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- "Puella non est femina."
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443
"femina" could be used for anything feminine, so also a child or even animals. The more frequent and specific word for woman is "mulier". To the contributors to this course, I'd highly recommend replacing femina by mulier, not just in this sentence but in general.
I think it depends on the dialect. In modern French and Occitan we say "femme" and "femna", which come from Latin "fémina" (also "fembra" in old Catalan) to refer to women. In modern Catalan and Italian we say "dona" and "donna", from "domina"; and in Spanish and Portuguese, "mujer" and "mulher", from "mulier".
Hopefully duolingo wouldn't be trying to teach dialectal Latin, but the standard.
Am I right in thinking Latin has no concept of definiteness? Would "the girl is not a woman" be the same in Latin?
Latin has no articles, so it could be the same. If you want some more definiteness, I think you could use words like "ille/illa" (meaning "that") or something like that (I'm not sure), but it would not be used all the time. My native language, Czech, works more or less the same way.
The audio sounds like it has been recorded in a parrot cage, but I like it.
Would it not be a more natural latin sentence if the verb appeared at the end of the sentence here? as in "puella non femina est"
Actually, it doesn't matter. Maybe in more casual Latin it would be "puella nón est fémina", but in a more formal register, it might be "puella fémina nón est", but word order is very free in Latin.
Why is it "Puella non est femina" instead of Puella est non feminina" ? It confuses me.
- 1197
You have to realize that languages have different grammar rules. In English, we put "not" before the thing we want to negate. But in Latin, "non" should come before the verb.
I thought Puella is a name XD . My answer was Puella isn't a woman LMAO
