- Forum >
- Topic: Latin >
- "I feel poorly."
"I feel poorly."
Translation:Male me habeo.
48 Comments This discussion is locked.
I feel "poorly?" I had to look that one up. Apparently the British do use it to say they aren't feeling well. In the USA most people would say *"I feel bad."
We do indeed say 'poorly'; for me, 'I feel bad' would imply I have a bad 'conscience' rather than I'm feeling ill.
In the U.S. I think "I feel bad" (and "feel badly") refers to conscience or to sympathy -- e.g., "I feel bad for her." But "poorly" is never used in American English to refer to health. Those of us who do know it in that context, it's either due to BBC or BritLit. If an American wants to say, "I feel poorly", we would say, "I feel ill/sick/unwell." A very formal American might say, "I did poorly on that exam" but his listeners would likely think he sounded odd.
I do agree that, in the U.S. saying, "I feel bad" usually refers to one's conscience or sympathy, but I do not agree about the use of the word "poorly" when referring to health. Of course, the use of different words changes depending on where you live, whether it be in the U.S. or somewhere else, for example you may live in an area where certain phrases and slang that are common, but where I live they are unheard of. Where I used to live, when talking about one's own health I do agree that you would usualy say something like, "I feel ill/sick/unwell." But when we refer to someone else's health we say, "She/He does not feel, so good," or, "He/She is feeling poorly." Using "poorly" when talking about an animal's health is not uncommon either. But then again, when I did start living in a different place, people often make comments about how my family speaks very "fancy" or formal compared to most (As I mentioned before people do talk differently depending on how they were raised, where they live, or where they come from).
36
In Eastern Kentucky, in the Appalachian Mountains, "poorly" is the equivalent of "not well".
In North Carolina people will use "ill" to mean "mad". I grew up in NC from 10 yo to 23 and it STILL trips me up (I don't use it).
- 1043
To be honest in my part of the US it'd be far more common to say the sentence as a negative: "I don't feel good" or "I don't feel well." instead of using a word like "bad" or "poorly", at least in the most common meaning of the phrase.
From user jairapetyan: "I feel 'poorly?' I had to look that one up. Apparently the British do use it to say they aren't feeling well. In the USA most people would say *"I feel bad."
...This is not universal across the US at all. Definitely, regional or even smaller areas will have their common phrases, but using, ahem, poor English is not a normal thing, nor should it be accepted or used as an answer in a language-learning app.
For the record or those learning, the clearer way to describe one's health would be something like "unwell", "don't feel well", and "sick" or "ill" explicitly.
"I feel bad" can mean all sorts of things - you can "feel bad" from doing something wrong, be showing empathy for someone else, or indeed describing health (though vague).
As an aside/additionally, if you feel remorse for something for example, the phrase could be "I feel badly about xyz," because "badly" is an adverb/describing an action (feel), whereas the noun/subject is whatever you feel badly about (xyz). This is different from describing a state of being like in the above examples, where "bad" or "unwell" are not describing the way in which you are feeling but are states of being/things/nouns.
Different examples with different verbs and nouns: "I did badly on the test." You didn't do well on your test. You did poorly. Did = verb (action), badly = adverb (describes an action), test = noun (subject) "I did bad on the test." Did bad? What or who is bad? Did = verb, bad = noun, test = noun. Bad is a noun, so you could replace it with another one to see how that works out: "I did house on the test." Just wrong. The "test" is the subject, what you're actually trying to talk about - not "bad".
...To summarize: This type of phrase is a difficult one that many native English-speakers use poorly often. ;) It's important to remember the relationships between your nouns, verbs, and descriptive words!
I've lived in the US all my life and use 'poorly' just like the British. I didn't realize it wasn't an American thing.
It's now too forgiving. I wrote - Me habet male - and it says i made a typo. No. I just got it wrong. Thanks anyway.
- 787
I believe that's just the way the system works, not only for Latin. It is probably just unable to differentiate between irrelevant typos and serious ones. I guess the way it works is as follows: it considers something like the ratio 'number of wrong letters' over 'length of the word' and if the result is less than some fixed threshold you get a typo, else it's a mistake.
I'd say the number of actual mistakes I get away with is roughly the same as the number of times I have an answer refused because of some silly typo, so I'm fine with the system as it is, as I suspect that improving it could be hard.
- 710
That's my reasoning too! I think it kind of evens out. Just today I missed something in Spanish because I got one letter of someone's name wrong (an insignificant typo, IMO!) but I also had a really glaring error in verb conjugation forgiven in Latin as a "typo," so I'm calling it equal. :)
Usually typos that result in real words are counted as incorrect, whilst single letter typos which result in non-words are forgiven. However, single letter typos in Latin seem to be forgiven...atm!!
I honestly don't know if this is a deep-level coding issue from the devs or a database entry issue from the course contributors. I have made typos where I put "tu est" instead of "tu es" and it forgave me as a typo instead of marking me wrong the way I would expect it to.
habeō, habēre, habuī, habitum
Means, primarily, "to have, hold" and has meanings stemming from that.
sē habēre is an idiomatic expression. It's the only time you'd see habeō as "feel."
Why do you need 'me' here when 'habeo' is conjugated? Shouldn't it be implied?
You're thinking of the subject pronoun "ego".
"Me" is the object pronoun, and it's required because this is a reflexive construction. It literally means "I hold myself badly."
Question: is there any considerable difference from "Male me" and "Me male"?
It is the accusative case of "ego." Think of the structure as the reflexive verb system you see in Spanish/French/Italian, etc.
It told me the correct answer is "ego male ago". This is the first time it has thrown the word "ago" at me. How can I know to use it if A) it's never mentioned it before and B) it shows a different answer here? I understand it can be said either way, but the lessons seem to be scattered and under explained. That being said...does anyone have a recommendation for a companion book to this app?
What is correct order? It seems like "Male me habeo" and "Male me habeo" seem to be interchange.
Yes, "male me habeo" is perfectly interchangeable with "male me habeo". :-P
Would "male habeo" not be sufficient as the suffix already indicates the first person?
- 2081
"Me" is an object here and can't be left out. The verb gives no indication of what the object is. The fact that "habeo" is first person does make it unnecessary to include the subject "ego" though.
No. The verb only conjugates to the subject. It is only the subject pronoun that can be left out. The object pronoun, which this is, is essential information that you don't get from the verb. "Habere" means "to hold". "Male me habeo" is literally "I hold myself poorly." Without the object pronoun "me", it's just "I hold poorly" and now you're saying that every time you try to pick something up, you drop it.
- 310
So "I feel poorly" is "male me habeo." According to a previous question, "I feel well" is "me bene habeo."
Why is "me" at different positions in those two sentences?
As the others said, Latin syntax is relatively flexible. Either one can go either way and mean the same thing:
Me bene habeo.
Bene me habeo.
Me male habeo.
Male me habeo.
- 2081
No particular reason, probably. The contributor(s) who wrote the exercises just happened to choose different word orders. (Or perhaps this was a deliberate choice, to demonstrate that both orders are possible.) In any case, both orders are almost certainly accepted for both exercises.
This is not the place to submit your answer. This is the place to ask any questions you might have about the lesson.
Why is it "male me habeo" and not "Male ego habeo"? Don't you say "I feel bad" and not "I myself feel bad"?
- 2081
You can't apply the logic of the English phrasing to the Latin sentence, because the Latin sentence uses an entirely different wording. In Latin, the idiom is literally "I have/hold myself badly," with "me" as the direct object.
(Note that "habeo" always needs a direct object of some sort, so "Male ego habeo" doesn't make sense; it would be as incomplete as "I have badly.")
No one here can do anything about technical errors. Next time something like that happens, take a screenshot and file a bug report:
https://support.duolingo.com/hc/en-us/articles/204728264-How-do-I-report-a-bug-
