(My Latin is very rusty. Take all of what follows cum grano salis.)
Why tenet rather than habet? (I expect I’m revealing extreme ignorance here.)
“Nothing” isn’t quite the same as “nothingness”. Perhaps inanitas?
Literary Latin tends to be rather terse. I wonder about removing the verbs, producing something like: “salvator sine salvatore. propugnator sine dominum, sine matre, sine patre, supra solum inanitas.” but that may be too far from Eliezer’s English version.
[EDIT: I also wonder about “soter” rather than “salvator”. It’s not so common a word in Latin—it’s simply a transliteration from Greek—but I think it sounds better :-). On the other hand, I don’t know what they’d have used for its ablative.]
[EDIT: Wouldn’t “salvator salvatorem non tenet” be better than “salvator non salvatorem tenet”?]
My feeling with those words is that habet mostly refers to actual objects, in a mundane sense (e.g. “I have a fork”), while tenet is more of an abstract “have” (e.g. “I have a belief”).
My (admittedly unverified) guess, would be something like:
Salvator non salvatorem tenet. Propugnator non Dominum tenet, nec matrem patremneque, solum nil superum.
(My Latin is very rusty. Take all of what follows cum grano salis.)
Why tenet rather than habet? (I expect I’m revealing extreme ignorance here.)
“Nothing” isn’t quite the same as “nothingness”. Perhaps inanitas?
Literary Latin tends to be rather terse. I wonder about removing the verbs, producing something like: “salvator sine salvatore. propugnator sine dominum, sine matre, sine patre, supra solum inanitas.” but that may be too far from Eliezer’s English version.
[EDIT: I also wonder about “soter” rather than “salvator”. It’s not so common a word in Latin—it’s simply a transliteration from Greek—but I think it sounds better :-). On the other hand, I don’t know what they’d have used for its ablative.]
[EDIT: Wouldn’t “salvator salvatorem non tenet” be better than “salvator non salvatorem tenet”?]
My feeling with those words is that habet mostly refers to actual objects, in a mundane sense (e.g. “I have a fork”), while tenet is more of an abstract “have” (e.g. “I have a belief”).
That seems plausible. (I don’t know enough to know whether it’s correct.) I like Jem’s dative construction better than either, I think.
That seems to agree with the English.
And it’s much better than the version I was trying to compose. Nice work!