"He sleeps at home."
Translation:Is domi dormit.
19 Comments
2039
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.
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!!!"
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?
- 2039
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.
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.
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%
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!
It does not show you the correct answer after you get it wrong so that you know what your error was.
