ut sit semper felicem terra timebat monstra?

[Garamoth]

According to Google Translate:

ut sit semper felicem terra timebat monstra
=
monsters in the land that feared to be always happy

Is that what it really means? Doesn't quite sound like a normal sentence...

[Wharrrrrrgarbl]

Hmmm, my half-remembered latin wants to render it as "In every way, and always, the monsters on earth feared luck" - i.e. a reference to the RNG.

[Garamoth]

"May you always be happy in a land of fearful monsters"?

[Wharrrrrrgarbl]

That doesn't properly address that "felicem" is in the accusative case. On reflection, I think a better gloss would be "How the monsters on earth always feared that s/he would be lucky!" That is, an exclamation about how significantly the monsters feared that the hero/player would be lucky during the game.

Also, I think Google has mistaken felix, felicis, an adjective meaning lucky, fortunate, or successful, for felicitas, felicitatis, a noun meaning happiness/fortune/success.

[[OP]Puppetmaster]

My two cents, and the only way I can make any sense of the phrase:

The accusative should be a nominative, whoever wrote it forgot that 'esse' (sit) is a copula, making 'felix' the subject complement, not the direct object.

Then it reads: In order to be happy always, the earth (the people) feared monsters.

[Cassie]

It sure would be nice if the developer cleared this up. *cough, cough*

[dislekcia!]

You're going to have to ask Aequitas. He just put it in one day, the rest of us have no idea what it means.

[Lümming]

I tried to make a grammatical analysis of it, here we go :)

"ut sit semper felicem terra timebat monstra"

ut = once, as soon as, hence
(if a verb follows which means to fear something or to hinder, it would mean "lest")

situs = at (the town at the river - urbs ad flumen sita)

semper = ever, always (adverb)

felix= successful, prosperous, triumphant (-> accusative, singular form of "felicem")

terra = land (singular, nominative)

timere = to fear sth., to be timid of sth. (imperfect indicative form "timebat" "he/she/it fears")
indicative means things that are actual happening "He is walking down the street"

monstrum = beast, monster (but sometimes also emblem, or sign of wonder) (plural, nominative form "monstra")

perhaps something like (I must admit I didnt take any latin course or something, just took a dictionary):
The land that fears monsters (or signs of wonder), is (therefore not) allways happy.

[Haeres Corvi]

Lümming, your analysis is quite good, but you missed some things:
- monstra is a neutral noun so it could be a nominative or an accusative form.
- in your translation you forgot to take in account the imperfect tense
- felicem being an accusative, it can't follow a verb like esse (be), it must be part of the complement of "timebat".
- I think sit is the subjonctive of esse (third person, singular)

I don't get what this felicem is doing in the middle of the sentence, honestly. If what I said above is right, then it can only be attached to monstra, why would it be so far? Could it be the subject of a dependant (subordinate) sentence with an implicit esse?

[dislekcia!]

I don't think Aequitas knows latin that well, TBH.

[Eddy]

I'll willing to believe the site (linked below) that states a rough tranlation is:
"May the land of fearful monsters be forever blessed."

Since my Latin classes have long since worn off, I'm going with 'belief' on this one.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DesktopDungeons?from=Main.DesktopDungeons

[Eddy]

This is totally unrelated, but one favorite Latin-ized phrases is:

"Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum."
A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants.

The Latin version has a nice cadence.

[Atantuo]

Back in school, I used to be good at latin, and it bugged me that I couldn't make sense of this sentence. Based on my own analysis, and some of the above posts, it seems likely that the author made a few mistakes.
There are a few ways to make the sentence grammatically correct*, including:
- "Ut sint semper felices terra timebat monstra" = "The land feared that the monsters may be forever happy" or "the land always feared that the monsters may be happy"**
- "Ut sit semper felix terra timita a monstris" = "May the land feared by monsters be forever happy"
- etc., although increasingly more of the original sentence would need to be changed

The second one seems to make a lot of sense in the context, with relatively small adjustments, so I'll go with that personally.

~~~~~
*(That's assuming I didn't make a mistake, which is a definite possibility.)
**(This is the only way I was able to make sense of the "timebat". It seems grammatically correct to me, but has really weird word order. A more intuitive, or closer-to-english order would be "terra timebat, ut monstra sint semper felices".)