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- "He sleeps at home."
"He sleeps at home."
Translation:Is domi dormit.
52 Comments
I get why we're asking for personal pronouns this early but failing to include them should not be marked wrong, and doing so very much gives the student the wrong impression of Latin as a language
Flag it and report it. This is the early beta release and there will be inconsistencies. It is our job as beta-users to report any issues we encounter.
There is no way to flag it. The only option available when flagging, is that the English sentence is unnatural.
Sometimes it allows us to omit the pronoun (which is normal in Latin), and sometimes it doesn't. I'm reporting every example that gets it wrong.
The pronouns make the sentences weirdly over-emphatic, like someone is shouting "HE is at home!!!"
I very much agree. One hardly ever reads it in classical texts. A solution allways is to write (Is) domi dormit.
No, domus is one of a handful of words that take the locative case. That's why it's domi and not in domo.
Great question!
Most location is expressed through the ablative case. Most nouns did not use the locative.
I do teach my students the rules for Nguyen to use the locket, but it’s a lot simpler to simply remember: expect the ablative unless you see the locative.
Names of some cities in particular, like Rome, will use the locative though.
Only the names of cities/small towns/villages have a locative form. The actual word "urbs" does not.
Unless I'm mistaken, I word order shouldn't matter for the answer as long as the right phrases are in the right clauses and with the correct verb?
The notion of "free" word order is pretty misunderstood. There is always a default order that is preferred. Other orders place the emphasis elsewhere.
It's the equivalent of:
He sleeps at home.
vs
He's the one who sleeps at home.
vs
Home is where he sleeps.
vs
Sleeping is what he does at home.
etc.
Sure, they're all perfectly grammatical, but as far as the meaning that is conveyed, they are not interchangeable.
As a Latin teacher, I would disagree that your translations convey the difference in word order.
The notion of SOV word order is not universal among authors, especially across time periods, and it is, of course, limited to prose.
Spoken Latin, especially among the common people, would not have been SOV all the time, which we see from graffiti.
As a teacher in Latin and Greek, if they want to teach classical Latin, the preferred word order is with the verb at the end. The exceptions and the fact that word order in poetry is different, should not be important for the basic level.
Years ago I read statistics on Latin word order. SOV was around 45% of all sentences and SVO was around 40%. The balance was all the other fun ways. SOV was technically the most common, but SVO is also common.
Perce, is that Classical Latin or all Latin? Does it include poetry?
These things matter, but in the end none of it does :) lol
From Wikipedia:
SOV : 63%
OSV : 21%
OVS : 6%
VOS : 5%
SVO : 4%
VSO : 1%
@Daniel
Oh yes, you are right, my bad, I've forgotten to mention what kind of texts, as authors can have some habits about different word orders but I became aware of it only recently.
It's:
- classical Latin,
- prose, not poesy,
- and from only one author, Caesar,
so it could have a (little) bias.
but:
-It was chosen in the Wikipedia to illustrate the Latin word order, the place of the verb in the sentence, so it's the reason why I used "little" about the bias. If it's a big bias, the Wikipedia article needs to be fixed (it happens, it's not always accurate, far from there),
-and, I believe that Caesar is a good example of classical Latin corpus (very often used to teach Classical Latin). If there's difference in the % between authors, it is probably small % differences.
Any way, this % chart is really informative about the placement of the verb trends.
But it shows a very low SVO, (maybe it doesn't use the verb to be often, but prefers verbs of action, as a war narrator?)
It seems that's not their philosophy, because they've been accepting a lot of my suggestions with different word orders. I think it's just that Duolingo isn't designed for variable word order, so they just have to capture every possibility manually, and they're counting on us beta users to find them.
There should be a macron over the locative: domī. Further, as others have noted, is is redundant.
Redundant, but not incorrect. And teaching the nominative of pronouns isn’t without merit for language learners.
Yes, I agree, but it is here taught as though it is synonymous with the English usage, which it is not. It does not say ‘He sleeps at home’, but rather ‘He sleeps at home’, perhaps as opposed to someone else. @david.megginson said the same thing.
I disagree a bit. Without larger context, parsing the translation to finely simply isn’t possible.
Translating isolated sentences provides isolated benefit. You can teach verb conjugation, noun declension, case usage, etc, but you miss out on all the larger contextual clues that can help you decide which definition of a word works best, or how a given adverb strengthens the sentiment of the sentence, etc.
Am confused by "Is" at beginning of sentence. Does "Is" mean "He?" NOTE: Simple answer, please. I'm not an actual Latin student so terms such as declination, 4th conjugation, locative, etc. Are beyond me. I'm doing this Duolingo Latin to deepen my understanding of English which is largely baded on Latin. Simple answer much appreciated. Thanks!
Yes. “Is” means “he.”
Also, if you want to get better at English grammar, there are better languages to look at. English gets much of its vocabulary from Latin but grammatically it is still a Germanic language.
If you really want to learn Latin, though, you're still going to need to learn all the terms. It just comes with the territory.
Here is a plain-English overview of what the cases are and how they work:
Latin cases, in English
Here are the noun and adjective declension charts:
declensions 1-3
declensions 4&5
Adjectives must agree in gender, number, and case with the nouns they modify, but they have their own declensions. Sometimes you get lucky and the adjective just happens to follow the same declension as the noun, but that is not a guarantee.
For good measure, here are the verb conjugation charts:
1st Conjugation
2nd Conjugation
3rd Conjugation
3rd i-stem Conjugation
4th Conjugation
What Magister_Smith said. English might have taken a lot of vocabulary from Latin (directly or via French after the Norman Invasion), but linguists solidly place English as a Germanic language, not at all a Romance language.
I wrote, "Is dormi et domi," which seems to be am exact literal translation, but it was marked as wrong. I don't know Latin so I can't say I was right, but it is a little confusing for a learner.
Not quite.
Is dormit - he sleeps
The is is optional.
Domi - at home
The et (and) isn't needed.
Does that help?
Maybe giving a brief info about why that personal pronoun is used.. that is naturally difficult for me in italian as well
how come we don't need to use "at" ion the sentence and just say home after sleep?
English uses prepositions, like “at“ in order to communicate information in this way. Latin often uses prepositions to, but other times simply changes the form of the word.
Here “domi,” a form of “domus,” means “at home.”
No, normally it would be in domo, but domus goes into the locative with no preposition.
In Latin “is” is a pronoun. It so nominative, singular, masculine and means “he.”
What is the difference between home an city that you use in before sleeping in a city but not before sleeping in ones home?
The word “domus” has some interesting forms that only apply to it. Normally the preposition “in” is used to denote location.
The locative case is only used with the names of cities/towns and small islands, along with a very small handful of common nouns including "domus". Everything else gets "in" plus the ablative.
For more details, please see my comment above with the links.
