Salvete!
In that passage of Familia Romana, the following reads: “Pauló post nihil á náve cernitur præter mare et cælum. Médus gubernátórem interrogat: ‘Quam in partem návigámus?‘“ (the acutes are the long vowels). The marginalia says “Quam in partem“ is the same as “in quam partem“. Neumann’s College Companion doesn’t say anything about this particular order (in between the words it governs, instead of before them), and all my dictionary (Francisco Torrinha’s Dicionário Português-Latino, 1945) says about it is that this collocation is found in poetry; my grammar (Napoleão Mendes de Almeida’s Gramática Latina; I confess I didn’t refer to Allen & Greenough or another more complete grammar, maybe I ought to have done that…) doesn’t bring any information about it. Is there some subtlety between “in quam partem“ and “quam in partem“? Is this collocation even common in Latin literature? Much thanks!
This word order is quite common in Latin. The interrogative word is fronted, but the preposition must precede the noun. And in general, the rich inflectional morphology of Latin makes possible more flexible word order overall than modern Romance and Germanic languages allow. Nouns and their modifiers can be separated without ambiguity because they are linked by their endings. Latin poetry makes elaborate use of the possibilities of this flexibility, but this is also to a lesser extent a feature of Latin prose. This is something you will get used to as you read more Latin.
So the interrogative may come before the preposition, but the noun that the preposition governs generally comes after it (are there any other cases where it comes before, besides mecum, tecum, secum, nobiscum and vobiscum?)?
In is never postpositive (after the noun). Other modifiers including adjectives can be placed before the preposition or elsewhere.
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I see. Much thanks, my friend!
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