I found several quotes in Latin while working on my second-hand translation of Principia Mathematica.

A note on the provenance of the following quotes.

The following are Latin phrases I came across in the introduction to the French version of Principia for which Voltaire¹ gave no French equivalent. This is undoubtedly because one could expect the reader to have a reasonable grasp of Latin and to recognise them. Each is a citation or motto which would be well known in learnèd circles, as we will see below.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a Latinist despite dabbling. What follows are the notes I took as I attempted to translate the phrases.

‘Nullius in verba’

The first Latin phrase we find in @voltintro’s description of the Marquise’s choice to study Newton. He tells us that, after abandoning the crutch of systems (of thought, such as Leibniz’s monads), she chose the Royal Society’s motto — nullius in verba — for her guide (p.vi). It is by taking this motto as direction, Voltaire claims, that she came to appreciate Newton’s work.

The Royal Society describes its motto as ‘an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verfy all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment’² and translates it simply:

take nobody’s word for it

Newton’s Principia claims to explain describe the mathematical principles of the natural world, and to do so by deriving its equations usingthe least presupposition possible. His tools are geometry — itself composed of lines and circles — and experimentation — in which all his principles are first observed and then proven. The Royal Society’s motto seems to fit well with that stated purpose, and we can see why Voltaire would ascribe the same spirit to the Marquise.

Still, the translation does not seem satisfactory given only a rough word-by-word analysis (I have not the skill for better). It seems like there must be a specific context in order to get the given translation.

The motto is itself taken from one of Horace @horace1-1’s Epistles³:

nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri,
quo me cumque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.
— Epistle 1.1

For the intrepid

This is the first of his Epistles, a letter to his patron Mæcenas in which he describes his attitude towards philosophy. Using the excellent @lewisandshort1879 dictionary⁴, we can look at the words in context and try to get an idea for how they are being used. Latin word order is fluid, especially in poetry, so we must look to the declension and conjugation of its words in order to make sense of it.

<ruby class=“ruby88”><em>Nullius</em><rt>adverbial comparative</rt></ruby>

genetive (ie, possessive) neuteur singular comparative rendered as:
not any, none, no.

<ruby class=“ruby88”><em>addictus</em> <rt>noun sg masc nom</rt></ruby>

this is a noun:
a servant or bondsman, an indentured person

<ruby class=“ruby88”><em>iurare</em> <rt>verb pres inf act</rt></ruby>

verb infinitive in the present tense:
to swear, to take an oath

<ruby class=“ruby88”><em>in</em> <rt>prep indecl</rt></ruby>

indeclinable preposition with various contextual translations

<ruby class=“ruby88”><em>verba</em> <rt>noun pl neut nom</rt></ruby>

plural noun in the nom, gen, or voc (subject, possessive, or vocative case)
words

<em>magistri</em> (noun sg masc gen)

genitive singular noun:
of a teacher, master, chief, leader

While much of Latin word order is fluid there are exceptions and tendancies which can help. One such exception is preposition, which must⁵ precede the words they describe. This means the we need to evaluate the word or words immediately following in a slightly different manner than might the above might suggest. We get

nullius addictus iurare

not being a servant to pledge

in verba magistri

a prepositional clause that looks something like:
in the words of a master

This gives the following rendering:

not sworn to the words of any teacher

which makes sense, given the lack of conjugated verb.

We can look at other English translations to check our interpretation.

@francis1846 gives the following gloss in his translation of the Epistles (p.9; emphasis mine):

You ask, perhaps, what sect, what chief I own ;
I’m of all sects, but blindly sworn to none ;
For as the tempest drives I shape my way,
Now active plunge into the world’s wide sea;

Voltaire uses nullius in verba to describe someone (the Marquise) who has decided to take nothing for granted. She had translated other philosophers in the past (like Leibniz) and, if Voltaire’s history can be taken at face value, found their reliance on established systems of thought or proposed mechanics to be problemetic. This is why she was so taken with Newton’s work, to the point of translating the entire Principia, providing a commentary, and doing all the calculations found therein. He relied on nothing more than geometry and experimentation.

That sounds like a brilliant example of the spirit of nullius in verba; but don’t take my word for it, you can read my translation instead in the Projects section of the site.

‘turpè putaverunt…’

The next phrase was a lot less immediately transparent. It came up in the following paragraph which describes the lengths that France would need to go in order to allow Newton’s sublime truths to find footing. Namely, that of letting the generations that had grown reading ‘the errors of Descartes’(-@voltintro, p.viii) and in doing so _ _ _ _ _ _ _.

<ruby class=“ruby88”>Il a fallu <rt>It was necessary</rt></ruby>, <ruby class=“ruby88”>pour éablir en France <rt>in order to establish in France</rt></ruby> <ruby class=“ruby88”>toutes les ſublimes vérités <rt>all the sublime truths</rt></ruby> <ruby class=“ruby88”>que <rt>which</rt></ruby> <ruby class=“ruby88”>nous devons à Newton <rt>we owe to Newton</rt></ruby>, <ruby class=“ruby88”>laiſſer paſſer <rt>to let pass</rt></ruby> <ruby class=“ruby88”>la génération de ceux <rt>the generation of those</rt></ruby> <ruby class=“ruby88”>qui <rt>who</rt></ruby> <ruby class=“ruby88”>ayant vieilli dans <rt>having grown in</rt></ruby> <ruby class=“ruby88”>les erreurs de Deſartes <rt>Descartes’ errors</rt></ruby>, turpè putaverunt parere minoribus, & quæ imberbes didicêre, ſenes perdenda fateri.

So what could they have possibly done as a result of growing old in the errors of teachers who came before?

Let’s first look at where the quote was taken from. Again, this is from Horace’s Epistles -@horace2-1; this time from a letter addressed to Augustus⁶ about poetry. The relevant lines are these (p.404):

vel quia nil rectum, nisi quod placuit sibi, ducunt,
vel quia turpe putant parere minoribus, et quae
imberbes didicere senes perdenda fateri.

@francis1846’s verse translation — and recall that his is not a literal translation — is as follows.

Should they, with awkward modesty, submit
To younger judges in the cause of wit,
Or own, that it were best, provoking truth!
In age t’ unlearn the learning of their youth.

Details

We will not do a word by word analysis of each line here, but we will look at a few different words for clues and the reader is encouraged to use the @lewisandshort1879 dictionary⁴ as well as the Perseus³ tools to do so.