O Sibili, sidemgo
Fortibus es inero.
O Nobili, demis trux
Vatis indem? Causan dux.
[Oh, see Billy, see them go,
Forty buses in a row.
Oh no, Billy, them is trucks
What is in them? Cows and ducks.]
S A T O R
A R E P O
T E N E T
O P E R A
R O T A S
An interesting -- perhaps mystical? -- presentation of anagrams and palindromes.
However, it reduces to nonsense:
Sator: "sower" or, figuratively, "creator" (nominative)
Arepo: nonsense. Not Latin.
Tenet: "he/she/it holds"
Opera: "works"
Rotas: "wheels" (accusative)
Mánios med fhéfhaked Númasioi
Ah, yes... the infamous "saxum loquens," the Praenestine Fibula. This inscription was said to have
been found on a dress-pin, dating to the 6th c. b.c.e. Sadly, its discoverer revealed it to be a hoax.
This was given to me to translate on Day 25 of the Summer Latin Institute, (we were not told that it was a hoax), and
we very cunning linguists came up with the following, exactly as we were supposed to:
Mánios med fhéfhaked Númasioi
Manios is a proper noun, nominative (see Greek "os" (2nd declension) and Latin "us" (3rd and 4th declensions).
med is the Classical Latin "me," the first person pronoun in the accusative, with the terminal dental sound having dropped out.
fhefhaked, showing reduplication (doubled sounds) at the beginning, is typical of the Greek perfect tense, as well as some Latin verbs (such as pelo/pellere/pepuli/pulsus). The terminal "ed" merely shifted to the terminal "t" in later Latin. Its meaning, once the reduplication is dropped, leaves us with the consonants "f" and "k" -- a good candidate for "facio," "to make." Thus fhefaked becomes "he/she/it has made."
Numasioi can be taken as another proper noun, in the dative (note the "oi" which would become an omega-iota subscript in Greek's 2nd declension, or another diphthong or terminal vowel for Latin's other declensions, "ae," "o," "i," "ei," "ui.")
Thus we have:
"Manios has made me for Numasios"
Brilliant!