Yet another poor neophyte requesting help...

[Amaranta]

I used to hang around here more often about a year ago when I was self-studying Latin in BLD; now, I'm taking Latin at university and I've got one sentence for my homework I'd like clarification on.

The Latin sentence (it's a drill so there's no context): Poeta bona cogitat bonusque habetur.

My translation (of sorts): Poeta seems to be nominative. I'm getting thrown by the two verbs, neither infinitive. Bona and bonus seem to be being used as substantive adjectives. I really don't know how it all fits together though.

Thank you very much for any help.

Oh, and is there any way to do macrons on this board?

[amans]

poeta is indeed nominative. There is a good probability then that it is the subject of the verbs: they agree with that.

So what does poeta do this to? The direct object: only bona could is in the accusative, - as you already stated, it can be a substantive adjective.

Now, the second part of the sentence: bonusque habetur. Perhaps you can recognize the verb as a form of habeo ('I have'). habetur is a passive: in this case I'd translate it as "is" or "exhibits himself"; bonus should make sense then.

I hope this helps.

Don't know about the macrons, though.

[Amaranta]

Ah, thanks. My problem was with habetur; the only translations I'd considered were he/she/it is held or considered; neither of which really makes sense.

[benissimus]

"is regarded" or "is considered" would be more appropriate translations for habetur here. There is no need to guess as to whether it is "he", "she", or "it", since you already know the subject is a male, poeta, and the adjective bonus provides another clue to the gender of the subject.

Don't bother with macrons on the Latin board - they are difficult to represent and most of us are used to reading Latin without them anyways. If you really must, you need to look for fonts that have macronized vowels and enter them with a special tool into the forum or else copy the vowels from somewhere else. Some people have also resorted to using accented vowels (and other methods) as an alternative to macrons.