I am hoping to translate the following from English to Latin:

"From Your Grace, I shall know no fear."

Latin structure however doesn't use 'shall' apparently.

What would the most accurate translation into Latin look like?

  • 1
    Welcome to the site! I suggest registering your account, so that you can edit your post and get notifications about answers. There are ways to express similar things in Latin. Would you be satisfied with a future tense ("I will know"), or are you looking for some other nuance? Elaborating on the message you want to convey really helps find the best translation. – Joonas Ilmavirta Mar 4 '19 at 19:43
  • Until I read Draconis's answer, I hadn't considered that you were using 'your grace' much as one might address a royal personage as 'Your grace.' I read it as more like 'the grace that you confer.' Perhaps you can clarify your intended meaning? I was taking the whole 'From Your Grace' phase to mean something like 'As a result of the grace that you confer'. – cnread Mar 4 '19 at 20:57
  • The Archpoet addressed his patron with meticulous politeness as 'Praesul.' homepages.wmich.edu/~johnsorh/MedievalLatin/Texts/Arch.html This patron was both Archbishop-elect of Cologne and an Archduke. "Ā tē, praesul, ..." – Hugh Mar 5 '19 at 14:26

The trick here is, Latin has a lot of morphology on the verbs: lots of ways that you can change the verb word to express a distinction. English doesn't, really: English verbs are marked as "past" (walked), "non-past" (walk), "non-past with a single subject who's not the speaker or the listener" (walks), and nothing else. So in English we have to use extra words to make other distinctions, such as "will" + "non-past" = "future" (will walk).

In this particular case, "shall" is being used to give a future meaning. In Latin, you would change the verb word itself, instead of adding another word to it.

So I would translate your phrase somewhat literally as:

Ā tē, domine, nullum metum sciam.
From you, lord, no fear shall I know.

"Your grace" is somewhat difficult to translate since it's an idiom the Romans didn't use; literally it would be grātia tua, but that doesn't feel right to me. So I swapped it out for "lord", a generic respectful title, but you could also use e.g. rex, "king", or something else more specific.

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