The Vatican is beginning the process of digitizing its extensive library of books and manuscripts, previously only available to a select few scholars and historians. Their plan calls for an initial 3000 manuscripts to be scanned, with the rest of the 82,000 other documents to hopefully follow.
That’s 41 million pages spanning nearly 2,000 years of church history that will soon be clickable, zoomable, and presumably, printable. When all is said and done, you’ll be able to read the Psalms handwritten across 13th-century vellum on your iPhone — so long as you speak ancient Greek.
ATMs in the Vatican City have Latin as one of the language options:
Anyone know what that means? Google Translate spits out a bunch of jibberish… (Photo by Seth Schoen)
Update: Lots of slightly different answers as to what this says, but this email from a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at Columbia is representative of the spread:
Anyhow, a super-literal translation would be something like this:
I ask that you insert [your] card in order that you come to understand the method needing to be used.
But more colloquially, we can do this:
Please insert your card to learn the instructions.
or even (although I’m really getting into sloppy translation territory here):
Please insert your card for instructions.
(thx, charles)
Update: And it may be more accurate to say that Vatican City ATMs previously offered a Latin option. According to @johnke, “they removed the Latin option with a software update sometime in late 2010/early 2011”.
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