I need-a some help

[Deudeditus]

Salvete omnes! well, after a pretty long camping trip sine lingua romana (nisi nomines saxorum animaliumque) I'm-a back with more questions to ponder. I bought a new book, as my copy of wheelock's seems to have some apart at the spine and is now in various places in my room... it's Moreland and Fleischer's 'Latin: an intensive course'..
well, the quetstion was:
Et gloria incolis provinciae et culpa, sed poeta de natura incolarum tacuit.

the best I can do is:
both glory to the province's inhabitants and the blame, but the poet kept silent about the nature of the inhabitants.

no makey sense to me...

[Deudeditus]

aaah. is it using the dative in a possessive sense? So maybe the incolae have the gloria et culpa?... I still don't know how it would be harmonious with the poeta knowing the real nature of the inhabitants...

[spiphany]

I've just been working through M & F myself in the last month, and I vaguely seem to remember that sentence. If I recall, it didn't make much sense when I looked at it originally either, and it still doesn't entirely. It's unfortunately one of the problems of this book, that the sentences used in exercises tend to be rather odd. Grammatically, they're fine, but the semantic content is often puzzling.

I think it would help if you assume there's an omitted 'erant' in the first clause, and start the translation "There was...". Then follow your second thought and take 'incolis' as a vague sort of dative of reference or possession and translate it as 'for'.
The sense here seems to be that although the inhabitants had these qualities, the poet didn't mention anything, good or bad, about them. So the 'gloria' and 'culpa' are perhaps part of the 'natura' which the poet 'tacuit'.

[Deudeditus]

gratias tibi, siph.