Novice's embarassingly simple translation question

Latin Learning Latin
1

Hi all:

I am new here and and am trying to teach myself Latin. I am working through Sharpley’s beginner’s latin and could use some helping translating a sentence that has stumped me. The sentence is: “At Romanis erant multi dei deaeque.” In context, it seems to me that it should mean something to the effect of “But for the Romans, there were many gods and goddesses.” Romanis can be the dative plural of Romanus, but doesn’t “dei deaeque” mean god’s and goddess’ (singular genitive)?

I promise not to make a habit out of this.

– Doug

2

The construction is called Dative of Possession.
http://tutor.bestlatin.net/grammar/dative.htm

Dei deaeque is Pl. Nom.

3

That certainly makes sense, but isn’t the nominative plural of deus is di?

4

Di is, I think, more common, but Dei follows the normal rules for the 2nd declension

dei (dii)
deorum (sometimes deum)
deis
deos
deis

-David

5

One little point is that the dative here is one of the ways Latin shows possession - Rather than “for the Romans there were many gods and goddesses”, try “the Romans had many gods and goddesses”