Answer key for Ex 95 Q4

[Thomas3333333]

Salvete,

I have a query about the answer given for this Question.

The Q is:

Pulchra est terra Italia

The answer given is: Beautiful is the land of Italy

Is Italy still in nominative case despite the answer being: "of Italy". Or is it a genitive case?

Thankyou so much for any assistance you may give me on this.

Thomas

[Gonzalo]

The Q is:

Pulchra est terra Italia

The answer given is: Beautiful is the land of Italy

If what you typed is right, the answer which you get, I think, is not well because the genitive of first declension is -æ.

Pulchra est terra Italia The word Italia is written in apposition, otherwise it might be expressed in other way. It would be properly said: Pulchra est terra Italiae, where Italia (nom.) takes its genitive, connected to terra. I think here we have a semantic problem. Terra is able to be esteemed like, in English, sand or like native country/fatherland (lat./hispanice patria).

[modus.irrealis]

This is one of the differences between Latin and English which you'll pick up. In the Latin sentence, it's a case of apposition as Gonzalo said. So basically Italia would be put in whatever case terra is. For certain words denoting places, this was the normal construction in Latin. For example, "the city of Rome" is urbs Roma (or urbem Romam if it needed to be accusative, and so on) and normally not urbs Romae.