"I am a woman."
Translation:Ego sum femina.
16 Comments
Femina and mulier both mean woman, but mulier is generally used by classical authors. For the checking of words, please consult Lewis and Short (free online). As to the ego, you could have a sentence with the word ‘ego ‘ if another sentence was following: ‘ego mulier sum, tu vir es.’ Latin usually does not use a pronoun. The word order: please learn the students to put the verb at the end of a sentence. That is the normal order in classical Latin.
"femina" and "mulier" are both accepted, as are all acceptable word orders (SOV is most common, but others are correct as well), both with and without "ego" (its use would depend on context we don't have, so we allow for it). Unfortunately it takes a while for the changes we make to take effect on the user-side, sometimes two weeks or more.
I understand the reasoning. However: even when you accept all the variations as answers, why don’t you use the preferred order in the examples you make? The same goes for the pronouns: Latin does use them only in certain cases, especially ‘is, ea, id’ ( often substituted by other pronouns). I really admire you and the others efforts. I just would love to see the examples as correct as they can be, esp. since you are in beta. ( note: I am not trying to be the smartass, I am a linguist, specialized in Latin and Greek.)
Frankly, I can't explain the reasoning behind it. I'm not one of the regular contributors who designed the course, just temporary help with the initial flood of reports. I am a regular contributor for other courses with flexible word order though, so I know how tricky it is to teach with the Duo format. If I had to guess, I would guess that they're using different orders and sentences both with and without pronouns to show that it's possible, because that's really hard to show any other way on Duo.
Thank you, I understand that. At the same time it makes my teacher’s heart age and worries me about other languages I might learn:-(
If you always check the forum, there are nothing to worry about, as people complain very hard when a sentence is not natural in a language. Duolingo is unusable without its forum.
For this matter, we can understand the order is flexible in a few exercices, and the correction should be always given with the most common order, I agree, that's logical, and normal & safe teaching ways.
Sometime we give students words they will recognize first, like femina, even if it's not the more common.
Personally, I don't think it's a good thing. It makes it easier to learn, but teach falsely, as we tend to memorize the exercises.
If they apply this logics, in the Spanish/Latin course, the sentence will be "Sum mulier" (mulier/mujer), and the coherence will be zero between the 2 courses. So, it's not really logical.
you really wouldn't use ego in this context. It would probably be "puella sum"
That would depend on the context. The pronoun can be used for emphasis.
"sum femina/femina sum" are also accepted, or should be, but unfortunately it takes some time for the changes we make in the Incubator to be active for users (sometimes as long as two weeks).
Still, please report (with the button in the lesson, not in the discussion) if it's not accepted, it's still possible something got missed!
"Ego femina sum" would be a more "standard" word order, "ego sum femina" changes the emphasis.
