Hi, r/Latin! (Latinos and Latinas?)
I'm dabbling with the design of an RPG and am working on character attributes.
I need a canonical / consistent translation of the terms "Body", "Mind", and "Soul".
Right now I'm working with Corpus and Mens for the first two. I don't really like the "Mens", and I have no idea if it's consistent with Corpus.
For "Soul", there might be better words to ask for. The concept I want to get across is a character's social skills, as provided by wealth, beauty, charisma, etc.
So maybe I want "Body", "Mind", "Everyone Else"?
Thanks in advance for help!
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I think it's something like "Corpus, mens et anima" but I wanted to be sure. Maybe there are some grammatical rules regarding these kinds of listings which I'm not aware of or other words would be used in this case? Thanks!
As an alternative to my somewhat literal-minded first answer, it is also possible to look for similar ideas in the Latin literature.
It happens that the Roman poet P. Ovidius Naso (born 43 BC, died probably in 17 AD), better known as Ovid, had a similar thought once; he wrote in a letter-poem (Epistulae ex Ponto 2,7,75):
Omnia deficiunt: animus tamen omnia vincit;
ille etiam vires corpus habere facit.Everything is lacking, but the mind conquers all;
it even makes the body have strength.
If you like (you are not bound by any metre, after all), you can distill this down to:
Animus omnia vincit: etiam vires corpus habere facit.
⋯ or even lose your mind and shorten it to Animus omnia vincit – the mind conquers all.
It is indeed true that “mind” can be translated as mens, but also as animus, and the two words are almost, but not quite synonymous and can be a little difficult to tell apart. Reading this belaboured discussion, I suspect the willpower would be better captured by animus, with mens stressing the intellectual capabilities. In your case, I would recommend animus.
(Mens and mentis are the same word, by the way, just different cases – mentis being the genetive.)
Corpus is indeed the straightforward translation for “body.” Yes, it has all kinds of other meanings (just like “body,” come to think of it), but first and foremost it's a living being's body.
The preposition in certainly does not mean “over,” it means “in” or “into” just like in English. Over as in a higher position in a hierarchy would be super or supra, as exemplified by the expression Caesar non supra grammaticos (freely, the emperor has no higher authority than the grammarians). The difference between super and supra was discussed previously on this site; in short, they are both equally appropriate in this case.
So you could say:
Animus supra corpus.
(You may be wondering, what, we can just string words together like that in Latin? Hahaha, no, we normally most certainly cannot, it is pure chance that it works here.)