Second Form Latin, Lesson 11, worksheet 5

[KatyA]

Can someone please help me figure out the proper sentence parts for the kinds of sentences below?

1. Our king (S) was praying (verb) before (prep) the arrival (OP) of the army. Answer: Rex noster ante exercitus adventum orabat.

What part of the sentence is "the army"?


A similar thing happens below in number 4:

4. He saw (sub/verb) a lamp (Direct object) through (prep) the window (OP) of our house (?). Answer: Per domus (gen) nostrae fenestram (accusative) lumen vidit.


Again, what sentence part is the "house"? And, is it the same in questions where the form takes on an apostrophe form of possession, like number 8:

8. "Your dog (sub) was sitting (V) behind (prep) father's feet (OP)." Canis tuus post patris (gen) pedes (accus) sedebat.

What is "father's"? (ie the feet of the father?) Meaning, what do I label it?

Thanks so much!
Katy

[Michael]

Katy,

The genitive is being used in all three of the sentences ("of the army" is an "of" expression modifying "arrival") We did not include a label for uses of the genitive case because we wanted merely to expose students to its uses. As mentioned in Lesson 5 of Second Form, the genitive can be used for both possession and other "of" expressions. There are actually technical names for those other "of" expressions that would require the student to learn many different names for each individual one, something we felt was too advanced for this level of Latin and would simply confuse students. We just want them to get used to seeing and using the genitive case and not worry about its technical part of the sentence. If you would like to have a label that encompasses all uses of the genitive so that you can label the parts of the sentence in question, you could use GE for Genitive Expression.

The uses of the different cases can be very confusing! I hope this is helpful. Please let me know if you have more questions.

Michael
Memoria Press

[KatyA]

Great! Thanks, Michael. It will be helpful just to have "GE" to mark that "something genitive is happening here." ; p I also know we've run across them in our English composition work, so I'll glance over those pages again for myself, now that I know what we're being exposed to.

[barcason]

In sentence #4- He saw a lamp through the widow of our house
The word order is prep. phrase, DO,Verb. I understand that order because you want to keep your DO close to your verb.
In sentence #12- The senate warned our king because of the matter.
The word order is DO, prep. phrase, verb. Why?

[pschaeffer]

Latin word order is actually very flexible. The Romans would switch the order to emphasize one word or phrase. Their language allowed that (because of its inflection) whereas ours requires a special order to show the usage of each word in the sentence. Part of learning to translate is getting used to that flexible word order.

If your student, when translating from English to Latin, gets all the right words with the correct forms but in a different order, count it as correct!

Paul