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postoffice.utas.edu.au>I received quite a few replies to my query on the source of the bilingual line "I Uitelli, dei romani sono belli / I vitelli dei Romani sono belli". My vague impression that I got it out of Tullio de Mauro's critical edition to Saussure's Cours de linguistique generale was confirmed: see p. XI in the French and p. XV in the Italian version. Below are some of the more substantial replies. I must however reconstruct Renato Piva's reply, which I deleted inadvertently. Piva points out the obvious - that this is a constructed example, and that neither of the translations I provided makes really sense. He notes quite interestingly that SONUS BELLI appears in Propertius 4,10,25, and also that the genitives DEI ROMANI BELLI could be combined in various ways. My thanks go to all of the following: Guy Aston Christopher Bader Leo Connolly Jean-Marc Dewaele Barbara Di Eugenio Anna Morpurgo Davies Renato Piva Vieri Samek-Lodovici David Wigtil I am Italian and I learned at school the joke about I VITELLI DEI ROMANI SONO BELLI. I do not know where it comes from but note that the Latin is meant to translate: Go, o Vitellius, at the war sound of the Roman God. It is also interesting that this is obviously an example of written ambiguity; it would not work in speech with quantity etc. intervening. If you could invent this one, you're a lot better than I am. But even so, the Latin is, shall we say, extraordinary. How would a bare ablative _sono_ fit in the Latin sentence? My dictionary says there are expressions such as _ire pedibus_ 'go on foot', but this seems too different. And then there's the unusual position of the apparent appositive _dei romani_ before the _belli_ to which it is apposed. And the very unLatin name _uitellius_. And vaguely I remember my first-year Latin teacher saying that the imperative _i_ wasn't used because it was too short (vaguely remember, I'm afraid; no more than that). Still, if we overlook these quibbles, I get a reading: 'Go with (on) the sound of War, that Roman god.' 'Roman god of war' sounds wrong, though I can't put my finger on why; I rather expect we should have an adjectival form of 'war' in the latter meaning. i vitelli dei romani sono belli, according to my colleagues here (the University of Bologna Interpreters' school) is a hoary grammar school joke in Italy which goes back at least 50 years. (It also contains a spelling mistake in the Latin - so presumably it's a translating into Latin from Italian joke. By the merest coincidence, I found a reference yesterday to _i_ as the imperative of _ire_. The author -- it may have been Sapir; I don't remember at the momemt -- seemed to regard it as a normal form. Well, I guess I'd trust Sapir over dim memories of my first-year Latin teacher, even though Sapir was hardly a Latinist. Still, the form hasn't survived in Romance. Make of it what you will. (The "future imperative" _ito_, which I think my teacher may have recommended, didn't survive either.)Mail to author|Respond to list|Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue