Salvete.
Perhaps it was overconfidence but I thought things were going soooo well with this chapter until I came across this sentence.
Noli quemquam ante mortem beatum dicere!
Could anyone, please, suggest a suitable translation of this? Perhaps more importantly I’d be very grateful if some pointers could be provided as to, quite, what is going on grammatically.
I’m unsure if there is an example of an accusative with an infinitive construction or indeed if ‘beatum’ is an adjective or a noun or a participle. I’m simply perpexed. I’ve been stuck on this for a day and I feel I’ll gain more by unpicking it thoroughly rather than stumbling past in an ungainly fashion.
Thanks for taking the time to consider this.
As you probably know, noli + infinitive is a common way of expressing a negative command. The only infinitive is dicere, so we know the sentence says something like “don’t say …”.
quemquam might look frightening, so we skip ahead to ante. It’s a preposition, and it takes the accusative, so usually it should be followed by a noun phrase in the accusative. And it does! ante mortem most likely go together. Knowing that mors is feminine, beatum can’t be modifying it.
A prepositional phrase in the middle of sentence usually functions as an adverbial and can be freely removed without changing the rest of the grammatical structure. That leaves us noli quemquam beatum dicere. We have two accusatives. At least one is probably a direct object of a verb. We deduced that the relevant verb is dicere. So what’s its object? We look for something that makes sense, but nothing in this sentence is of the sort that you “say” (like eg. verbum). It doesn’t make sense to “say happy” or “say someone”. But dicere with an accusative with infinitive construction means “to call X Y”, as we have seen before in the book. And incidentally, we have two accusatives. Now everything fits together:
“Don’t call anyone happy before death” (or more idiomatically: “before they’re dead”)
Something like this would be the flow of my thoughts if I struggled with this sentence. If any of the notions I mention seem unfamiliar, it’s probably time to review some earlier chapters!
Thanks for the super informative reply. Most of your points ring clear bells bur I shall indeed review some earlier chapters. My learning style very much involves checking out any ‘leads’ and not only will I benefit from the help provided but I’ll also avoid feeling like I’ve cheated myself. Thanks.