any classicists on this board?

[Carol]

susanmcgee wrote:
>
> I recently have been trying to unravel an issue/answer a question
and wonder if any of you have any insight into it.
> 
> In high school, I was taught a Latin phrase. I was told that it was
an example of the Delphic oracle's ambiguity. The phrase was:
> 
> Ibis Redibis in Numquam Armis Peribis. As many of you many know, in
Latin, word order is irrelevant. <snip> SO....the phrase EITHER means
> "You will go, you will return, you will never perish in arms" OR it
means "You will go, you will never return, you will perish in arms." 
> <snip>
> 
> I was talking to my partner about this and she looked puzzled and 
> asked if it were from the Delphic oracle why was it in Latin? 

> <snip>

> I found this explanation 
> Delphi Oracle - Syntactic Ambiguity
> A famous Latin translation of one of the prophecies of the oracle at
Delphi reads "Ibis, redibis numquam peribis in bello." Two different
translations and interpretations may be provided for this sentence. 
1. "You'll leave, and you shall never return as you will perish in 
the war." 2. "You'll leave and return, and you shall not perish in 
the war." Very close to what I had been taught.
<snip>

Carol responds:
The article that you cited (which I also found) gives you your answer.
The often quoted words are a translation that preserves the ambiguity
of the original.

I'm not a classicist, but I know a bit about English literature and
history, as well as the background of particular English writers
(especially Shelley) and their education.

Here's my take on why the prophecies made by the Delphic Oracle (the
Pythia, obviously not the same person from generation to generation)
are frequently given in Latin. (Please note that I'm speculating, not
giving an authoritative answer and will happily accept correction.) In
the nineteenth century and earlier, educated Englishmen were quite
likely to know Latin but less likely to know Greek, or at least, to
know it less well than they knew Latin. They might, for example, have
read Sophocles's "Oidipos Tyrannos" (I don't read Greek and may have
the transliteration wrong) in its Latin translation, "Oedipus Rex"
(the title retained in most English translations but obviously not the
original title). English writers of this period often referred to the
Greek gods by their Roman names in translations from the original
Greek, as if the Greeks worshipped Jupiter and Venus and Mercury
rather than Zeus and Aphrodite and Hermes. I think they would expect
their readers to be familiar with the Oracle's pronouncements in Latin
rather than the original Greek (unless they were writing for fellow
Oxford or Cambridge graduates).

At any rate, the Oracle at Delphi dates back to prehistoric times, and
the prophecies that we have date from, IIRC, the seventh or eighth
century B.C. to Roman times. (Croesus died in 546 B.C. and Pyrrhus in
272 B.C.) Until Greece was conquered by the Romans in 146 B.C., the
prophecies (including those made to Croesus and Pyrrhus) would have
been made in Greek. It's possible, even probable, that they continued
to be made in Greek even after Greece was conquered. After all, the
Romans respected and imitated Greek culture, and they were more likely
to learn Greek than the Greeks were to learn Latin. (The language of
Greece and the entire eastern half of the Roman Empire, as you
probably know, was Koine Greek, not Latin.)

Carol, who agrees that a Google search on the topic is frustrating and
finds that her own books aren't much help, either, unfortunately