Taking liberties with some verbs

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seminomadic
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Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Jan 06, 2014 5:59 pm

Taking liberties with some verbs

Post by seminomadic »

I'm on unit 3 of Wheelock's right now and can't help but feel there are some translations of verbs I've encountered which might make them more intuitive or natural in our current vernacular which aren't listed as definitions in Wheelock's.

laudare - to give credit (book uses 'to praise')

debere - should (book uses 'to owe, ought, must')

servare - to watch over (book uses 'keep, save, guard, preserve')

errare - to be wrong (book uses 'to be mistaken' [v. formal], 'to err' [archaic] s.t. 'to make a mistake')

Looking forward to thinking what the more experienced in translation than me (ie everybody) feel about these. Maybe there are verbs in Latin I haven't yet met which are more exact applications of the bold-faced words I mention above.

Thanks in advance.

Qimmik
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Joined: Mon Mar 18, 2013 10:15 pm

Re: Taking liberties with some verbs

Post by Qimmik »

You shouldn't expect a one-for-one relationship of each Latin word to a specific English word. The on-line version of Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary generally gives a reliable surey of usages (although it's now about 140 years old and the Oxford Latin Dictionary is generally an improvement over its predecessor, at least for archaic and classical Latin--the time range of the OLD ends somewhat earlier than L&S). You'd do well to turn to L&S when you have a question about Latin vocabulary.

http://perseus.uchicago.edu/Reference/l ... short.html

One feature of L&S that is particularly useful is that it provides citations to specific texts, so that you can figure out what period a given word, or a given usage of a particular word, belongs to.

seminomadic
Textkit Neophyte
Posts: 12
Joined: Mon Jan 06, 2014 5:59 pm

Re: Taking liberties with some verbs

Post by seminomadic »

Thanks!

I hear what you say about the one-for-one exchange. Maybe I should have made it more clear that I didn't expect my bold-faced usages to be anywhere near all-encompassing or always appropriate. I was just asking if they were also possibilities.

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