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- "The baths are not in the for…
"The baths are not in the forum."
Translation:Balnea in foro non sunt.
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the common plural of balneum is not balnea, but balneae. the plural balnea began to be used in the post augustan period but it didn't become common. it's kinda ireegular.
see: varro, de lingua latina, ix.68; lewis&short, s.v. balneum.
I'm sorry to be so ignorant, but i would think that the plural of balneum should normally be balnei. Do you know why it was balnea and before balneae instead of balnei? Many thanks in advance for your help!
2084
Neuter second-declension nouns have the plural "-a" instead of "-i." (You can see this in English with some nouns derived from Latin: "datum" -> "data"; "medium" -> "media.")
According to Wiktionary, the "balneae" plural is because the plural declines as if the word were first declension "balnea" ("-ae/-arum/-is/-as/-is"). I don't know of a reason why this was the case, but obviously this quirk is irregular, as doubey5 said.
"balneum" is second declension neuter, and as such has a nominative and accusative plural of "-a"
If 'labrum' means 'bathtub' can't we use that in the answer instead of 'balnea'? Is the nominative plural 'labri'?
A more natural translation would be "There are no baths in the forum." Welcome to Hicksville.
Actually, your sentence says something entirely different.
The Duolingo sentence “the baths are not in the forum” indicates that there are baths but their location is somewhere other than the forum.
Your sentence states that zero baths are located in the forum, which is different. It does not point to baths being somewhere else, as the Duolingo sentence can.
If you did want to say "There are no baths in the forum" rather than "The baths are not in the forum", how would you make that distinction in Latin? Is it just a matter of changing the word order to something like "Non sunt balnea in foro"?
