I am currently working (among other things) on my transcription of the “Exercises” in Adler’s “Practical Grammar” and Adler’s own Latin translations (from his “Key”). This is quite a big project. I have finished the last proofreading run, dealt with errors introduced by myself while transcribing and with punctuation typos. Now I am weeding out other types of typos (actually not that many). Most are straightforward, one isn’t:
I am not sure whether the underlined bit is correct, or whether it needs to be corrected to of the Roman orators.
As a native English speaker they both sound acceptable to me, but "Cicero was the most eloquent Roman orator’’ sounds most natural to me without the partitive genitive.
It is correct. “Of Roman orators” is a grammatically-correct shortening of “of the Roman orators” or “of all Roman orators.” It might have a slight nuance of informality, as most shortenings do, but not by much.
I agree with calvinist that “the most eloquent Roman orator” is more natural (= less formal) than using “of.”
Thank you both for your help. I opt for Adler’s own “Cicero was the most eloquent of Roman orators.” Some of the English is a bit “dated” because his textbook “Practical Grammar of the Latin Language” dates from 1858.
There is one more question. In one exercise Adler asks the following question:
I am wondering about the Was you… instead of Were you…. I know that it is correct mid-19th century English because I found a similar question in an 1832-text (“How far was you, towards the parties, from the gate, while Mr. H. was beating Mr. S.?”). However, to me this Was you sounds extremely weird and I am wondering whether this is only so for me as a foreigner, in which case I would simply let the sentence as it is, or whether an English native speaker would be “surprised” as well (in which case I would probably add a “[sic]” or a note). What do you think?
I don’t think it’s a matter of formality/informality. Rather you have a specific class—Roman orators—and in that class Cicero is the most eloquent. “the most eloquent Roman orator” would say the same less elegantly. I wouldn’t view it as a shortening of anything. It’s exact.
The beech is the most handsome of trees.
Doesn’t that sound better than “the most handsome tree” or “the most handsome of the trees” or even “the most handsome of all trees”? If not to you or your respondents, I’m sure it would have to Adler.
quid igitur? noli tangere!
EDIT I was too slow in posting this.
As to your new query, “Was you” would certainly be stigmatized as vulgar today, and would never appear in a textbook except as as example of incorrect usage.
I essentially agree with mwh. Of the three versions, "the most eloquent of Roman orators’’ sounds the most elegant. I wouldn’t expect to hear that construction from an uneducated person. That’s why I said ‘‘the most eloquent Roman orator’’ sounds most natural to me, the other version is somewhat marked to me as being ‘‘educated speech’’, which is what I think ragnar meant by ‘‘formal’’.
English used to have a second-person singular pronoun “thou” that was forced out by the second-person plural “you.” Mostly we still use “you” with the plural verb. But in some dialects it replaced “thou” instead of displacing it, and they kept the singular verb usage around.
Here Noah Webster makes the case for “you was” as being the natural usage, quoting from Boswell and others:
thanks to all of you for your competent help. I keep the “Was you…” and add a note to make it clear that this is neither an oversight nor an error on my part. I want to make a transcription which is as faithful to the original as possible (minus typos, missing and wrong translations). His text actually still uses “thou” and “art” from time to time (though not very often), by the way.