Last week, I was on holiday in Catalonia. This has reinvigorated my interest in Spain and the Spanish language (as well as giving me a taste for Catalan). A few more posts related to my trip will probably follow soon, but for now here’s a trilingual treat that I came across while surfing Wikipedia earlier today. (The third language in question, though, isn’t Catalan as you might expect from the start of this paragraph, but Latin, the grand-daddy of them all.)
In English, we have a well-known saying:
An apple a day keeps the doctor away
This is probably somewhat exaggerated but it’s certainly true that apples are quite healthy and eating them regularly is likely to have a positive rather than negative effect on your general health (sadly, I’m not sure that drinking cider counts). Actually, I read an interesting blog post fairly recently (and, sadly, have mislaid the link to it) suggesting that bananas are even healthier and we’d do better to say “A banana a day…”, but that’s digressing.
There is also a Latin saying that probably still just about qualifies as well-known (at any rate, it’s one I’ve known for a long time):
Mens sana in corpore sano
This means “A healthy mind in a healthy body”. Presumably the point of this is to indicate a correlation between mental and physical health.
The Wikipedia page on bilingual puns lists a delightful merging of these two sayings that approximates the meaning of the English one by substituting a similar sounding Spanish word (manzana = apple) for the first couple of words of the Latin one:
Manzana in corpore sano
(Literally, “An apple in a healthy body”).
NB in case you’re wondering about the title of this post, this Wikipedia article on macaronic language might help.