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- "He sleeps at home."
"He sleeps at home."
Translation:Is domi dormit.
52 Comments
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.
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.
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.
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!
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