanic population...on the other hand LA sucks as a sports town)? and kansas city? i imagine they have a large hispanic population too, but there are more people that live in center city than probably live in the entire state of kansas! but i don't want to bash the MLS. i hope the league succeeds. now its time for the renowned philadelphia fanbase to show soccer hooligans how its done!

JUNGITE aut PERITE!

4 comments:

lee oh thee i saw he ran said...

There is no "j" in latin.

Consequently, "Jungite" aut Perite is wrong.

see my blog at http://pedrofeliz3b.wordpress.com/ for a full explanation, my post at
AVARITIA BONA EST – THE NEW PHILADELPHIA SOCCER FRANCHISE TRIES TO SPEAK LATIN—AND GETS IT WRONG, OF COURSE….
May 15, 2009 by pedrofeliz3b

As Henry Beard, author of “Latin for Even More Occasions” (Villard Books, NY, 1991), states at p. 111 of his very humorous book,

“CONSONANTS….”

“J, W AND Y don’t exist in Latin.”

Beard, Id. at p. 111.

There is no letter “J” in the Latin language.

The right word would be "Iungite" which is the plural imperative form of the verb "iungo," I join (see 201 Latin Verbs, 1964), which again, has no J in it.

From "iungo" we get "conjunction" and "injunction," but "j" is only in the english alphabet--it's a modern invention--it doesn't exist in latin grammar, in the latin alphabet or anywhere in latin dictionaries or books.

Consequently, the phrase "Jungite aut Perite!" is completely wrong from a scholarly standpoint.

A factcheck with a high school latin teacher would have quickly fixed this. It's pretty obvious no one with the Sons of Ben actually knows or ever took any Latin.

--Dr. Arthur Kyriazis, MSc.E.

Michael Shirk said...

I was just searching for the "Unite or Die" flag of Ben Franklin and stumbled here. I felt compelled to respond to Caesar:
Latin is a language. One that still exists. Modern typographic conventions (Since the 16th c. or so) are neither here nor there. I have *many* books in Latin that use J - and also, I might add, lowercase and punctuation!

Yes, there's no "j-as-in-buDGE" *sound* in Latin, but J-as-a-positional-variant-of-I, as a letter? Certainly.

JKE said...

Art,

Just came across your post. If he were still with us, Joe TuPele" Tatta would tell you to lighten up, so lighten up. Let's support the team and refrain from finding fault until they start losing. --JKE

Unknown said...

Consequently, nobody in the soccer fan world give two flying craps about the proper scholarly spelling of anything. Honestly, you are preaching the proper spelling and use of a language that is barely used for anything other than catch phrases and slogans to a bunch of people that don't even care about the proper spelling and uses of the words in the english language. Latin might as well be a dead language like sandscrit.

So Iulius, with all that being said, let me be the first to say that nobody cares about your boring word origins blog, nobody cares that Jungite is technically wrong, and nobody cares about your scholarly standpoint or your opinion of philadelphia sports fans. In a country where words are misused and misspelled every single day in almost all forms of media, your proper Latin means absolutely nothing. Regardless of whether we use the proper form or not, if someone says or prints "Jungite Aut Perite" everyone knows what they mean. The whole point was to come up with a good slogan that sounded cool, not try to win a nobel peace prize for outstanding scholarly use of the almost dead Latin language.