Translation help from Fabulae Syrae

Latin Learning Latin
1

Fabulae Syrae is intended to accompany the latter chapters of Lingua Latina. In fact, I find it a large step up. From the story of Cariolanus comes this: Ille vero, eorum precibus minime motus (this I understand means "In fact their pleading didn’t move him), then the sentence carries on: iis ut abirent iratus imperavit, decens ‘se neque Romanos, a qiubus tam indigne pulsus erat, iam amare, neque de patria, quae suos filios laudem ac gloriam merentes tam turpiter e finibus eiceret, multum curare’; immo dixit ‘eam ne nomine quidem patriae dignam esse’. Could someone out there translate this for me? As is sometimes the case, I get a general feeling for what’s being said, but lack the specific details that make for enjoyable comprehension.

2

Why don’t you have a go at translating this yourself? Then we can help you with your translation. I don’t think you will learn much if someone does the translation for you. Identifying the grammatical structure will help you to understand what’s going on. That’s a first step at least.

3

On the contrary, I think I gain much from self-correcting once given a translation. But if I must do this to get a translation, here is my grammatically and logically confused effort: “they, as they were going away, he angrily ordered, saying, they are not the Romans (I know the accusitive doesn’t work here?) from who with such indignity he was thrown out, now he is to love, nor from his homeland which his own children praise and which merits glory, in such an ugly way ejected him from the borders, he should care for so much; rather it doesn’t even have the dignified name of the homeland.” There you have it. I’m sure it will afford you much mirth. But now I hope you will keep you end of the deal, and give me a translation with notes where I went wrong. Thanks

4

Pin130,
Before Seneca holds up his end of the “deal”, try figuring what the subjects of each verb (and that includes the participles and infinitives) in that sentence are. Also, in " immo dixit ‘eam ne nomine quidem patriae dignam esse’, are the apostrophes present in the original text? I am puzzled as to why they are there.

5

The whole point of LLPSI is to avoid translating. If you have to do it for entire passages, that is LLPSI’s way of telling you that you have not mastered the material presented in previous lessons well enough (especially if even translating doesn’t help). Instead of translating, the best thing to do is to go back and reread (which should be done regularly anyway).

6

You’re right, Aetos, perhaps the word “deal” is ill-chosen. I was hoping, though, that embarrassment would bear some fruit.
The text appears as immo dixit ‘eam…dignam esse’. I don’t know exactly what it means, Shenoute, not to translate a language which is foreign to you. It’s true there is a point when one reaches fluency that the sentences read “as if they were English”, but this is only achieved with mastery. After nine years playing with Latin (maybe half-hour a day) I’m still far from it. Actually I have little problem reading LLPSI. As mentioned, I find Fabulae Syrae a step beyond the corresponding chapters in LLPSI. Thanks to both of you for your comments.

7

pin130 no one is here to laugh at you but please feel free to laugh at anything I post. We are here to help. Often the best help comes in a form which does not appear at first sight to be helpful or what we asked for.

The complete text is as follows:

"Legati igitur, postquam ad Volscorum castra venerunt, Coriolanum multis precibus oraverunt ne patriam iam oppugnaret. Ille vero, eorum precibus minime motus, iis ut abirent iratus imperavit, dicens ’ se neque Romanos, a quibus tam indigne pulsus erat, iam amare, neque de patria, quae suos filios laudem ac gloriam merentes tam turpiter e finibus eiceret, multum curare’; immo dixit ‘eam ne nomine quidem patriae dignam esse’.

So yes there are single quotation marks after immo dixit.

Shenoute was making a valuable point. Translation comes after understanding not before. You dont need to translate you need to understand the function of all the words in the passage and you need to identify the grammatical constructions that are being used.

You have to believe the latin makes sense and so if you can’t understand it you have to think more about the grammar.

How do you understand “ut” in " iis ut abirent iratus imperavit"? If I give you the hint that abirent is an imperfect active subjunctive 3rd plural does that ring any bells as to the construction? iis is a dative, why?

se is the accusative subject of amare and curare. Who is being indicated by se? eiceret is imperfect active subjunctive 3rd singular. Do these give you a clue as to the constructions being used?

a quibus is “by whom” not “from who”. You need to distinguish between a, ab and e, ex.

“laudem ac gloriam” are both objects of “merentes”. Why did you take laudem as a verb with suos filios?

nomine is an ablative taken with dignam. ne … quidem here might be “not even”. eam is f acc what does it refer to?

Are these enough hints to get back on the right track?

You might be well advised to read chapter 38 of Lingua Latina to revise the constructions used there.

If I have erred Shenoute and Aetos will put us right, then we will all have learned something.

8

I second what seneca said about (not) being here to laugh and being here to help. I think my posting history here shows that I’m glad to spend time answering questions. It’s just that sometimes I feel that answering the question is not the most helpful thing to do.

I think seneca covered the Latin side of things :slight_smile:, so I’ll just add a few LLPSI-oriented comments:

  • iis (…) imperavit. Based on your translation, I’m not sure iis is understood. It’s covered in FR, chap. 8
  • ut abirent iratus imperavit, ut + subjunctive is covered in chap. 27
  • dicens ‘se neque Romanos(…) amare neque de patria (…) multum curare’, Accusativus cum infinitivo is covered in chap. 11
  • isolating the relative clauses a quibus (…) erat/quae (…) eiceret, chap. 8
  • morphology (merentes, participium praesens chap. 14; nomine/laudem 3rd declension chap. 11)

It seems to me that there are too many holes in your understanding of the material covered in previous chapters, and getting this one passage from Fabulae Syrae right is not going to fix that because, by itself, it won’t give you enough practice. Carefully and actively rereading LLPSI from the start, as many times as possible, seems like a better way to solve this.
Again, LLPSI (and the ancillary material) is designed to be read, not to be translated. If you have to translate, mentally or on paper, entire passages, this means the content hasn’t been mastered well enough. Understanding without translating does not come after mastery/fluency, it’s something to aim at and work on right from the start (even if it will take some time to materialise) and that’s the whole premise and strength of LLPSI: reading Latin like you read your native language right from the start, thanks to easy texts and a carefully planned progression.

Here is a text you may find interesting: Why You’re Frustrated with LLPSI (And How to Use It Better).

9

Thank you Seneca and Shenoute for taking the time to help me out. It will take time to digest your comments and corrections. Rather discouraging, though, to be so far off after so many years–this is my third time through LLPSI. This time I started from chapter 20, thinking to add Fabulae Syrae as I go along. The truth is that I read LLPSI quite easily on the whole, though it’s true I don’t take note that this word is in the accusative and this one in the ablative and why it should be like that.
If I would go back and check all the grammatical points mentioned, I’m sure I know all of them. But application is apparently
another matter. Once you point it out I see that abirent is imperfect subjunctive–I recognize the form–yet in reading I don’t pay attention to it and just grab a general meaning “going away” or “went away”. Even now, I couldn’t tell you what type of clause it makes together with “ut” (purpose or result, etc.). I generally just translate “ut” as “that” or “in order that” and usually it works. I guess it’s called lazy reading, but I wonder if I have the patience for anything else.

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Don’t be! I think I wrote something in another post about LLPSI being a lot of work. Some people like to say you just have to read it but that’s not exactly true. It has to be read many, many times while paying attention to details.

If I would go back and check all the grammatical points mentioned, I’m sure I know all of them. But application is apparently another matter.

I think that’s a very important point: knowing grammar is not the same thing as being able to put this knowledge into actual use. I’ve seen many people knowing all declensions and knowing exactly what an Accusative was, but still translating puellas amant as “the girls love”.

As I see it, only repetition (and by that I mean a looooot of repetition) can make someone instinctively use cases, conjugations, etc., without having to think about it. Knowing that -as is the plural accusative of the 1st declension is not enough (I’m not even sure it’s necessary actually), but seeing -as used in hundreds of sentences is.

LLPSI provides a lot of repetition, more than most textbooks, but still not nearly enough. Familia Romana is what, 300 pages long? Nobody can learn a language just by reading 300 pages, however carefully designed they are. Periodically going back and rereading past chapters is one way to increase the amount of repetition. Based on what I saw here and there (see the blog post quoted below), I think having read each chapter 10/20 times when one has finished working through the book is kind of normal. Attentive reading and exercises are also essential in making sure finer details have been noticed and really understood. Using the audio recordings, reading other easy texts are useful tools too.

About easy texts: in my experience, people have a tendency to disregard easy texts, thinking that because they “understand” them they won’t benefit from using them. That may be true if they already can actually read them with ease (and even then, I’d argue that there is a place for easy texts). But if they have to regularly rely on translating, mentally or on paper, then it doesn’t matter much that they understood the text: they weren’t able to read it, and that means that the grammar/vocab used in the text hasn’t become second nature yet.

Here are some books I used to get a large amount of reading under my belt. Maybe you’ll find some of them useful too when you’ll be tired of rereading LLPSI :smiley:
Beginners:

Appleton (& Jones) wrote a series of books for teaching Latin by the Direct Method at the beginning of the 20th c.:

Also, a blog post which may be of interest (the author had some Latin before tackling LLPSI, but I think the way he approached the book is valuable no matter the background): Driving With Dido - How I came to read Latin extensively

I decided to try to read FR without attempting to translate any of it into another language, since it was clear to me that part of the point of learning a language is not to need a translation. Doing this, I was able to “flow” until chapter 7 or 8; at that point, the vocabulary became overwhelming. (…)

Here, for reasons I can’t recall, I made a decision that worked wonders for my reading ability: I didn’t abandon the book, but neither did I turn my energies to studying the vocabulary that seemed to be my stumbling block, as I had tried when going through the Aeneid. Instead, I simply started back at the beginning of the book, and again read as far as I could. I figured, correctly, as it turned out, that I would internalize a bit more of the vocabulary each time I re-read the chapters and thus would eventually make it further and further through the book; in the process, I hoped, the syntax would become second nature. I might read chapters 1-7 three days in a row, then chapters 1-9 four days in a row, then chapters 1-12 several days in a row, and so forth. (There are 35 chapters, of which the last is a grammatical dialogue adapted from Donatus’s Ars Minor.) In this way, after a few weeks, I was reading up through the chapters in the mid-twenties, at which point, for time reasons, I began to divide my reading of the book over multiple days. After about two months, I could flow through the entire story over the course of two or three days, without any problems of vocabulary or syntax.

Initium - Julii Exitium - praesta
11

Thanks Shenoute for your helpful advice. Of the Latin readers you listed, some I’ve read, some I found a little too difficult (Nutting’s First Latin Reader), some I’ve never heard of and will investigate. I do lose patience though reading LLPSI over and over again, as good a writer as Orberg was.