I’m doing Wheeler’s Workbook and I don’t understand this (ch. 3)
I understand that -bus denotes the plural in dative and abl. But I guess I’m confused about the fem. and masc. uses of mea/meus, and translating it. The Wheeler key says it’s - my daughters - but I don’t understand why meis is either dative (to/for) or abl (adverbial. by, with, from, in) and not another case.
How do you translate it? if it’s in the dat. is it “to my daughters”, if in abl. is it " by, with, from my daughters"?
The possessive pronoun meus, a, um is an adjective of the first and second declension. When it refers to a masculine name, meus is declined like lupus (2nd declension, masculine name). When it refers to a feminine name, mea is declined like rosa (1st declension, feminine name). When you use it for a neuter, it is declined like bellum (2nd declension, neuter).
Your translations are fine. When filiabus meis is used within a sentence, there may be a more idiomatic English translation.
Looking at the chapter in Wheelock, I think the cause of confusion is in the vocabulary entry for filia. The book is simply pointing out that daughter is irregular in the dative and ablative plural, using filiabus rather than the filiis one would expect. This is to distinguish it from filius, since in those two forms (dative and ablative plural) it appear the same if declined following the regular pattern, whereas in all the other forms the difference between son (filius, filii) and daughter (filia, filiae) is easily visible.