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nigerweiss comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't speak Old English, unfortunately. Could someone who does please provide me with a rough translation of the provided passage?
It's at the bottom of the chapter. "Three shall be the Peverelle's sons, and three their devices by which death shall be defeated."
[edit] Originally misremembered the last word as "destroyed".
In case anybody else made the same mistake as I did, the two bits of Old English are the same.
and
According to the Olde English Translator, gewunen doesn't mean defeated or destroyed. It's the present subjunctive plural form of the verb gewunian, which means "to remain continue stand to habituate oneself to" which puts me in mind of "tolerate" or "get used to."
Perhaps gewunnen, meaning conquered, and not gewunen. I don't think you can use present subjunctive after béo anyway. Here béo is almost surely the 3rd person singular subjunctive of béon, the verb that we know as to be. If gewunnen, then we can interpret it as being the past participle, which makes a lot more sense (and fits the provided translation). The past participle of gewunian is gewunod, which clearly isn't the word used here.
Edit: translator's automatic conjugation is broken, sorry for copy-paste.
Good catch, I wasn't even thinking if there were a different, related verb that might be used there, nor of the particular grammar. That's just where that form gewunen showed up in the translator.
If the verb is winnan or gewinnan, the past participle would be gewunnen. In either case, the sense is conquering to obtain, or alternatively resisting, struggling against, enduring or suffering. And there are less ambiguous words to use if the sense was that Death would be defeated and eliminated, i.e. destroyed, or even mastered or overcome.
In other words, it still looks ambiguous enough to me that it could mean that "...three shall be their devices by which Death shall be tolerated."
As a point of interest, does the entire lineage of which Harry is the scion derive from a single Peverell brother? In which case, a less likely alternative interpretation would be
"Peverell shall have three descendants: his son, his son/descendant (who contributed to the quest in some important way), and finally Harry, who between them shall accomplish Death's defeat".
It's not enormously likely, but it would explain why "three shall be Peverell's sons" takes up a third of the prophecy when it is has zero value as a piece of information if taken at face value.
Tom Marvolo Riddle?
Note also the "shall be". As Harry says in the chapter, this is future tense; therefore, the prophesy is not talking about Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus.