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"The orator sends me a letter."
Translation:Orator ad me litteras mittit.
36 Comments
I would have thought so. French uses a remnant of the dative case 3rd person singular pronoun in 'lui envoyer une lettre" (send him/her a letter.) It would make sense if that came from Latin. However, it doesn't seem to. I can't find anything in my Latin dictionary under 'mitto' besides constructions with 'ad + pronoun/noun/name." Maybe someone else knows more?
I don't know, but I googled it and it seems that both (ad + acc and dat) are possible. An extensive discussion is in https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?t=7686
In responding to BryanWilli, it's generous of DL Latin to allow dative if one is attempting to imitate classical Latin. One would need to do a thorough search of TLL, but from what I can tell, mittere + ad in classical Latin is dominant, while + dative may be more common than known for colloquial speech. One finds compounds such as remittere + dative in Plautus. In Late Latin mittere + dative becomes common, and probably the usage in the Vulgate both hastened its use and contributed to the dative (indirect object pronoun such as Spanish le and French lui) in Romance languages. One finds in Acts 13:26 vobis ... missum est (ἡμῖν ... ἐξαπεστάλη); Ps 20(19):3 mittat tibi (both iuxta hebr. and LXX). At Ezra 5:17 mittat ad nos is as much indebted to the original Aramaic and LXX πεμψάτω πρὸς ἡμᾶς as to classical tendency. If anyone wanted to look more deeply in the secondary literature, one could start with Dickey and Chahoud, eds., Colloquial and Literary Latin; García de la Fuente, Introducción al latín bíblico y cristiano; Blaise, Manuel du latin chrétien; and Mohrmann, Études sur le latin des chrétiens.
1142
So what they're saying is that the English word "letter" to mean an epistle is a synecdoche? Cool.
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Is there a preference for word order: Dir. Obj. / Indir. Obj. or vice-versa or either, according to emphasis?
According to the classic on the subject - Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Composition - unless there is a need, in context, to emphasize a certain word (by placing it at the beginning or end of the sentence), the general Latin word order is/was: direct object + indirect object + verb. The example given there is:
Hunc librum filio dedi. “I gave this book to my son.”
Well, if you look in the Oxford Latin Dictionary under mitto, mittere, you'll find, in definition #17 ("to have (things) conveyed, send, dispatch"), some examples ("letters and other documents; also greetings") used with the dative. There are some clear examples cited, from Plautus and Ovid, for example.
No, it looks as though you have two direct objects: accus. me and accus. epistulam.
It only works to say: Orator epistulam ad me mittit (using prepositional phrase ad me, "to me"); or Orator mihi epistulam mittit (using the dative mihi, "to/for me") in the sense, "The orator is sending a letter for me."
The first (epistulam ad me) seems most common.
In the Oxford Latin Dictionary, I do find an example from Plautus with mittere + accus. + dative (et tibi ego misi mulierem, "And I in fact sent the woman to you"). Check OLD under 15 b for mitto.
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I entered "Orator epistulam mihi mittit" and it was accepted. No complaints here. Just wondering whether my construction is any better or worse than the given answer of "Orator ad me litteras mittit".