Wheelock's Ch. 6 translations

[Feles in silva]

I just finished translating the English "Practice and Review" questions to Latin, and checked my answers against Benissumus' answer key. I seem to have gotten the cases, number and gender right, as well as the tenses of verbs, but the order in some of them deviated significantly from what Benissumus has in the answer key.

I know that Latin in word order is quite malleable, but I just wanted to check that I wasn't missing something and starting a bad habit.

The translations I had are:

11. Quare non possumus semper vera vitia tyranni videre.

12. Pauci liberi viri poterunt tyrannum tolerare.

13. Multi Romani magnos libros antiquorum Graecorum laudabant.

The last translation I got correct on the first shot, but it left me with a question:

14. Ubi possunt gloria famaque esse perpetuae?

I used perpetuae because the sentence was asking about glory and fame. So there were two things that were perpetual, so perpetual had to be in plural (nom.). If it had only been glory, I would've used perpetua. Is this correct reasoning, or was it just a fluke that I came up with perpetuae?

[benissimus]

Salve Feles,

Your translations all appear to be correct. In my opinion, the English to Latin exercises are the most important, since they demonstrate that you know the material and do not simply recognize it when you see it, so you seem to be doing well so far.

14. Ubi possunt gloria famaque esse perpetuae?

I used perpetuae because the sentence was asking about glory and fame. So there were two things that were perpetual, so perpetual had to be in plural (nom.). If it had only been glory, I would've used perpetua. Is this correct reasoning, or was it just a fluke that I came up with perpetuae?

This is a good point and you made the correct decision. If you have two feminine nouns being modified by the same adjective, typically the adjective will be feminine plural as you have it. However, adjectives modifying multiple nouns can produce some interesting phenomena.

Two nouns of the same gender typically take the shared adjective in the same gender but in the plural, as pecunia et fama sunt carae mihi "money and fame are dear to me"; agricola et nauta sunt avari "the farmer and sailor are greedy". Sometimes, however, the adjective is singular, but this often merely suggests that the adjective applies to only one of the nouns, e.g. filium et virum pulchrum habeo "I have a handsome husband and son" - the same ambiguity exists in English (is the son handsome or just the husband?). Still, nouns that do not possess sexual gender (as opposed to arbitrary grammatical gender) can take a neuter adjective, especially when the nouns are of mixed gender; e.g. avaritia (F) et vitia (N) mea (N) "my greed and vices", gladius et virtus sunt fortissima/fortissimi "(his) sword and virtue are the strongest" - in this example you might take the neuter adjective to represent two things, or you might take the masculine because, since masculine dominates the feminine case, a masculine noun and a feminine noun create a masculine group.

[Feles in silva]

Benissimus,

Thanks for taking a look at the translations (and for the answer key!). Until I found this forum the one big downside was the lack of an answer key for the Practice and Review sentences, as well as someone to ask if my chapter exercises - for which there is a key - were on track since they usually deviated somewhat from what the book had.

At least I know I'm on the right track now so that is a good confidence builder.

Thanks again.