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Answer key for Ex 95 Q4
Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:17 am
by Thomas3333333
Salvete,
I have a query about the answer given for this Question.
The Q is:
Pulchra est terra Italia
The answer given is: Beautiful is the land of Italy
Is Italy still in nominative case despite the answer being: "of Italy". Or is it a genitive case?
Thankyou so much for any assistance you may give me on this.
Thomas
Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 9:48 pm
by Gonzalo
The Q is:
Pulchra est terra Italia
The answer given is: Beautiful is the land of Italy
If what you typed is right, the answer which you get, I think, is not well because the genitive of first declension is -æ.
Pulchra est terra Italia The word
Italia is written in apposition, otherwise it might be expressed in other way. It would be properly said:
Pulchra est terra Italiae, where
Italia (nom.) takes its genitive, connected to
terra. I think here we have a semantic problem.
Terra is able to be esteemed like, in English,
sand or like
native country/fatherland (lat./hispanice
patria).
Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2007 12:49 am
by modus.irrealis
This is one of the differences between Latin and English which you'll pick up. In the Latin sentence, it's a case of apposition as Gonzalo said. So basically Italia would be put in whatever case terra is. For certain words denoting places, this was the normal construction in Latin. For example, "the city of Rome" is urbs Roma (or urbem Romam if it needed to be accusative, and so on) and normally not urbs Romae.