Dipper's Not-So-Latin Zombie Spell

Just because I want to show off my newfound prowess on the subject...

Recently, Disney's Gravity Falls just premiered the first episode of season two this past weekend. It was a fun episode, if a little more violent than usual.

However, there was one scene in the episode where main character Dipper Pines recites a spell from a book, accidentally (spoilers!) summoning an undead army onto the town of Gravity Falls. I was too wrapped up in the moment to pay much attention to said spell at first, but later realized the spell he recites sounds like Latin. And I having just finished two semesters of studying Latin, I decided to look into the words of the spell, to see if they were indeed Latin, used correctly, and come up with a translation of my own.

The results are telling.

First, here is a link to an image of the written spell Dipper recites from the journal (right-hand bottom). It runs: "corpus levitas diablo dominium mondo vicium." The Gravity Falls Wiki translates this as all Latin, meaning "Body, rise. Lord Devil (or Devil Dominion). Conquer the world." And at first glance, that looks accurate. At the very least, it fits the context of the scene.

But I have a few quibbles with the Latin wording, and its translation.

Now, "corpus" is completely correct, and means "body" as the wiki translated. However, with "levitas" we have a few issues. First, it is not a verb, but a noun, and it does not mean "rise" but rather "lightness, levity/fickleness, inconstancy/groundlessness," none of which really fits the context of the sentence, though I suppose "body groundless" could be one (personally, I'd reverse the word order in that case to be "groundless body." I'd REALLY like to translate it as "body alight," only "alight" is a verb and "levitas" is a noun, so I can't really) and even then, that's more of an adjective usage than a noun usage, which doesn't feel perfect, but it's legal.

"Diablo" does mean "devil," and many of you probably already know that, as the word has some usage in English as such already. However, "diablo" is NOT a Latin spelling of the word. In Latin, that would be "diabolus," at least in the nominative case. However, considering the next word is "dominium" (which is correct in both usage and translation, "dominion" or "domain"), I would want to put it in the genitive (possessive) and make it "diaboli" so that it translates to "devil's dominion/domain."

Next, I want to note for those who are not aware that Latin, unlike English, structures its sentences as subject-object-verb instead of subject-verb-object like English speakers are used to. This means that in Latin, the verb is pretty much always at the end of the sentence. This applies to "mondo vicium," where "mondo" is the noun and "vicium" is the verb. So a literal version of the wiki's translation would be "the world conquer," but since that's not how its done in English, it's translated as the more familiar "conquer the world." There's nothing wrong with doing it that way, I'm just explaining this now so there's no confusion later.

Now, on the subject of "mondo," while it is a Latin derivative, this is also NOT a Latin spelling of the word. Instead, it would be "mundus," which can be translated as "the world," but also as "the universe," "the heavens," or as "mankind" so take your pick on what you like best, I guess. For me, "the world" works just fine and was probably the translation intended. "Vicium," however, is a bit more complicated, because I believe it is both misused and misspelled, because I cannot find an exact match to that word. The wiki translates it as "conquer," which given the sentence context and some of the alternatives makes sense to me, so I figure that's what its supposed to say...only that would mean it'd be the verb "vinco" and there is no version of the word, in any tense, that is spelled like "vicium." Furthermore, the spellings that come closest to "vicium" all use the perfect form "vici" which are all generally used in the past tense, meaning that a proper translation would be "conquered" implying in this case that the undead have already conquered the world...when they clearly haven't. The only exception to that would be the word in future perfect tense, "vicero" which would translate to roughly around "will have conquered," which works...only the word, as it's used in a spell, is used more in a commanding sense. So it ought to be in the imperative; "vince."

So to recap, a better phrasing of Dipper's zombie spell would be "corpus levitas diaboli dominium mundus vince" which would translate to "body groundless, devil's domain, conquer the world."

Also, Dipper mispronounces "vicium;" in Latin, the "c" is always pronounced with a "k" sound, not a "c" sound like we'd expect with English.

And Latin uses macrons in its spelling usually, and the show didn't, but I can't blame them for that, as it could've caused confusion for the uneducated, as well as possibly other complications. For example, I'm not using macrons in this because that would necessitate special characters that deviantART probably won't care for me using.

Despite all of this, though, this is all a more accurate usage and translation of Latin (even though its more of a hybrid of languages in the show) than I had honestly been expecting, so I'm actually fairly impressed.

Anyway, hope you readers find this enlightening, or at least interesting.