De finibus bonorum et malorum
De finibus bonorum et malorum is a Socratic dialogue by the Roman orator, politician, and Academic Skeptic philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. It consists of three dialogues, over five books, in which Cicero discusses the philosophical views of Epicureanism, Stoicism, and the Platonism of Antiochus of Ascalon. The treatise is structured so that each philosophical system is described in its own book and then disputed in the following book. The book was developed in the summer of the year 45 BC, and was written over the course of about one and a half months. Together with the Tusculanae Quaestiones written shortly afterwards and the Academica, De finibus bonorum et malorum is one of the most extensive philosophical works of Cicero.
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What Hacker News says
- It's ultimately a corrupted version of Cicero's "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum".
- > This is a really big stretch in interpretation
According to Wikipedia[0], "[t]he placeholder text is taken from parts of the first book's discourse on hedonism." The first book being the first book of Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_finibus_bonorum_et_malorum
- I wasn't aware that Lorem Ipsum was conceived with uniform distribution of word lengths in mind. I couldn't find any information about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
> The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.
Could you please provide source? I am curious now.
Alternate argument is that my version represents real actual text from real books :-), but to be honest, it is a tongue-in-cheek attempt.
- Lorem Ipsum is a passage quoted from a Latin book "De finibus bonorum et malorum" and has been used by typesetters for seventy or eighty years. So the fact it can be translated shouldn't be a surprise.
- It's even more amusing if you go to http://translate.google.com/#la/en/ and start slowly entering Lorem ipsum by hand. Highlights:
The results are slightly different if you don't capitalize “Lorem”.Lorem → Product Lorem ip → We recall Lorem ips → IPS News Lorem ipsu → Dummy Item Lorem ipsum → Welcome Lorem ipsum do → We give Lorem ipsum dol → This mourning Lorem ipsum dolor → Welcome Lorem ipsum dolor s → The Pussycat Dolls Lorem ipsum dolor si → Contact if Lorem ipsum dolor sit ame → Welcome Home Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet → Product Manager Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, → This page is currently Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, c → This page is available Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur → This page is half the battle Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit → This page is half the battle WIN!Edit: lipsum.com explains the source of the text; it is a slightly garbled fragment of a sentence from de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum by Cicero: “Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem” which translates as “Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.”
- Do you know enough about this generator to trust the text generated in other languages? For all you know, the Arabic or Hebrew ones might be embedding culturally insensitive words if they were "translated" from the original gibberish lorem ipsum. Or do other scripts have a pseudo-canonical passage to quote from like De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum?
