what the fuck
saxo cere comminuit brum
what the actual fuck
the word for brain here is cerebrum, and it's been literally split in two
I've seen wordplay like this before in Latin, but with compound words that are clearly made up of separate parts
but "cere" is not a word and neither is "brum"
you could translate it something like
"he split his br apart ain with a rock"
and it's only slightly less unreadable than that due to freer word order
needless to say something I'd expect more from a modern experimental poem than an ancient epic
Latin linguistic shitposting is amazing. Like, I can't recall exactly, but there's a line of poetry that says basically "Claudius lives in the mountains mountains".
Except because Latin is inflected and word order is less important, it's actually written like "in the (mountains) Claudius (mountains) lived"
And it still means the same thing. Except why the duplicate of mountains? Because it turns out, Claudius didn't live in the mountains. He lived in a valley between two mountains.
They changed the word order of the sentence and duplicate a word, to do a word-order pun about where some random guy lived! It's great, and exactly the kind of thing you can't do in English, because we depend so much more on word order.
official linguistics post
@enlitment this may interest you ^ ^