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- "I am well."
"I am well."
Translation:Me bene habeo.
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I know this is an old thread, but for any future people seeing it, just to make this very clear, the Latin literally says, "I hold myself well." The initial "I" is implied in the ending of "habeo," and "myself" is stated in the word "me." There are two steps to translation: Getting the sentence out of the original language, and getting it into the target language. If a literal translation would not make sense to a listener, then we need to change it once more, so that "I hold myself well" becomes "I am well," since that makes sense in English.
Bene is a Latin word, an adverb. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bene#Latin
Me is the accusative and ablative form of the 1st person singular personal pronoun. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/me#Latin
Please do not spread incorrect information if you do not know even the basics of Latin.
The Latin listener might assume you are claiming to be a good person rather than saying you are doing well at the moment. Me bene habeo means "I hold myself well" and is the classical Roman convention. The French don't normally say, Je suis bon. in response to question, Ça va? They reply, basically, "It goes" or Ça va. The Spanish say, "¿Cómo está?" or "How is it?" Not "How are you." And the other person replies, Está bien. "It is well", not "I am well."
Etc. and so forth. Different languages/dialects have different conventions. You can't just translate another language word for word into English and assume you have it right.
Correction: "¿Como está?" means "How is he/she?", and "Está bien" means that the subject is good, like "He is fine". In Spanish you skip the subjet pronoun. "¿Como estás?"(How are you) can be "¿Como estás tú?" but it's not necessary because the word "estás" is already referring to 2nd person. Also there is a bifurcation on the definition of "estás" that can mean either "it is " or "you are".
NOTE we've got our languages confused. This is a thread for discussion of Latin, not Spanish.
(But Daniel is right, of course: ¿Cómo está? can mean "How are you? (formal)" as well as "How is s/he?")
ETA I realize the confusion happens easily if one studies more than one language and follows multiple threads. I do it myself.
Habeo = I have
Habes = You (singular) have
Habet = S/He has
Habemus = We have
Habetis = You (plural) have
Habent = They have
This is the present tense of the nominative case of habere ("to have"). There are different endings in different tenses (preterit, imperfect, etc.).
Every verb is conjugated like the above EXCEPT different categories of verbs have entirely different endings. You're going to want to find a way to look up a conjugation. In this case I googled "Latin conjugate habere" and got a chart.
This site captures all of the lessons, so you can refer to it to see if you missed anything:
https://duome.eu/tips/en/la
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.
For good measure, here are the verb conjugation charts:
1st Conjugation
2nd Conjugation
3rd Conjugation
3rd i-stem Conjugation
4th Conjugation
I think the way Duolingo works is that the user has to figure out the conjugations from repetition and familiarity/pattern spotting, unless you realise there are things (patterns) to learn, which can be found set out in tabular form elsewhere, and then seek them out to learn in order to avoid the frustration of knowing there is a logic to the pattern, but Duolingo does not set it explicitly for you in tabular form.
My impression as a user of a few years is that DL tries to avoid a lot of grammatical explanation or identifiers (gender, number, verb tense) that tend to stand between a user and the target language.
If one gives up worrying about being marked wrong, knowing that one will get another chance to get it right, it's really not a bad way to learn a new tongue. I'm still not convinced one can learn Latin this way, but I have to admit I've learned a lot more Latin from the DL beta program than I expected to do. (And I have textbooks that give me the formal explanations.)
That's right. "Bene" is an adverb. "Me bene habeo" is literally "I have myself well". "Ego sum bene" is not something they said in Latin, that's just a word-for-word swap with English, which can use "well" as an adjective in the context of health and wellness, and which uses "to be" in many different contexts that other languages do not.
It's only in English that we can use "well", which is usually an adverb, in the context of health and wellness as an adjective. You can tell "bene" is an adverb by the way it is unchanging.
Also, "Sum bonum/bona" is not idiomatic in Latin and would mean more like "I am a good person".
The idiom in Latin is "Bene me habet" (literally "I keep myself well") and "Bene ago" (literally "I am doing well" -- literally do-ing)
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I am well = Ego bene sum = Io sto bene [Italian] I am a good person = Ego bonus sum = Io sono buono [Italian]
A few reasons:
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"est" is the 3rd person conjugation. You need to say "ego sum". It's "I am" after all, not "I is".
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"bene" is strictly an adverb. It does not compare with the English "well" which is an adjective when used to discuss health.
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"Me bene habeo" is idiomatic in Latin. It's literally "I hold myself well", thus "bene" is an adverb modifying "hold," which is an active verb.
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Stative verbs such as "esse/to be" take adjectives because as verbs of state, anything in the predicate is a subject complement, meaning it directly modifies the subject, not the verb.
Amanda, yes, the literal translation is Bene sum, but listen to Rae: that isn't how Romans actually stated their health.
Compare to the Spanish, ¿Qué pasa?, which became English slang back in the 1970s. Now one can ask and answer the question literally--¿Cómo estás tú? "How are you?" Estoy bien. "I am well."--but in various places at various times, the expression ¿Qué pasa? actually elicits the response Pasa bien. "It goes well."
Compare also to current American slang: "How's it hangin'?" "Whaaaaaat's up?" and "How they treatin' you?" Now all of these CAN be answered with the literal, "I am well" (Estoy bien or Bene sum), but they can just as well be answered without the use of any form of "I am". "Hangin' to the left like always." "Nothing's up!" "They treat me fine."
I believe a fluent speaker of Latin would understand Sum male and maybe even say it in some contexts. Me male habeo is merely the more common idiomatic convention in everyday greetings. Habere means "to hold" as well as "to have". I don't know why Me male habeo is translated "I hold myself", but it usually is, as Rae pointed out immediately above.