As if to prove my previous post, I've been intrigued by a text difference between "Ave verum corpus" settings by Mozart and Josquin. (Craig says that Elgar's setting, and a few others', agree with Josquin's.) The text is:

Ave Verum Corpus natum de Maria Virgine.
Vere passum immolatum in cruce pro homine:
cuius latum perforatum aqua fluxit et sanguine.
Esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine.

(Note that "A" is the first letter of the first line, "E" the second of the second, "I" the third of the third, and "O" the fourth of the fourth; there's a fifth line not set by Mozart that continues "O Jesu dulcis...")

The first three lines are approximately as follows (my translation, a bit free with the cases, which don't translate well in this text):

Hail true body born of the Virgin Mary,
Who truly suffered and was sacrificed on the cross for mankind:
Whose side was pierced, and water and blood flowed forth.

The last line is both harder for me to translate and where the textual discrepancy lies. Josquin switches the words "in" and "mortis":

Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine.

The first part of the translation is no problem; "Esto nobis praegustatum" is "Be for us a foretaste." However, the rest I have trouble with. Various sites have the different translations. This site has a literal translation which, while mostly correct, doesn't help much with the subtleties of meaning:

Be / for us / foretaste / in / of death / testing

And it also has a bizarre nonliteral translation, which interprets a bit:

Be for us a foretaste of heaven, during our final trial

This site has the translation I found most places, which I really dislike for its sing-songiness; it also alters the meaning, not only for interpretation's sake this time, but also for singsongy rhyme:

be a foretaste sweet to me
in my death's great agony

So I've been trying to figure it out on my own. It's mainly a matter of figuring out which words go together. "in examine" is definitely a semantic unit; examine is the ablative form of the noun "examen," which means, among other things, "weighing, consideration." (That's why I say the literal translation above is only "mostly" correct; it relies on a synonym of a cognate, rather than a dictionary, for this word.) Ablatives and understanding the subtleties of prepositions like "in" are very hard for me. "Mortis" as a word isn't hard at all; it's the genitive form of "mors," and means, "of death." So I have two theories, each of which finds some evidence in one of the textual variations (though of course word order in Latin isn't rigid, so either could go with either meaning).

Theory 1: "Be for us a foretaste of death upon contemplation"; ie, when we think of you, let that be a foretaste of when the same thing will happen to us. This matches up very well with "Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine" (Josquin, Elgar, etc.), and seems to me to mess with the meaning of "in" the least.

Theory 2: "Be for us a foretaste of the trial of death." This one matches up best with the translations I've read, and would support Mozart and putting "mortis after "in," with "examine," since they'd be a semantic unit (the trial of death). However, while I can justify "trial" because the "trial" of death could be God's weighing of us, I have a hard time justifying translating "in" as "of."

Well, I think I should email my old Latin instructor about this, but of course it's more fun to write a blog post and get all my thoughts out in writing.