Textkit Greek and Latin Forums

Could someone look over these please?

The topics for this unit are:
Result clauses
Relative clauses of characteristic, result, purpose

1. They ran across the fields so quickly that they arrived home faster than their friends.

Tam celeriter trans agros cucurrerunt ut celerius quam amici domum advenirent.

2. There is no one who does not know that the commander of the allies has been in charge of the troops for many years.

Nemo est qui nesciat imperatorem sociorum copiis multos annos praeesse.

3. The storm was so great that everyone wondered why the ships had not been destroyed.

Tanta tempestas erat ut omnes mirati sint cur naves non delatae essent.

4. They so wanted to get help that they ran as quickly as possible to where they might get it.

Auxilium parare tam voluerunt ut quam celerrime quo id pararent currerent.

5. He was the only one in Rome who did not know what his daughter was doing.

Romae solus erat qui nesciret quid filia faceret.

6. It is possible that the old men have suffered more than we know.

Fieri potest ut senes plus doloris quam scimus pati sint.

Yeah, they are grammatically fine. i really like your word order in a couple.

In the first you could use the more idiomatic construction of "they reached home awaiting their friends" in stead of introducing a comparative clause. i.e. domum amicos exspectantes advenirent.
Maybe if you wanted to make the sentence more Ciceronian, you could say 'agros transversos tam celeriter cuccurrer(e/unt) ut...' since, as far as i know, he didn't use trans.

(2) was great!

in (3) it may have been nice to reverse the order of the past participle and form of sum, perhaps ending with 'essent deletae' for emphasis.

In (4) I haven't seen auxilium parare before, in the sense of getting (non-military) help. Perhaps '(alicuius) opem implorare' may have been more idiomatic. I think, too, that 'adeo' should be used instead of 'tam' as it is the extent of the verb itself that introduces the consecutive/result clause. I think in the second half a demonstrative might have to be added to correspond to the relative. I always find it hard when you have little hidden relative clauses, but I think it should be written as "they ran as quickly as possible to the place from where they might...", which would mean slipping something like eo/illuc and then unde, so:

ut quam eo celerrime unde eam implorarent currerent.

(5) is v nice.


(6) I was sceptical about 'fieri potest ut' - as i thought it was a Late Latin thing of Augustine - but (the divine) Sir Mountford's Bradley's Arnold put me in my place. Nice! plus doloris has the partitive genitive and is formed correctly, but seems to jar for me, I think it is because patior is left without an object...maybe plurem dolorem would be more correct. i need to look into that one. And, a stickier subject still, but it is likely that the present subjunctive would be used after the quam.

But these are all minor points.
Very good.

~dave

haha even I knew "fieri potest" = "it is possible"

Una mihi illa est hodie victoria

Sometimes bingley your word order is quite nice. I agree that number 2 is rather sweet

Thank you both. Interesting what you say about my word order. I tend to translate in chunks and then re-arrange parts of the chunks and the chunks as a whole to what feels right, though I couldn't really say why it's right.

re: fieri potest ut

It wasn't so much its existence i was unsure about, it was its usage in Classical Latin, as I had only seen one instance in that period and that was in Cicero's letters (Fam.VI), which were often written in a different style.
The reason that I concede to it being OK, despite its rarity, is that Mountford/Bradley/Arnold mention it without comment, and they tend to adhere to the Golden style. I have, too, found an instance now in Cicero's Pro Caecina, so it has to get the green light!

~dave