Agricola et vitam et fortunam nautae saepe laudat.
Can anyone explain the grammatical structure to me?
Does it means " The sailor often praises the farmer and life and fortune"?
Sound peculiar, Thanks a lot.
It does sound a little peculiar. I hope that my grammatical explanation will make it clearer. First, your translation puts "sailor" as subject and "farmer" as object. But look again at the sentence:
Agricola et vitam et fortunam nautae saepe laudat.
Agricola (farmer) is in the nominative case, so it has to be the subject of the verb (
laudat). Who praises? The farmer praises...
And what is
nautae? You'll notice that
nautae cannot be the subject of the sentence. The -ae ending in the first declension can mean singular genitive, singular dative, or plural nominative. But the verb we have is singular. Also,
agricola is already in the nominative case.
So it has to be either genitive or dative singular. There's no obvious way that the dative works in the sentence, but the genitive is very appropriate. We ask, WHOSE life and fortune does the farmer often praise? The sailor's!
Note that in
et vitam et fortunam,
et...et are just like "both...and" in English.
Can you get the translation from this explanation? If you need more help, please feel free to ask!
David
by Ni » Tue Sep 26, 2006 7:59 am