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- Topic: Latin >
- "Quanti crustula constant?"
53 Comments
298
I agree with most of you.
Without being attempting to be rude, Germanic language speakers do a poor job pronouncing Romance language sounds in general.
The voices sound weird. Most vowels are changed into diphthongs. R sounds are pronounced like schwas sometimes, or like a full trill when they make the effort to make it different from schwa, and overreact. When they pronounce the T sound they usually and an S (I suppose they are trying not to pronounce it as th in "this" or "thin"), but again, the result is weird (I find particularly weird the pronunciation of "matres" as something like "matsress")
I must say there are a couple of voices which sound quite natural, but the woman and one of the guys sound really really american.
Surely, if you are teaching an English course you wouldn't like your sample sound with a strong Italian or Spanish accent. I don't think there is anything bad with accents, but I believe they are not appropriate for a language course. And sure these voices have a strong accent.
In my opinion, it would be nice if they could get some Romance speaker voices.
(please, forgive my errors with English, as is not my mother language)
A Spanish or Italian voice would be great for this course, as many sounds and vowels of Latin are in those languages. I agree with you, an English accent doesn't fit Latin at all.
Very pertinent, thanks. I understand that we have to understand that we are in a beta version, like number 0.001c. ,;)
The thing is: even with a romance language we can have awful pronunciation... listen to Jacques Brel's song "Rosa", lol... https://youtu.be/v6rLLE48RL0
The female speaker has a very American "short o" in "constant" -- it sounds more like "canstant".
- 122
I don't want to be rude, but this woman's American accent is not suited to Latin at all. She has been hard to understand from the outset...
Wouldn't "biscuit" a better translation than "cookie" in your opinion?
Biscuit, comes from the French biscuit, meaning it has been baked twice in the oven (bis=Greek root for twice, and "cuit" present participle of "cuire", cooked, baked. Le biscuit est cuit deux fois. (Same thing in Italian with biscotto).
Cookie is from Cook, via Dutch koek, koekje, little cake.
But when I look up the modern definition for a cookie, it says that it's a round biscuit, with either chocolate chips or nuts chips inside the dough.
So, isn't biscuit more general and better here?
They should accept both, because in majority of the USA a biscuit is a small fluffy, buttery breakfast bread, so having only biscuit wouldn't make send for an American. Truly all synonyms for the biscuit or cookie should be acceptable.
I agree with most of what you said, but you may have suffered a slip of the finger when you said that “bis” was from Greek. It’s Latin for “twice”. This explains why the Italian is biscotto, from the Latin bis coctum. I’m English, and much prefer “biscuit” to “cookie” in the present instance.
In the translations from Latin into English, I always use biscuit(s) rather than cookie(s) and I don't think I've been marked wrong yet. I think that these two words have somewhat different interpretations between American and British English. In general, what in Britain we call a biscuit is called a cookie in American English.
- 262
I'm French and I had never ever noticed where did "biscuit" come from ^^
Thank you for this, I learned something new again today :)
Wow, I never knew about that! Very interesting. Yes, biscuit is much more fitting!
- 213
In half the globe a biscuit is a salty circular piece of bread about 1-2 cm thick which you cut in half and put butter on.
I reported a problem but it diesnt let me say which. When the woman speaks i cant hear a dufference between crustula and crustulam
I'm not trying to be rude, but I don't understand most of the audio clips in this course even though I've been a Latin student for 4 years. The pronunciation is just really weird and it's probably because of the English accent. It would be much better if the audio clips were recorded by an Italian speaker.
- 2088
You were probably taught a different pronunciation scheme than Duo teaches. You likely learned Ecclesiastical Latin, which is used by many churches and is indeed substantially influenced by Italian. But Classical Latin is what Duo uses. It is also a very common form of Latin and is believed by most scholars to be closer to how the Romans actually spoke.
I'd put Latin in context. It was a universal language, spoken by language speakers from many different linguistic, educational, and class backgrounds -- just as English is today. I would expect that hearing Latin spoken in a cacophony of different accents was just part of daily life in a marketplace in the empire. With English being my mother tongue, I happen to like the Latin that Duo recorded. Oh, and rather than complain, I remind myself to be extra grateful for it because it's free.
No. Quot means “how many”, while asking a price requires a "genitive of price” asking “how much” (=quanti).
The pronunciation is completely off in this one. Not only there's a strong aspirated C and a schwa sound where there shouldn't be (cHrustulə), there's a whole word that turns into gibberish. I appreciate the huge work that has been done by volunteering but come on, this audio has awful quality!
What it should be: CONSTANT. Con-stun-t. What the audio says: KRANG-STANT.
I wouldn't be surprised if the speaker turned out to be German. That KRA sound gives it so much away.
- 241
Speakers of Germanic languages do aspirate a lot. German tends to aspirate in stressed position, often word-initially. English does the same, but is likely to throw in aspiration virtually anywhere, as this American speaker does with both crustula and constat. She has the additional habit (in common with most Americans) of being unable to produce an O that sounds remotely like an O; which is why constat sounds like ChANSTAT. Speakers of Romance languages will often hear the aspirated c as CR, and, in common with speakers of British English, they will always recognise an American accent in that inability to say the O in words like constat.
Perhaps it is the price we have to pay to learn foreign languages. After all, to be fair, although I have not heard English speakers produce a clear vowel without a diphthong (outside of Yorkshire) I can't remember any French or Italian person I have spoken to ever having much success with a TH sound.
Yes, perhaps a Romance speaker would have been better. But I think we should have nothing but respect for people who give their time to help us learn; and bear in mind that we are exposed to different accents all the time, without permanent damage. We'll survive.
Meanwhile we'll have to internally rewrite ChAN as CON and ChRUSTULeh as CRUSTULA.
Is the difference between constat and constant purely to do with singular vs. plural?
- 448
Must it be specified which cookies we're talking about? Since there are no articles, wouldn't 'how much do cookies (unspecific cookies) cost' also be correct?
is it just me or shouldn't it by cookie singular since crustula is singular
- 2088
We're using an accusative, as you figured. "Crustula" is the plural form of the noun "crustulum," which is a neuter second-declension noun. These nouns have the "-a" ending in the plural (both nominative and accusative), so "cookies" is "crustula."
I think biscuit should be allowed. I am not used to calling biscuits, "cookies".
Why don't we use "quanta" instead of "quanti" when "crustula" is a 2nd declension?
- 2088
"Quanti" is separate from "crustula" and is not meant to agree with it; "quanta crustula" would mean "how many cookies." What we're doing here is using the genitive "quanti" to mean "how much" in terms of price. You can think of it as having an implied noun like "Of how much (price) are the cookies?"
- 2088
I'm not sure what you mean; that's simply what the Latin sentence means. Do you have a reason for thinking it shouldn't be correct?
- 2088
"Crustula" is plural "cookies" (plural of "crustulum"). I'm not certain that Duo accepts "How much are cookies?" though; you may need to stick with the closer translation of "How much do cookies cost?"
I see that. Thanks. It was really throwing me off since the meaning is basically the same.
- 448
English Second Language dude here, wondering if it would be possible to enable both 'do' and 'does' as correct answers, even though the grammar is wrong. I know a lot of ESL people are struggeling with this. As it's not a corse in the English language, it would help if the it was more forgiving with mistakes unrelated to the Latin.
- 2088
As it's not a corse in the English language, it would help if the it was more forgiving with mistakes unrelated to the Latin.
I believe correct answers are more or less individually added by hand by the contributors, and they are probably not inclined to deliberately add ungrammatical answers to the list. It would also be rather impossible to try and anticipate all the grammatical mistakes people might make. Duo generally accepts spelling errors of one letter or so, but unfortunately it does not seem to be set up in a way that accepting grammatical errors like that would be a remote possibility.
