Translation help

[mdsteininger]

I am using the latina christiana 2 program and I am having difficulties with the translation in lesson 19 drill b. I do not understand how you decide which endings to use. For example the sentance "in the trees" should be "in arbor" but I do not know what ending to put on it or how to decide what case to put it in. Can you help me with this? Thanks! Shalom

[martin]

If you want to say, "in the trees", you are dealing with a noun: trees (arbor, in Latin). The question is, in order to say this, what form do you need to put this noun in? In Latin, a noun has three aspects to its form: case, gender, and number. Each noun only has one gender. In the case of 'arbor', the gender is masculine, so we don't have to worry about that, and it will not affect the form in this case.

So we are left with decided whether it is singular or plural (number) and what case it will be in.

First, we simply start the expression with "in". It is the same in Latin as in English:

in

Then we need the proper form of arbor, which will be determined by its number and its case. The English word "trees" is obviously plural, so we will want the plural form. We also know, if we look at the vobulary list, that words following "in" take the ablative case. So we want the ablative plural form of 'arbor'. Here is the declension of arbor:

SING. PL.
NOM: arbor arbores
GEN: arboris arborum
DAT: arbori arboribus
ACC: arborem arbores
ABL: arbore arboribus

We want the ablative plural form, which is the form on the bottom right-hand column: "arboribus".

Therefore, we get:

in arboribus

Let me know if that helps.

Since it is


I am using the latina christiana 2 program and I am having difficulties with the translation in lesson 19 drill b. I do not understand how you decide which endings to use. For example the sentance "in the trees" should be "in arbor" but I do not know what ending to put on it or how to decide what case to put it in. Can you help me with this? Thanks! Shalom