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- "Marcus urbem non condit."
29 Comments
410
What a lazy dude Marcus is compared to Corinna, he should have known that millennia later Latin students would find him lacking.
1768
Are these taught when using the desktop (web browser) version of Duolingo, because I'm on mobile and see no lessons for Latin.
411
Yeah, there's a rumor that that weirdo Marcus is building SOMETHING in his garage -- if not a city, what else could it be ?? Haha !! Like Jobs and Wozniak built Apple Corp. in their garage, so maybe we shouldn't sell Marcus short lol !!
259
Because Urbes, in the Nominativo is used when you only give some reference of it but Urbem in the accusative case is the object of the sentence.
411
Marcus urbēs nōn condit. = Marcus does not found cities. -- "urbem" is accusative singular, "urbēs" is accusative plural -- accusative case because direct object of verb -- long vowel markers, BTW, are of potential importance for understanding poetic meters, and often for understanding which syllables should be accentuated in longer words --
107
Hello,
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1041
The phrasing here is confusing. Does this mean he doesn't build A city, he builds lots of them? In what other context would the sentence work?
107
Hello,
Yes, "Marcus does not build the city" is correct... but not because of "urbem".
In Latin, there are no articles, so you are left to chose to use wether "the" or "a" (depending from the context, your taste...)
Latin is a language with declensions: the ending of nouns (and adjectives) changes according to their grammatical function in the sentence. There are many functions attached to each case, but in general:
- nominative: subject, predicative => "Rome is a city" / "Roma URBS est"
- vocative: direct adress => "City, you are beautiful" / "URBS, pulchra es"
- accusative: direct object => "He builds a/the city" / "URBEM condit"
- genitive: attributive => "Romulus is the creator of the city" / "Romulus creator URBIS est"
- dative: indirect object => "I write a letter to the city" / "URBI epistulam scribo"
- ablative: origin of a movement and... many things => "I come from the city" / "Ab URBE venio"