[....] Or just an illustration of the broad-brimmed tasseled heraldic [ecclesiastical hat ] [...], or failing that, a mitre, either 1 also bearing the date of consecration. [....] untranslated from the Latin, the better to befuddle the Protestants and assist recognition by fellow traditional Catholics
As best I can determine, albeit from classically-oriented
Latin reference works (instead of ecclesiastical Latin), this is "
May 11, 2017":
ante diem quīntum Īdūs Māiās
Annō Dominī MMXVII [‡]
Overly literally: "
before the fifth day before Ides (of) May(in) the Year (of Our) Lord 2017"
Customarily abbreviated thus:
a.d. V. Id. Mai.
A.D. MMXVIIWhere the 1 word-length underscore above indicates movement (of the translated word "before") by deletion then insertion.
From the perspective of classical Latin, the small letters shown in the Latin above should be rendered in
small-capitals (or if lacking the latter, then ordinary
capitals), because the only letters that classical Latin had were
capitals, which are what modern readers & writers often call
upper case letters; invention of
lower-case letters was quite a few centuries away into the future.
Feel free to compare my book-dependent translation above with the signature formalism of traditional papal encyclicals. I simply haven't had the time to do that yet.
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Note ‡: Latin vowel lengths are marked to assist confirmation that presentation uses the proper inflections; abbreviations would not use them. All declinable words are in the
accusative case (e.g., no
genitive); why that's so is a mystery to me (and not what I drafted), altho' it might be "progress toward (something)" (or even an extreme example of words used as
appositives). I'll call it a Latin
idiom and try not to lose sleep over it. "Īdūs" and its modifiers are always
plural. So it might be prudent to
go with the abbreviated Latin date, which not only has the advantage of avoiding
all[/] of the inflected endings (and explanations for the surprising ones), but also was a straightforward table look-up in a reference book for Latin.