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- "Quis est in urbe?"
73 Comments
I know you're all talking in English here but it feels like everyone's talking in Latin - ablative, aspirative plosives and tenues... I don't think I'm in Kansas anymore lol
If you're going to learn Latin, you need to know what the different noun cases are, because we're just getting started. There are different declension patterns depending on what class the word is, but I won't be getting into that here because I'm still learning that myself. This is just the basic stuff here.
This write-up closely follows this video: Latin's Case System, by latintutorial. Please watch it later for more details. I am writing this up strictly in English, and much of this terminology is universal, but all of this is specifically how they are used in Latin.
Nominative:
-
The subject of the sentence. Generally who or what is doing or experiencing something.
a. The girl is sleeping. -
The subject complement after a stative verb.
a. Mark is a young man.
Genitive:
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Possessive.
a. The mother of the girl. (AKA The girl's mother.) -
Part of a whole.
a. A section of the orange. -
Description
a. A book of great renown. -
Objective
a. A fear of zombies.
Dative:
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The indirect object of a transitive verb.
a. Tom threw the ball to Sam. -
Reference (such as the benefactive, "for the benefit of").
a. Dave cooked dinner for Olivia. -
Possession (not the same as the possessive).
a. I have a horse. (Literally, "There is to me a horse." This is the method Irish uses: "A horse is at me.")
Accusative:
-
The direct object of a transitive verb.
a. Tom threw the ball. -
The object of certain prepositions (generally motion toward).
a. Jen is coming to the house.
b. The bird flew into the cage.
c. The children are running around the tree.
d. The hole goes through the floor.
e. The flower is near the tree.
f. The ship will be sailing across the ocean. -
Duration of time.
a. We sleep for eight hours.
Ablative
This is a bit of a catch-all. My main source glossed over this, so I brought in other sources to round it out:
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Turns a noun phrase into an adverbial phrase.
a. The message was delivered by an owl.
b. She went for a walk with the dogs.
c. The Romance languages derive from Latin.
d. The apple is in the basket.
e. The painting is on the wall. -
When something happens (not the same as duration).
a. I'm going on vacation in three days. -
The object of certain prepositions (location or motion away from).
a. I live in the city.
b. He's coming from the office.
Vocative:
- Direct address.
a. Robert, how are you? (archaically: O Robert)
Locative:
- Where someone or something is located. Only used with the names of cities, towns, and small islands (proper nouns such as "Rome", not common nouns such as "city") plus the three common nouns "humus (ground)", "rus (countryside/farm)", and "domus (house/home)". These do not take any preposition. (There are also two more nouns that take the locative, but they are more rarely used.)
a. All other locations take a preposition and the ablative case. See "ablative" above.
I don't know what you meant by "tenues". I assume that's a typo, but I don't know what you were going for there. "Aspiration" and "plosive" are just ways to describe sounds. "Aspirated" means with an extra puff of air, "plosives" are stop consonants (p, b, t, d, k, g).
[There is a weird glitch that's making the entry for "Locative" bump up against the entry for "Vocative" without any space. I've triple-checked my formatting and there's nothing I can do to fix it. It's on Duolingo's end, not mine. Hopefully it will resolve itself eventually.]
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Since this is an initial overview, I would like to offer a small detail of the little I know, but may be useful (and subsequent responses will certainly be of help to me).
ABLATIVE is not exactly a "catch-all", but rather from your examples it seems to subsume the INSTRUMENTAL CASE within it, here in your iteration of Latin cases, whereas in Sanskrit, for one example, the instrumental case remains distinct, whereas Ancient Greek subsumes the instrumental within the dative case.
So, ablative and instrumental have specific grammatical identities that may be helpful to know on principle, within the Latin declension system (even if subsumed within one category they remain distinct linguistic concepts).
That could very well be the case. If memory serves, I was quoting one of my sources that called it a "catch-all". I was just beginning in Latin at the time I wrote that up, and I already fixed a bad mistake I made when explaining the dative of possession.
Wow, Rae, just wow! That is unbelievably helpful and I will watch the video at the link as well. It hadn't even crossed my mind that the Genitive would cover anything but possession!
Yes, for "in" (in English), but if it takes the accusative it means "into" with motion towards.
Ah, is that where Zamenhof got the inspiration from when he put that in Esperanto?
Indeed. English is unusual in not making more of a distinction between 1) "I am (at) home" and 2) "I go (towards) home". Compare, inter alia, Irish "Táim sa bhaile / Téim abhaile", Swedish "Jag är hemma / "Jag går hem", and Czech "Jsem doma / Jdu domů".
Yeah, Dutch uses op for on and onto, the difference is generally clear from the verb or the context.
A general rule of thumb (more often right than wrong) is a stationary preposition or a moving away preposition takes the ablative, whereas other moving prepositions generally take the accusative This doesn't always hold true, but it especially helps in the beginning.
Consonants are only aspirated when they have a 'H' afterwards: ⟨ph⟩, ⟨th⟩, and ⟨ch⟩. Keep in mind that ⟨ph⟩ is not /f/, ⟨th⟩ is not /θ/ or /ð/, and ⟨ch⟩ is not /x/. For an example, listen to the classical audio here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/philosophia#Latin
All recordings on wiktionary that were called "Classical Latin" that I have come across weren't proper Classical Latin.
I've found most of them to be quite good and true to reconstructed Latin pronunciation so far. There are certainly some that aren't so good though.
As far as I know, Latin speakers usually didn't have an opposition of aspirated plosives and tenues. Few would have been able to pronounce Greek loan words correctly.
There seems to have been some level of allophonic aspiration which lead to spellings as pulcher, but I think it was left to chance if this allophonic aspiration entered the spelling of a word.
At the same time, the point is to be pedagogical and prescriptive in this case: to teach Classical Latin as if coming from a perfect native speaker of the aristocratic class (for example -- please don't rip into this assumption :P) and to learn it as if from a perfect native speaker.
I'm not sure I got it right or not, but I think what you just said is plain horrible; I hear it on my ears going like "the point is to teach a disfigured and improper Latin as if it was all good and perfect"! Maybe I just drifted with the thought and you didn't mean what I understood at all, but if that's not the case, please remember that Duolingo could be the first and the largest teaching gateway ever that pumps the education of Latin to such a potentially very large mass of learners. When a language is taught wrong, it could stay wrong forever.
When a language is taught wrong, it could stay wrong forever.
You're giving Duolingo way too much credit. Even if someone completes a big tree on this site, it's only a jumping-off point toward learning a language. There is no substitute for in-person instruction from qualified, certified language instructors. Duolingo courses are put together by volunteers. Your fear that Duolingo will somehow ruin Latin is entirely unfounded.
So they're completely unaspirated like in Spanish? I think the two voices of the Latin course have Germanic background and therefore they're not accurate.
There are instances where the consonants are aspirated, but if there's no H there, they're not. The ones pronouncing the sentences for us should definitely make the distinction, be they Germanic language speakers or not
I've read this a lot of times. I might need to publish an article on this.
If you suppose that /kʷ/ is a labialised phoneme, then there is no information on the articulatory position in the [ʷ]. The proper definition of ⟨ʷ⟩ in IPA is labialisation anyway.
This means, you should spell it as [k̟ʷɪs] or even [cʷɪs]. Besides, it should be impossible to pronounce [kᶣɪs], if the /k/ is not in fact [k̟]. This also shows that people who suppose there is no palatalisation (I don't mean affrication) of /k/ in Classical Latin should review their analysis.
In such narrow distinctions, for sure, you can consider it advanced/fronted or palatal (so long as it's labialised since it is phonemically distinct from /k/)
Please make sure to report this - this is an acceptable answer that they probably don't have in the database yet.
It's clearly an Irish-accented /in/ = [ɛn], but should be [ɪn] in Latin
Is the "s" in quis pronounced or is it silent? The audio isn't working for me so I am having to use my best guess based on my knowledge of other languages.
It ought to be pronounced. As far as I know, there are no silent letters in Latin.
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I find the pronunciation quite weird, it sounds with an American accent (vowels and consonants). Please, consider an automatic reader if it's not possible to have native romance speakers. It's too hard to figure out what they are trying to say.
I don't disagree, but some of the voices are speaking into handheld dictaphones with children making noise in the background.
This is a beta test. I don't know that the vocals are supposed to be permanent.
There’s a bit of a strange clicking sound after the audio plays, but I’m not sure if that’s just my phone or the actual audio
the sound of the button should be after the record unless there is an old/bad equipment.
It's the sound of the recording equipment being turned off. It seems as though the Latin squad are on a tight budget.
The Latin currently available is in beta test form. I doubt that's the recording they plan to use in the long run.
The fact that we don't have the written accent here, I find it a little disruptive, as there's certainly a tonic accent, and I'm not sure the audio is right? It sounds like a Spanish speaker or Irish speaker?
I don't know how many different people are doing the audio recordings. At least two, a man and a woman. The woman I've heard sounds Irish to me.
To my ear, there are more than two and they are using different machines.
It's possible I simply haven't encountered all of the different voices.
Or I could be flat-out wrong, Rae. I haven't been keeping a list. You and I have both finished the beta Latin tree, so I assume we have heard the same speakers.
This guys pronunciation is off. He pronounced the initial vowel in 'urbe' wrong. He also pronounces 'scribit' as 'screebet'.. please fix this.
You seem to be addressing the course contributors. They do not look for feedback in the learners fora, which is what this is. If you think something sounds wrong, you need to flag it and report a problem with the audio.
No, I was talking to Hussamov. Your issue is not something the course contributors have any control over. You would want to direct your report here.
"¿Quién está en la ciudad?" = español
Esta clase es de inglés a latín. No español.
I should think so, but the DL beta test isn't extensive enough to tell us how strict Latin speakers are re the difference between a village, town and city. The "spirit" of "Who is in town?"--which someone might well say in NYC--certainly seems apt (and more likely than "Who is in the city?").
