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- "Placetne vobis hoc garum?"
24 Comments
What is the "vobis" doing in this sentence? Isn't the "placetne" already asking "do you like"? So...?
Placere is, i think, the ancestor of piacere in Italian and plaire in French which mean"to please". So placetne is more "Is it pleasing" than "Do you like". That's why you need "vobis".
I think the literal translation would clear things up here.
"Placetne vobis hoc garum?", would translate to "Does this fish sauce pleases you?".
Here Garum is the subject and placetne means pleases. But pleasing to whom? YOU. We don't write it this way for an ease but the meaning would be incomplete if you don't put 'vobis'.
HTH.
The "g" in classical Latin is thought to have always been pronounced as in the words garden and grape.
Garum was probably made with fish, but to call it fish sauce is misleading as it was used for many different dishes. It must have been strong but not necessarily "fishy" in taste.
Not really. The translation to "fish sauce" refers more to the modern day fish sauce found in Thai and Vietnamese cuisine. They are essentially identical to ancient Garum (which fell out of fashion in European cuisines over the millennia)
So it means fish sauce in that sense, not in the sense that it is a sauce for fish.
It explains in the section "TIPS" of this lesson. If you're using Duolingo on the phone app, thats the reason you might not see it, in which case check out the desktop version, to read about the garum ;)
316
The word "fish" does not appear in the Latin sentence.
Do you like this sauce seems to be a legitimate answer.
It could be a little confusing since garum is not the word for sauce but the name of one. It would be right to keep the noun when translating, but then not everyone will understand what it means.
- 100
Garum is a very specific condiment, made with fermented fish and preserved with salt.
So yeah, fish sauce, not just any sauce
For "Do you like this fish sauce?" wouldn't "Placetisne hoc garum?" work better?
'Garum' is the subject here, so the verb needs to be in the third person. It doesn't work with 'placesne' or 'placetisne'.
Literally
'Is the fish sauce pleasing to you?'
Vobis is the dative (to you). This is also how the verb 'piacere' works in Italian.
Ok yeah that's my bad, I clicked the verb because when I originally saw it it didn't look right. And the top definition said I like, so I went with that and thought something went wrong with the question. Sorry
Placere does not literally mean like, it's more like "be liked by" or "be pleasant for" like German gefallen or Ukrainian подобатись.
