Week 3

Translation

The heart of any sentence is its subject and main verb, so finding the two in a Latin sentence is often the best place to start when translating into English. As you know, subjects in Latin take the nominative case and verbs (third-person singular present active verbs anyway, the only type we know about) end in the letter t. Once you have those spotted, you just need to find out what part of speech and part of the sentence the rest of the words are. Once you have that, all you need to do is rearrange the words into a way that makes sense in English. Let's look at some examples.

Caecilius est in horto.

What's the subject? The only word in the nominative case is Caecilius.
What's the verb? The only verb in the sentence is est, meaning is.
What else is there? in horto. What does it mean? In the garden.
So what's our translation? Caecilius is in the garden.

amicus iratus cibum consumit.

What's the subject? amicus, meaning the friend, and iratus, meaning angry are both in the nominative case. iratus agrees with amicus in case (and gender), so it must modify amicus. Thus, the subject is the angry friend.
What's the verb? The only verb in the sentence is consumit, meaning eats.
What else is there? cibum. What does it mean? the food. In what case? Accusative. So it is what? Direct object.
So what's our translation? The angry friend eats the food.

This may seem very simple right now, but eventually we're going to start seeing longer Latin sentences and understanding the fundamental parts is going to be very critical!