"These girls are not speaking but singing."
Translation:Hae puellae non loquuntur sed cantant.
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It also has can bear the nuance "the illustrious/famous girls," as noted here: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/34697254
I'm frustrated to be this far along and still dropping the 'ur' from loquuntur.
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Linda, it is a so-called deponens, a verb only in the passive form, actively used. Therefore it has here always ur at the end.
This phrase seems to be beter translated as these girls do not speak but sing. How do you know that the verb is being carried out immediately? I got caught out as i tried to put "hae puellae loquuntur non sunt", why is this wrong?
There is no present continuous tense in Latin. "Loquuntur" can mean either "they speak" or "they are speaking". "Loquentes sunt" might possible, but it's definitely not proper.
To add a little bit to GaiusSolitaire's post in case it helps: the periphrastic construction (present participle + esse) was part of the Volkssprache, occurs in the Vetus Latina through imitation of Greek, and becomes more common with Late Latin. See Haverling, "Actionity, tense, viewpoint" in New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax (de Gruyter, 2010) 370-74; Leumann-Hofmann-Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik, 388-89.