A couple grammar questions.

[CarmentaLatin]

I hope that I'm not using this message board for the wrong purpose, but I have a couple specific grammar questions. I have written a Latin Wikipedia article and there are a couple places where I'm unsure about how to translate.

1. If a city is in the 3rd declension, the ablative would be -e, wouldn't it? But someone corrected my sentence and turned it into this:

Nunc in regione Los Feliz in Angelopoli, California habitat.

Is this sentence correct? Why would the ending be -i? Was the person perhaps mixing up the ablative and the locative?

2. Am I wrong in believing that words ending in -ista, -ae can be either gender, depending on the gender of the person referred to, and so any adjective modifying the noun will have the endings of the chosen gender? I thought I knew this, but someone changed one sentence into:

Josephus Matt est cartoonista Americana.

Shouldn't it be "Americanus"?

Gratias tibi.

--Andreas

[modus.irrealis]

Hi,

1. If a city is in the 3rd declension, the ablative would be -e, wouldn't it? But someone corrected my sentence and turned it into this:

Nunc in regione Los Feliz in Angelopoli, California habitat.

Is this sentence correct? Why would the ending be -i? Was the person perhaps mixing up the ablative and the locative?

It should be -i for the ablative because it's a Greek word and these are sometimes treated differently. Words in -polis are declined like the example of basis given here.

2. Am I wrong in believing that words ending in -ista, -ae can be either gender, depending on the gender of the person referred to, and so any adjective modifying the noun will have the endings of the chosen gender? I thought I knew this, but someone changed one sentence into:

Josephus Matt est cartoonista Americana.

Shouldn't it be "Americanus"?

You're right here. Look at this list of nouns ending in -ista, and you'll see the ones that have the suffix -ista referring to a male person are listed as masculine. And I imagine (but couldn't confirm after a quick search) that it's only more common in modern Latin usage, and would be just like Spanish and such languages where's the words are either masc. or fem. depending on the referent.

[CarmentaLatin]

Mode,

Thanks for your help. Interestingly, I think that I have always assumed that this was how the -ista nouns worked because of how they work in Spoanish and Italian. And the information concerning the ablatives of cities ending in -polis is quite valuable.

Vale.

--Andreas