Help from anyone who speaks Latin?

[Undertown]

Didn’t know where to put this so I’ve come to the staff room. There’s a sculpture in the V&A with a Latin inscription which reads

• QVEM GENVI RODVLPHVS ANIMI CAVSA CAELAVIT

The collections website translates this as

• Ridolfo, whom I bore, has carved this as a tribute of love.

I don’t read Latin but the tiny bit I do know doesn’t seem to fit this. Can anyone confirm that the translation is right?

i don’t speak Latin, but ChatGPT does…

“Whom Rudolf engraved for the sake of his soul.”

Breaking it down:

• QVEM = whom
• GENVI = (variant of genui) “I begot / produced” — but sometimes mis-carved; could also be read as “made” or “created”
• RODVLPHVS = Rudolf(us) (a man’s name, Rudolph)
• ANIMI CAVSA = “for the sake of the soul” (literally “for reason of the spirit/mind/soul”)
• CAELAVIT = engraved, carved, chiselled

So it’s basically a dedication or inscription: “Rudolph engraved this, for the sake of his soul.”

Yes, I used chatGPT too! Which is why I was querying it. The V&A translation suggests it’s for love of his parents but there doesn’t seem to be anything about that in the chatGPT translation. However, I suspect chatGPT might be missing some subtlety. The first bit could certainly be ‘whom I bore’.

I would stick with the V&A translation. The translation suggested by AI is incorrect, although spirit, soul or mind are the more usual translation for anima. I think in this case they miss the nuance of the word. I'm not familiar with the statue, but I expect they have carefully consid

Yes, I think that was my conclusion too. AI has its limitations!

Chat GPT isn't right here. The thing about these large language models is that they are giving you a statistical likelihood as to what something means, which may often be right, but won't be right in every context.

"animi causa" is an idiom that basically means 'for fun/for pleasure'. Doing something 'animi causa' is the opposite of doing it 'negotii causa' (for work), i.e. something that you do to bring you, or someone else, pleasure or joy, rather than because you are made to or someone pays you to.

Animus can mean the soul, but it can mean a whole range of things - the entry on it in Latin dictionaries is extremely long! So Chat GPT has gone for the most literal meaning, because it doesn't know Latin idiom, only the top level dictionary entries.

So literally, 'Rodulphus (presumably the Latinised version of the name, which was actually Ridolfo), whom I bore, carved this for pleasure (i.e. out of love)' as opposed to 'because he was paid to'.

Chat GPT is also wrong that GENVI is a 'variant' of genui. It is literally just a way of spelling genui! And the basic meaning of genui (past tense of gigno) is to bear, beget, produce, give birth to. It is a first person verb, with quem (whom) as its object, so Chat GPT is wrong that it would mean 'he made', it has to mean 'I made him'. There's no reason for it to speculate that the inscription has been miscarved when it makes perfectly good sense.

This was my suspicion, that ChatGPT can’t manage subtleties of language. thank you so much for taking the time to go into the detail for me. Can’t beat a live expert!