Hello friends and fellow Textkit-users,
I’m sorry to have to put this one before you as I’m almost certain it’s one of those language-learning situations where I am unable to see what is grammatically staring me right in the face, and where once the simple answer has been pointed out to me I will never have any trouble with the construction again. So here it is -
Gladium ēdūcere cōnantī dextram morātur manum.
Initially my mind wanted to read the first part as an ablative absolute but this can’t be correct, since the participle doesn’t end in an ‘e’. So I had to assume that the participle is a dative, which led me to ponder on the possibility of the dative being related to the compound nature of the verb ‘ēdūcere’, but after a while of thinking about this I found myself still no closer to making any sense of the sentence. And so finally I decided that I would post it here on this forum where somebody more knowledgable than myself will no doubt have no trouble whatsoever in pointing out to me just what’s going on grammatically in this sentence.
Thanks in advance!
Tom.