Hello, everyone.
Though I’ve been a member of the forum for a while, I kept my studies on hold until the beginning of this month, and only now I’ve been dedicating myself to Latin once again. I’m studying it on my own, and, although I’ve got a couple of very good support materials (both in paper and online, and both in English and Portuguese – my native language), I’m mostly following Napoleão Mendes de Almeida’s Gramática Latina, which is both a grammar book and a course. I’ve been able to go through it quite well so far, but it seems I’ve finally got stuck and can’t help reaching out for help.
The lessons are usually set with throughout explanations about their topic, then questions regarding the points studied, and then translation exercises (both from Latin to Portuguese and vice-versa). Right now I’m in lesson 54, ‘Compounds of _Sum_’. The following are the sentences I got stuck at, and I’d really appreciate it if someone could give me some hints about the problems I’m having with them.
First, the translations from Latin:
‣ Prudentia abest a malitia distatque plurimum.
Although this one wasn’t particularly difficult, I thought it sounded a bit awkward, so I’m not sure my translation is correct: ‘Prudence is distinct from wickedness and stands apart from it.’
‣ Inter meam domum et tuam interest flumen et pons.
When I first looked at it, it posed no mystery, until I paid attention to the verb itself. My initial translation was just ‘There are a river and a bridge between my house and yours’, but since flumen et pons is the subject, I’d have expected intersunt, so I’m puzzled – am I missing something obvious or do I just lack knowledge on some special agreement issue going on here? I see in Charles E. Bennett’s A Latin Grammar (§ 255, 2) that the verb may agree with just the nearest subject when it comes before it, but I can’t tell whether that’s the case here because I haven’t been taught that in Almeida’s course yet.
‣ Quid hoc mihi profuit? Immo obfuit.
This is a typical case of a sentence the sense of which I’m quite sure of, but which I can’t put together grammatically. Almeida is kind enough to point out that hoc is the subject and quid the direct object, and I’m positive that translates along the lines of ‘How was this useful for me? On the contrary, it was prejudicial.’ I’m probably confused because of prosum governing the dative and then quid being accusative, and also possibly because I’m not being able to translate quid itself properly (as I can’t make it fit as ‘what?’, ‘which?’ in this exact context).
Then, two sentences I’ve just remembered from an earlier lesson (lesson 52, ‘3rd and 4th Regular Active Conjugations’). These were to be translated into Latin. I’ll give the original Portuguese sentences below, then my own English translation of them, and then the Latin translation I came up with, and then mention the point I’m curious about.
‣ O inimigo se aproxima para devastar os campos.
‘The enemy approaches in order to devastate the fields.’
Almeida explicitly pointed that para devastar (‘in order to devastate’) was to be translated with the Future Participle, so I came up with:
Hostis agros vastaturus appropinquat.
Then, the next sentence of the exercises was:
‣ Vou para ver os jogos.
‘I’m going (in order) to see the games.’
My rendering of it:
Eo ludos spectatum.
In this case, as Almeida didn’t indicate anything special about it, I used the Supine, as ‘(in order) to see’ comes after a verb of motion and expresses a purpose, so no problems with that. The question then is – if appropinquo is also a verb of motion, and devastating the fields is the enemy’s purpose, why was I asked to use the Future Participle instead of the Supine in the first of these two sentences?
