divinityofnumber dixit:
I know that the order of the words made sense to the ancients, but it seems so alien to me as a modern English speaker. I think the biggest stumbling block for me when translating Latin to English is trying to dissect the Latin sentences and get the words in an order that makes sense to me.
Is this the main problem for anyone else out there?
Don't try to dissect the Latin sentences into a discernible English order, because it won't work and that's now how the Romans read it. The Romans didn't read English.
This point was drilled into me by a professor called Dexter Hoyos, who's incidentally a preeminant Hannibal/Carthaginian historian, at a seminar all NSW high school students who take Latin have to go to. I'm going to type some of his 'rules' for reading Latin:
1. The Romans Didn't Know English (TRDKE)
therefore, word-order and word-group-order in Latin do not follow English patterns, except by accident.
2.
A. Don't try to find an English meaning for each separate Latin word, to see if accumulating the separate words in English gives the meaning of the sentence. This method thinks of a Latin sentence as actually Hidden English, and yet TRDKE.
B. Don't believe that a Latin sentence is simply equivalent to English words in a mixed-up order. TRDKE.
Read it from left to right, noting the endings but without translating the words, then by the end of the clause, having looked at all the endings, you can understand the relationships the words have with each other. I found by following these 'rules', I understood how the sentence works in the Roman order. Then I started translating it.
I used to think of Latin as like a puzzle, where my eyes went all over the place looking for the verb sometimes at the end of the sentence, but that technique failed me on so many occasions.
