jowens wrote:Hampie wrote:jowens wrote:I know this is probably quite simple, but Linqua Latina and the college companian don't really go into it - What clues do you see that let you know it should be 'That' as opposed to 'It'? How do you know that it should be 'That beast is not feral', rather than 'It is not a feral beast', is it the word order?
hic, hæc, hoc : this
ille, illa, illud : that
is, ea, id : he, she, it
Isn't hic/ille more about 'this, right here' and 'that over there' more than just this and that? And it seemed from the previous replies, that in this instance 'ea bestia' was translating to 'that beast' as opposed to 'it/he/she'
I was lazy :3. I read the article about the latin pronouns on Wikipedia. And it indeed states that is, ea, id are very weak demonstrative pronouns. There’s also iste and ipse one of them being between hic and ille, one of them meaning ’this yours'. Anyhow, latin does not work the same way as english do, and treats demonstrative pronounce differently – it also depend on the time a text was written. A direct translation trying to achieve word to word corespondency will always be quite fuzzy. If I recall correctly, ille, illa, illud lost much of it’s ’power’ during mediaeval times and the meaning became almost synonymous with is/ea/id, the professor said when we read some latin text at uni.
Is, ea, id are indeed stronger than he/she/it – since latin will not use pronouns at all most of the times when the subject is clear only by observing the verb ending. "It’s not a feral beast" would probably not have an ’ea’ at all, since it’s quite clear from the ’est’ that it’s the beast that is the subject and the feral is the predicative attribute. Bestia fera non est. ’It’s not a feral beast’ ’Ea/ille/ipse bestia non est’ ’That beast is not feral’….
I might be wrong a lot thought, but that was my, rather confusing, five cents :3.