Augustine, Book XI, Ch. ii.
Quoniam si inter eum qui tendit et illud quo tendit via media est, spes est perveniendi; si autem desit aut ignoretur qua eundum sit, quid prodest nosse quo eundum sit?
Translation: Because if between the man who presses on and the destination [quo tendit] a connecting path [via media] exists, there is hope of arriving; but if the path is missing or unknown, what is the point of knowing the name of the destination?
I have translated this as if quo calls for the name of a destination, and qua calls for the route by which a destination may be reached. I have translated via media as “connecting path”.
How does this look?
Looks fine, quo and qua being synonyms I think.
Looks fine, quo and qua being synonyms I think.
Check the lexicons. They are not synonyms.
Cf Hor. : qua obstrepit Aufidus and mitte sectari Rosa quo locorum sera moretur
Just looking at the dictionary, qua is ablative feminine. That’s the “from” case, right? And quo is “to where”. So is it where the road starts from versus where it goes to?
As in the examples I provided they both may mean where
The way it’s usually explained is that with quō we understand locō, and with quā we understand viā. Yes, we might be able to find contexts in which English might render both as “where,” but that has more to do with the way we use the English word, i.e., its range of meaning. In Latin, the two words have distinct usages. The OLD has good articles on both words (not surprisingly), but too lengthy to quote here.
Oxford Latin Dictionary. See Amazon for information.
To clear up confusion in some of the posts above (though not in Hugh’s original post):
quo is a relative and interrogative adverb meaning “where” in the sense of “to which place”, “whither”, i.e, motion towards, not location, (like in with accusative), and by extension “to what purpose”.
Relative/interrogative adverb of location, “where”, “in what place” (like in with ablative) is ubi.
qua is “by which way”.
Quo and qua are not synonomous. Quo alone does not imply ablative loco. Qua does not mean “from what place”.
See Allen & Greenough 152 for a complete list of correlatives:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=AG+152&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0001
Ok my Latin Russian dictionary gives ‘where’ as one of the meanings for both qua and quo and it serves well for practical purposes.
Hylander wrote:
See Allen & Greenough 152 for a complete list of correlatives:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=AG+152&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0001
Thank you for the helpful reference, Hylander.
Ok my Latin Russian dictionary gives ‘where’ as one of the meanings for both qua and quo and it serves well for practical purposes.
No, it doesn’t serve well at all, unless you only care about cobbling together a rough translation and not about understanding Latin. Quo and qua have different meanings in Latin. And in Russian, too.
Quo means “where” in the sense of “to what place”, or archaic “whither”.
Qua, to the extent that it can be translated into English – loosely – as “where”, really means “in what area/region, in what parts”.
In Russian, quo is куда; qua could be translated где, though that’s not quite exactly what qua means. In Russian you would never confuse куда and где.
Please see the two examples from Horace I have mentioned before. Qua and quo fit perfectly the meaning где. Cf Hor. : qua obstrepit Aufidus and mitte sectari Rosa quo locorum sera moretur
mitte sectari Rosa quo locorum sera moretur – this is not the adverb quo. With locorum, it’s the ablative of the relative/interrogative pronoun quis. literally, “in which of places”. Taken as a whole ithe expression quo locorum is a poetic way of expressing “where/in what place”, to be sure, but again quo is not the adverb quo, and the adverb quo alone does not mean “in what place” – it means '“to what place”.
qua violens obstrepit Aufidus – qua here, loosely translated, means “where” in the sense of “in the region where” or “by which way”. It’s not quite equivalent to ubi – not a specific location but a general area or region or along the course of the river, in English, “by which way the Aufidus roars”. It’s in no way equivalent to the adverb quo.
The adverb quo can be translated “where” in English, but it implies motion to a place, not location at a place. English “where” can be used to imply motion to a place or location at a place. The word “whither”, which translates the adverb quo accurately and without ambiguity, is archaic in present-day English.
Mixing up quo and ubi is sloppy and wrong. Quo cannot be used to mean “where” in the sense of location at a place. It means only куда, never где, and the distinction is as fundamental in Latin as it is in Russian. It’s the same distinction as in + accusative versus in + ablative: direction vs. location.
Ah, good clarification. I think the explanation quō locō (and quā viā) is meant as a possible origin explanation for the adverbs (and now that I think about, probably not accurate accept as a didactic tool).
On quo and qua, here is another query.
Many years ago a cartoon pictured a taxicab driver asking a potential customer, “Quo vadis, Mac?”
Is that correct Latin for, “Where to, Mac?”, with an expected answer of, for example, “Carnegie Hall”?
Now, suppose the customer wants to know by what route the driver intends to arrive at Carnegie Hall. How could qua be used in a short question?
I guess you could use qua alone.
“Quo vadis, Mac?” “In urbem.” “Qua?”
Or maybe you might say “qua vadamus?”, “How are we to get there?”.