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- "Filiae meae in urbe dormiunt…
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The ending of "filiae" sounds off to me. Hearing a long i rather than long a sound.
Dipthongs are two vowels run together. If you say a short a and a long e, you get a long i sound. I have never heard ae pronounced, in Latin, other than as in this course.
I actually make an effort to pronounce Latin 'ae' as /ae/ (tense open front/central unrounded vowel)+(tense mid front unrounded vowel)). However, when I hear a classicist pronounce Latin 'ae', it does indeed come out basically as an English long ī in their own dialect ((tense open front/central unrounded vowel)+(tense high front unrounded vowel (or /y/ off-glide))).
I suspect the Roman pronunciation was closer to /ae/ than to English ī, that is, with a slightly lower ending vowel. Since we don't have /ae/ in standard English, but we do have /ai/ (as in "bye"), it would be hard for American or British speakers to hear the difference between /ae/ and /ai/, anyway.
TL;DR English 'ī' for Latin 'ae' probably isn't exactly right, but you'll need to get used to it.
It's not the only case where it's difficult to hear the words. In my Swedish course, there is a button for slowing down the speech, which is often very useful. By the way, I heard it as deliae as well.
I have a problem with this American English. For me a city has to have a cathedral, therefore, almost all urbs are towns. Sometimes town is accepted as a translation and sometimes it isn't. Also, there is no option in the reporting list that enables a correct report in such cases.
What? Ancient Rome didn't have a cathedral, so I suppose the Romans were wrongly applying their own word to their own city?
Really! I was talking about the translation of urbs to town not being accepted. I explained that the English English use of the word city is very different from the American one. I should like the word town to be accepted for urbs.
Here is a British definition of city: "a place where many people live, with many houses, stores, businesses, etc., and which is bigger than a town: " From the Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/city
Beijing is a very large city. I don't know if it has a cathedral--but I am sure it is not prominent-- definitely not a defining characteristic of Beijing
What do you call Istanbul and Beijing?-- towns? I suspect that Istanbul does not center around a cathedral. And I bet its mosques are much more prominent.
Why make it difficult? The cognate of "urbs" is "urban" "Towns/ villages are more often in rural areas, "Cities" are "urban areas".
Note that the word "village" comes from the French (and from Latin). https://www.etymonline.com/word/village
See pye20 below
Like us, the Romans had different words for "city" and "town" ("Urbs" mostly referred to Rome and the large towns of Gaul).
The word for "town" would be "oppidum."
In the days of Julius Caesar, you are right, most locations would have been considered "oppidi." The application here belongs completely to DL, and their conceptualization of "Urbs" is mostly based off of the modern American word "city," which actually has a different connotation from both the classical sense of "city" and the Latin word "Urbs."
Hope this helps!
In the U.S., many cities have a Catholic cathedral. They just are not the centerpiece of the town. I imagine that is true in many other countries. It has nothing to do with "American English". It has to do with geography, especially human geography.
The pronunciation of "urbe" sounds almost like OR to me; I thought the "u" sound was more like "oo" as in moose. Is this an issue of "classic" versus "ecclesiastical" pronunciation?
No, just a foreign accent probably. I mean, we're all "foreigners", even today's Italians. "Orbe", however, would be something different: a circle.
The first is for a masculine noun, while the second is for a feminine plural noun.
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I don't know, but I'm thinking, it's according to the gender of what's reffered to. For instance, when referring to filiae, you'd use maea, and filii, use mei.
I'm curious about the difference between "mihi/tihi" and "mei/tei".
https://www.latin-is-simple.com/en/vocabulary/adjective/47/?h=meum
mihi and tibi are Dative forms of me and you (singular familar form of you) An indirect object is an example of something that would be Dative.
mei is my while tei is your (Genitive forms of me and of you)
States correct answer is "My children sleep in the city." Isn't children liberi?
The word "liberi" can also mean "sons" or "children". I wonder though if it originally applied to sons of free citizens. https://www.online-latin-dictionary.com/latin-english-dictionary.php?lemma=LIBER200#
Keep in mind that "Filii" is the masculine "sons" or "children" that we learned at Duolingo so far and "Filiae" is the feminine plural for "daughters" or "children".
