For trivia lovers out there...in all of the discussions and paperwork surrounding Selwyn College – Te Maru Pūmanawa at our recent Synod, one of our eagle eyed Synod reps thought she had spotted a mistake in the Latin motto for Selwyn.

The Selwyn College – Te Maru Pūmanawa Motto reads as follows:

Vitai Lampada Tradunt (translated as They hand on the torch of life - Kei te hoatu ratou ki te rama o te ora)

Eva Hammond from the Palmerston Parish (who has a background in the classics) writes:

When I saw the motto first I thought that the word 'vitai' had been wrongly written as the ending in the letter 'i' does not figure at all in the declension of the noun 'vita' meaning 'life'. 'Aqua vitae' meaning 'water of life' is a common phrase (used especially among Scots as a reference for whisky!) where 'of life' in the Latin word has the ending 'ae' and is pronounced as one syllable. I have never seen the genitive (possessive) case ending of 'vita' other than 'ae'.

However, the poet, Lucretius, has taken liberties by ending the word in 'ai' which would have been pronounced as two syllables in order to make his lines rhyme, so I'm told. Whoever chose this phrase for Selwyn's motto and adopted it exactly as Lucretius wrote it may have been a little mischievous as he (probably male) would surely have known that the average student would not have recognised the word written as 'vitai'.

Regarding 'lampada', if in a Latin format, I would have expected the ending 'am' as it is in the accusative (objective) case ending as it is the object of the sentence but I forgot that educated Romans would have been familiar with Greek hence the Greek form. 

If you've not nodded off by now.....I would have expected the motto to read 'vitae lampadam tradunt' but I stand corrected! I'll just have to blame Lucretius for my confusion...