I am just winding up my transcription of the Key to Arnold’s Latin Prose Composition as revised by George Granville Bradley. I have a question, though.
In exercise 45 we find the following sample sentence with an attached note:
In the scanned version I use for the transcription the c’s and e’s are not easy to distinguish. Therefore I am not sure whether this is supposed to mean politics or polities. I guess it is politics because that word is far more common. Still, I am not completely sure.
Does anyone have an idea (perhaps based on a better scan)?
Thank you. He does not say so in the Key. But in the textbook (p. 191) Bradley notes:
The various meanings of this phrase > res publica > (often written as one word) should be carefully noticed. It should never be translated by “republic,” but by “the constitution,” “the nation,” “politics,” “public life,” etc., according to the context, and should never be used in the plural unless when it means more than one “state” or “nation.”
So the warning in the Key means that singular “respublica” can mean “politics”, but not the plural “respublicae”.