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Gaius Valerius Catullus |
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| Author | Message | | | Posted on Fri Jun 15, 2012 21:29:57 | |
| | Am I the only one who finds this to be incredibly bewildering? If "acris" is to accord with "morsus," they must both be genitive singular -- does "incitare" take the genitive singular? I looked around online, and most people seem to think that morsus is accusative plural -- but then where does that leave "acris"? Am I going crazy?
Thanks! | |
| | | Posted at Wed Aug 15, 2012 01:25:14 | Quote |
| | I did some searching and I turned to an entry in Lewis and Short that indicates Acris is an adjective that can be taken as a masculine or feminine plural genitive. Acris and Morsus as singular genitives would make no sense, as I'm sure you've discovered. There's no reasonable way to translate that into good idiomatic English. More often than not, a larger dictionary like Lewis and Short will offer a "way out" of the somewhat more difficult grammatical situations. Words and their conjugations in latin do not always play by the rules and in those cases we need to use both the context and instinct to determine whether the case is "exceptional". In Latin poetry, more often than prose, this will be the norm primarily due to metrical requirements.
| Quote: | | | | | Am I the only one who finds this to be incredibly bewildering? If "acris" is to accord with "morsus," they must both be genitive singular -- does "incitare" take the genitive singular? I looked around online, and most people seem to think that morsus is accusative plural -- but then where does that leave "acris"? Am I going crazy?
Thanks! |
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| | | Posted at Wed Aug 15, 2012 01:26:43 | Quote |
| | Sorry, I meant plural accusatives not genitives. :p
| Quote: | | | | | I did some searching and I turned to an entry in Lewis and Short that indicates Acris is an adjective that can be taken as a masculine or feminine plural genitive. Acris and Morsus as singular genitives would make no sense, as I'm sure you've discovered. There's no reasonable way to translate that into good idiomatic English. More often than not, a larger dictionary like Lewis and Short will offer a "way out" of the somewhat more difficult grammatical situations. Words and their conjugations in latin do not always play by the rules and in those cases we need to use both the context and instinct to determine whether the case is "exceptional". In Latin poetry, more often than prose, this will be the norm primarily due to metrical requirements.
| Quote: | | | | | Am I the only one who finds this to be incredibly bewildering? If "acris" is to accord with "morsus," they must both be genitive singular -- does "incitare" take the genitive singular? I looked around online, and most people seem to think that morsus is accusative plural -- but then where does that leave "acris"? Am I going crazy?
Thanks! |
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