- Forum >
- Topic: Latin >
- "Stephanus est vir."
37 Comments
I'm happy my school made me take 2+ years of Latin because otherwise I wouldn't understand anything having to do with declensions and conjugations otherwise. I find it interesting that Latin is an option on Duolingo because the whole program is pretty much immersive vs. memorizing all the endings - it seems kind of counter-intuitive. But I guess I'll see later on!
Besides learning declensions, imagine what would happen to the accepted translation list if we tried to accept anglicisations... Stefan/Steven/Stephen/Stephan/etc. would quickly multiply the number of translations by a huge amount and be hard to keep consistent, and there would always be people wanting this other version that was left out.
Can't accept every variants of a name. Yes, that's true, you're right. But there's certainly a semi-official translation for a name, as it's used in Latin textbooks. Of course it's impossible to add all the variants of a name.
For Stephanus, English dictionary translate it this way: https://glosbe.com/la/en/Stephanus
Stephen
Please report audio issues with the button in the lesson, not in the sentence discussion.
There's a guide on how to be most helpful with your reporting here. :)
Ph is might have been pronounced like in uphill, but also has the "f" sound, like in philosophy, phenix, photo. Although ph is Greek in origin and was pronounced like aspirated p+h, it has changed to f sound in both Latin and Greek soon after and in around second century continued to later pass it to other languages, ie French and Spanish, etc. The idea of pronouncing ph as f spread to other languages, for example Hebrew, where the letter פ can be p or f depending on context. Languages tend to change and normally go to the easiest way regarding pronunciation. Aspirated p-h naturally changed to f sound. U might have been pronounced line English w, but the v sound is naturally occurring in all the languages so why there's none in Latin, since some words would sound more naturally with v not u /w/? Distinction is visible on Pompeian graffiti where in one word letter u and letter v can clearly be distinguished. And since nobody exactly knows how Latin was pronounced, let's skip "aspirations" (;)) and go on with learning.
The end of the sentence is the most common verb placement. The others are also correct though, and have been added, but unfortunately it takes some time for the changes we make in the Incubator to be active for users (sometimes as long as two weeks).
Still, please report (with the button in the lesson, not in the discussion) if it's not accepted, it's still possible something got missed!
366
Because the order of words in Latin seems very flexible, I tried to translate this as 'The man is Stephanus' but it got marked wrong. Thus I am guessing that 'The man is Stephanus' would have to be 'Vir est Stephanus' or maybe even 'Vir Stephanus est'. I'm just beginning, so maybe sentence order gets explained more later...