- Forum >
- Topic: Latin >
- "I am a man, but I am not a w…
"I am a man, but I am not a woman."
Translation:Ego sum vir, sed non femina sum.
35 Comments
Go ahead and report it as correct. I put in "Vir sum, sed femina non sum" - which is also correct - and it didn't accept it. :)
Latin is predominantly an SOV language, so typically the verb goes at the end. But Latin being a heavily inflected language means that word order is relatively loose - so SVO sentences, like what's often presented in the course, are also correct.
Volgav vitsenanieff nivya kevach varatsach.
1059
I agree. The conjunction isn't really suitable here because the first part implies the second. I suppose saying "I am a man, not a woman" would make more sense, but I guess they wanted to fit in 'sed' into the sentence.
I think Latin is a strain for Duolingo's engine, since it's a synthetic (rather than analytic) language, and the word order isn't really fixed. There is a sort-of standard "classical" Latin -- really arbitrary rules made up for school children -- that they used to teach in Latin composition classes 100 years ago, and maybe they're following those here. When you look at medieval Latin, or even (what we know of) spoken/vulgar Latin during the classical period, there really aren't many word-order rules; ditto for poetry, where the word order changes according to the demands of prosody.
801
When I learned Latin at school personal pronouns were not used in verb conjugation except for emphasis. The verb "to be" was conjugated as :
sum es est sumus estis sunt not "ego sum" "tu es" "is, ea, id est" etc.
Also, the verb was the last word in the sentence. "Vir sum", not "Ego sum vir".
Have the Romans told us we were wrong, from beyond the grave?
They're not forbidden, but you generally use them only to be emphatic (as is still the case in modern Spanish and Italian):
"Venis." - "You're coming"
"Tu venis." - "YOU are coming."
This is just a beta version of the Duolingo Latin course, and we're all testers. I'm getting marked wrong on a lot of questions when I don't make the right guess about whether the author included or didn't include the pronoun (it's entirely random), but they're accepting my suggestions as fast as I can report them, so it should all get sorted out before the end of the beta period.