MovieChat Forums > As Above, So Below (2014) Discussion > Rhyming, units of measure

Rhyming, units of measure

posted 9 years ago by Theshornwonder
8 replies | jump to latest

I thought this movie was fine, it entertained me, and it was spooky.

All over this board though people seem caught up by two things that, to them, apparently make the film laughable. The first, being that supposedly "the Ancient Aramaic translated, also rhymes in English!". But this isn't correct, there is no indication at all that the words rhyme in Aramaic at all. In fact (most likely because nobody in the cast or crew can speak Aramaic) they never say the words in Aramaic so there is no indication that the writing rhymes in the original language. Secondly, the writing was made 500-600 years ago. Aramaic was, by then, already a dead language. So whoever wrote it, Flamel himself, or someone else, was not a native Aramaic speaker and very likely did or could have spoken English. So, its not that someone wrote a rhyme in Aramaic that translated to also rhyme in English. Much more likely, given the timeframe of the writing, its that someone wrote a rhyme in English and then carved it into the stone translated into Aramaic to make it more difficult to discover even if the writing itself is discovered. So, there really isn't an issue there at all.

Second, the argument that "they assume they'd be using the same units of measurement 500 years ago that they use now." Well first, they use the metric system in France now, and second, she gets the measurement from an old alchemical chart. France did, indeed use "feet" as a unit of measure 500 years ago and that unit of measure was unchanged from basically the old Roman units the French adopted 1,000 years ago. That unit is also very similar to the "feet' uni used today in America and that used by Britain under the Imperial System. So, yeah, it does make sense.

I'm not saying the movie is perfect, but the complaints about these two issues are clearly arrived at by making assumptions that the film does not. You may assume the writing rhymes in Aramaic, but the film doesn't say it does. You may assume they're using the wrong measurement, but within the film, there is no indication they're using a modern measurement, and if they are, the unit they're using is pretty close to the same as would've been used in the time of the writing being translated.

[–] ebwalkerjr 9 years ago

I caught that too. Why would a clue written in a completely different language have a rhyme pattern in english.

[–] Theshornwonder 9 years ago

Because it was written to rhyme in English. It doesn't rhyme in Aramaic.

[–] Snatchy 9 years ago

That's a nice try to explain the rhyming in English, but even if someone tried to intentionally take an English rhyme and translate it into Aramaic, there's just no way translating it back to English would result in the exact same phrasing. Just try using Google Translate to go from English --> Spanish --> English again. The general meaning might remain but the words will change.

Language is full of ambiguities, and translation is more about interpreting the intended meaning. There are many ways to translate the same sentence from one language to another. Doing a word-for-word translation usually results in an incomprehensible jumble.

[–] Theshornwonder 9 years ago

Um, google translate is not a good substitute for a fluent speaker. If the writer wanted an English rhyme they could have made one using Aramaic. Google translate is irrelevant.

[–] Snatchy 9 years ago

So you're saying that if someone wrote something in Aramaic, everyone -- every single translator -- would translate it using the exact same words and sentence structure so that it rhymed perfectly? Nonsense.

[–] Theshornwonder 9 years ago

No. I'm saying that 2,000 years after Aramaic was a used language, someone may hide an English rhyme in Aramaic to make it difficult to figure out.

[–] Snatchy 9 years ago

Rhyming has no effect on meaning. There is absolutely no reason the translation needed to rhyme in order to make sense (let alone rhyme in ENGLISH when the author was FRENCH). The only reason it rhymed was because the writers obviously thought it would sound more poetic and spooky that way.

[–] Rhymoid 8 years ago

Both of your arguments are flawed.

The discussion in the FAQ (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2870612/faq#.2.1.8) refers to some verifiable historical facts about the definition of the foot. That FAQ may need some improvement; for instance, it's also possible that Flamel used le pied du roi, which was introduced by Charlemange. In any case, your historical explanation is nothing more than bluffing. There are already huge differences between the Roman pes (believed to average 0.2957 m), le pied du roi (0.32484 m), and the international foot (0.3048 m), blowing up to multiple meters when interpreting "halfway 741 feet". Not discussing the question "which foot did Flamel use" when it should come up is very uncharacteristic for a supposedly capable archeologist.

Then, we assume that the writing on the back of Flamel's headstone is Aramaic. It isn't. The writing definitely uses an Ancient Greek alphabet, or one of its many descendants. But whatever it is, your argument that the English translation would rhyme, just because it was originally in English, makes no sense. Have you actually paid attention to the words he used?

winged vulture leads the way /
with brightest light in darkest day /
underneath the heaven's rain /
what is lost shall be regained /
halfway twixt the darkest gate /
and this tablet laid atop [paird?] fate

Greek and Latin (or possibly Etruscan, or whatever the writing was) allow for some shuffling in the word order, so we can ignore how unlikely it is that a translator chooses the intended word order (in what seems as his first attempt, no less). But what kind of English speaker would prefer the word "underneath" over "below", the word "twixt" over "between", or the word "atop" over "on top of"? Never mind that the verb "regain" entered the English language around the 1540s while Flamel died in 1418, or that the words "way" and "day" probably didn't rhyme in the English spoken around that time.