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- "Me bene habeo."
49 Comments
2158
Thanks for this link on Latin consonant pronunciations, Rae!
Also by the same guy on vowels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwtgvwJljto
And his yt.com channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrMiGmO4X9WeWq1fMm_7avg
1204
from what little I do know the h is not silent but it soft, like a pronounced exhale of sorts.
818
There are many latin pronunciations used today, with the most popular being Ecclesiastical (the pronunciation used in the catholic church, which is based on modern Italian phonology) and Classical (the reconstructed pronunciation of Latin from around the birth of Christ). Both are valid, but they have some differences; one of which being that the H is pronounced in Classical Latin, but not in Ecclesiastical Latin.
"Habere" is literally "to have/to hold". Therefore the reflexive pronoun is required for it to say "I hold myself well".
We use "well" in English as a health-related adjective (I am well), but outside of that context it is an adverb. "Bene" is typically an adverb and we cannot assume that Latin uses adverbs in the complement to describe the subject (?Ego sum bene).
From http://rharriso.sites.truman.edu/latin-language/latin-word-order/,
Adverbs do not have endings to indicate agreement, so they are “velcroed” to the word they modify, usually coming directly before.
From that, I would think that it is correct to inject the adverb between the reflexive pronoun and the verb.
780
"Me bene habeo" = I am well. OK. But when I translate "male me habeo" as "I am bad", the answer is wrong and it is "I feel poorly". Could someone explain to me ? Thank you.
1071
'Me bene habeo' literally means 'I hold myself well', which we translate as "I feel good'. You can almost think of this as the answer to the question "how are you holding up?". "Me male have", "I hold myself badly", just means the opposite of "me bene habeo", and we have to translate it to something with an opposite meaning. "I feel poorly'" is just one possiby translation.
660
But, Michle, you can say "I feel bad" when you don't feel well physically or emotionally.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/do-you-feel-bad-or-feel-badly
780
Thank you for your reply. It's not very easy to learn Latin through English, I'm French.
- "I am" is "sum", not "sums".
- You cannot have more than one conjugated verb in the same phrase. You would not say "He is has".
- Latin does not say "I am have" or use "esse" to help conjugate verbs.
- "Se habere" literally means "to have oneself".
(ego) me bene habeo
Here are the verb conjugation charts:
1st Conjugation
2nd Conjugation
3rd Conjugation
3rd i-stem Conjugation
4th Conjugation
Here is a plain-English overview of what the cases are and how they work:
Latin cases, in English
Here are the noun and adjective declension charts:
declensions 1-3
declensions 4&5
Adjectives must agree in gender, number, and case with the nouns they modify, but they have their own declensions. Sometimes you get lucky and the adjective just happens to follow the same declension as the noun, but that is not a guarantee.