Hi Jason, I’ll agree with you that to a number of speakers it may sound perfectly fine. But the reason I used that example was for a larger purpose, which is to show that languages force semantic information (gender, tense, etc.) that other languages do not. This is a basic structural difference between languages.
Consider this sentence:
Conveni amicum.
I met a friend.
I think that most would say the English translation is good, and I’m assuming most would translate it almost identically to mine. The interesting thing is, we lost semantic information in the translation, which English could’ve maintained:
I met a male friend.
This translation better reflects the semantic information in the Latin, but generally speaking this would be omitted. Why? Because we all recognize that the masculine form is required by the structure of Latin which reveals gender by default. To avoid gender in Latin you must take a roundabout way of saying amicum which would itself not be neutral but would rather reveal that you were making an effort to hide the gender. In this sense, Latin cannot do what English can in this case. Even if the Latin author doesn’t care to reveal the gender it will still be expressed, unless he purposely wants to avoid the gender and uses a circumlocution to avoid it, which would not be perceived as really neutral, but rather as an attempt to conceal information, since amicus is the standard, default word to express friend.
On the other hand, the English version has added semantic information by way of a noun determiner, a, which is required in this construction. The extra semantic meaning carried by a/the can be expressed in Latin, but by default this is not necessary… in English it is.
Immensely important point: The structure/grammar of a language doesn’t only reveal what can be expressed, but more importantly, what by default must be expressed. Now it is true that languages can use circumlocutions to get around some of these impositions, but their usage will be noticed by another native speaker as exactly that: an avoidance of the default system in order to hide some information.
Conveni benevolentem.
This is what you suggested earlier, Adrianus. Wouldn’t this be perceived as a deliberate attempt to conceal the gender of the friend, rather than merely a neutral word like English friend? It’s technically an adjective functioning as a substantive: I met a friendly-person. I would think that a Roman wife would not like this answer to her question, quo ivisti? She would probably think he was avoiding amicam.
The more important point, which is what my first translation was meant to show, is that just because semantic information is present in a nominal or verb, it does not necessarily follow that the author wants to express this or finds it important at all. It could also be pointed out that the verb conveni was by necessity a particular tense conveying particular time/aspect information. All of this is default semantic information in Latin. The system needs this information fed to it on a regular basis, even if it’s more than the author/speaker really cares about. We don’t notice this with the verb because English is structurally similar when it comes to verbs. If we were translating into a language which by default leaves verbs timeless and aspect-less we would probably ask ourselves the question: Is the author trying to point out the time/aspect? Or is it merely expressed because Latin requires it? In a very fundamental way, this is the entire reason why translation can be so difficult, as these same principles apply to the semantic field of individual words as much as they do to the overall structure of the language. For instance, English makes a default distinction between love and like, something that some languages do not. English distinguishes between technical automobile and everyday car, while other languages may have one word to cover the entire space, technical and everyday.
