We're deep into Second Form Latin with our 8th grader, and as extra credit, we're working up a ridiculously long English sentence (lots of prepositional phrases, adjectives, adverbs, and possessives) to translate into Latin, to flex our known grammar and vocabulary.
A few questions that have come up:
Kraig
Nevada City, CA
A few questions that have come up:
- The subject of the main sentence we're using is "brave soldiers and strong horses", which would translate to milites fortes et equi fortes, and then we want to say, "Our brave soldiers and strong horses". Question is, where should nostri go? After milites fortes, after equi fortes, or perhaps after both? I would imagine it depends on whether we want to say that both the soldiers and horses are ours, which is what we're assuming. In English, we'd naturally apply "our" to the soldiers and the horses, but I'm wondering if it needs to be more precise in Latin with the personal pronoun possessive adjective on both nouns.
- The verb of the sentence we're building is were hauling, or trahebant, and we're adding a bunch of prepositional phrases. Question is, as those phrases get longer and more numerous, would we still keep placing trahebant at the end of the sentence? For example, "Our soldiers were hauling rocks" is Milites nostri saxa trahebant. Adding "on the road" would add in via--and with the simpler examples we've seen in the textbook, we'd have Milites nostri saxa in via trahebant. So far, so good. But now we're adding much longer prepositional phrases like "on the road near the city at the foot of the hills"...and will be adding more adjectives in those phrases and even more phrases. At some point, then, the trahebant becomes quite separated from the subject of the sentence. Would we still keep placing the verb all the way at the end? Or is there a point at which we might start putting the prepositional phrases after the verb?
- One of the prepositional phrases is "near our enemy's city", which we think translates to juxta hostis nostri urbem because "our" modifies "enemy's" and so nostri would follow hostis rather than following urbem. Is that correct? And if we then say, "near our shameful enemy's wretched city", would that be jutxa hostis turpis nostri urbem miserem?
Kraig
Nevada City, CA
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