In honour of my husband finally finding the necessary cables to fire up the N64, finally allowing us to play Mortal Kombat 4 on date night again, here's "finish him" (lit. "impose death upon him") in Middle Egyptian.
The reason it says "impose death upon him" rather than "finish him", despite the existence of the verb "to finish" in Middle Egyptian, is that the ancient Egyptians didn't use "finish (off)" as an idiom for killing something or someone. Yes, I think my shitposts through an inordinate amount.
As a classicist I cannot applaud this strongly enough.
(I once spent a good hour working out exactly how to best represent "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke" in properly classical Latin.)
Speaking from having read every marginal annotation in 350 Renaissance copies of Lucretius (esp the heavily annotated sex bits), rendering nuances of ‘fuck’ in properly Classical Latin has been a major goal of scholarship for a good 600 years.
Sometimes I think I'm very lucky that Plautus worked from New Comedy and not Old Comedy, because my dissertation would've been a lot harder if I had to deal with that much sexual & scatological & political humor amidst everything else I was doing with the plays. JN Adams was largely enough for me.
Though I /did/ attend a fascinating talk that had a whole chart with gender and active/passive uses of some specific Latin sexual verbs & derived adjectives/nouns specifically within graffiti, centering on futator/futatrix for its point of study.
(Okay and also at one point I ended up three layers deep trying to find a citation for something I'd learned in an Aristophanes class about uses of "piglet" and "sow" as specific sexual innuendo because I was trying to properly explain the sexual/violent aspect of an exchange in Truculentus.)
