A colleague at work did me a great favour as I prepare for the coming semester. I wanted to thank her in a novel and distinctive way.
Given the herculean and painful nature of teaching large classes (as I do), the phrase that came to mind was "Morituri te salutant." But I knew that wasn't right, because I don't actually expect to die teaching, and I'm singular not plural.
I wanted "He who is about to teach salutes you!" But it's been nearly 40 years since I studied Latin.
Cue the Internet.
I needed to know the tense/conjugation/declension/whatever of morituri. I knew it would be some weird-ass participle, but not surprisingly there are no online tables of "weird-ass participles". It took only a couple of Google searches to come across this page, which gives morituri as the plural masculine nominative of the future active participle.
Fine. Whatever. Fortunately, I could parse enough of that to know I needed the singular masculine nominative of the future active participle
I quickly confirmed that "docere" was the infinitive of "teach" with Google Translate.
Then I asked Google for the singular masculine nominative of the future active participle of "docere".
The very first hit was this page, which explains every conceivable way to use "docere."
Thus, "docturus".
Finally - and thanks to the tight connection between Latin and Italian, the former of which I know reasonably well - I knew that if "te salutant" is the plural, then "te saluto" is the singular.
Total elapsed time - around 20 minutes, including writing a quick email using the phrase to my colleague.
Now, when I think of what I'd've had to do - say, back when I was in Grade 13 and actually still studying Latin - to work this out. Well, it would have involved a lot of work with my Latin teacher (who quite frankly didn't know much Latin), or at least an hour at the Toronto Reference Library (plus at least 3 hours round trip commute to get to it).
So, yeah - Internet for the win.
Caveat: I'm still not 100% sure I've got it right. But I'm confident enough to write about it here. And that's good enough for me.
EDIT: 29 July. Thanks to comments on Google+, I now understand that while both "te saluto" and "te salutat" are correct, there are subtle (to me at least) differences in translation. "Docturus te saluto" means "I who am about to teach salute you" while "Docturus te salutat" means "He who is about to teach salutes you". Because I want to keep the symmetry with the original, I've updated the title of this post to reflect "te salutat".
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