In the Latin For Beginners answer key “nostra castra sunt vestra” is translated as “our camp is your camp”. I understand castra is a second declension nominative plural and nostra and vestra are agreeing with it in case and number here. I believe it should be “our camps are yours” or something like. Have I misunderstood or is the key mistaken?
Hi Yutna,
You’ll find there are a number of nouns in Latin that have a special sense in the plural. There is a list of them in the Allen & Greenough Grammar:
http://dcc.dickinson.edu/grammar/latin/category-search?field_gl_section_number_value=107
In the case of castra, you’ll see that in the singular, it means “fort”, but in the plural it means “camp”.
That’s useful. I notice later in the exercise “in castris vestris” is translated as “in your camp”. For these words are the plurals actually a different singular in all cases? If they are how can plurals be formed for words like castrum?
If I understand your questions, I think what you’re really asking is if the plural of a noun has a different meaning, then how do we express the plural of the singular meaning of the noun? In the case of castrum, its singular meaning “fort” is a somewhat rare usage of this word. One would more often see “castellum”, thus the plural of “fort” would be expressed as castella. An example of this in English would be brain vs. brains. In the singular, it refers to a physical part of the body. In the plural it can have the meaning of intelligence. (‘The brain has a very complex structure.’ vs. ‘That man has brains.’)Another thing you’ll notice is that the plural meanings of the words in that list tend to be more specific, the singular more general. Compared to English, Latin also has far fewer words, which for the Romans was not a problem. One word could have multiple meanings; the meaning to be sensed was determined from context.
In English we could sometimes infer from context that brains means more than one brain. In Latin can these words work the same way or is castra always “camp” and never “forts”?
Yutna, that’s a good question and I invite you to have a look at the entry for castrum in Lewis & Short:
https://logeion.uchicago.edu/castrum
As you can see, there are many usages for the word, both in singular and plural. Do we have to memorise all these meanings for castrum? I think not. Can we come up with a rule that covers all the usages? Maybe. However, when reading Latin be alert to the fact that the phenomenon exists and when the meaning you know doesn’t exactly fit the context, and a similar word does, look in a good lexicon to confirm your hunch.
Thanks, I get it. The complexity is expanding pretty fast but D’Ooge’s LFB is a great book.