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Archive for September, 2012

Memento mori Posted by on Sep 27, 2012

Roman necropolis in Barcelona. Photo by Sebastia Giralt.

Memento Mori is a Latin sentence meaning “remember you will die” and is used to call to a person’s modesty, reminding that we are all human and we all get the time, and also indicating that life is, after all, very short. If we use Catholic terminology, we could say that the “remember that you…

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Syntax: locative Posted by on Sep 23, 2012

Locative The locative case, attributed to Indo-European language, expressed the ubi complement, with local and temporal meaning. It indicates where and when something happened. In Latin, only some of the old locative cases remain:  in the singular of the first and second declensions. Its morpheme is -ae for the first declension, -i for the second…

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Syntax: ablative Posted by on Sep 18, 2012

The overall value of the ablative is to indicate the external circumstances, the relationship between the process and the external thing. Latin ablative represents the mix of three primitive cases: the ablative, the instrumental-sociative and the locative. Latin unified the old values ​​of these three cases into one, except the few remaining locative cases. This…

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Syntax: dative Posted by on Sep 13, 2012

Ostia (Rome). Picture by Lawrence OP.

Dative is the case of the indirect object. It  is used to designate the person or thing concerned by the verbal action. From this overall view we will explain the specific uses that we can find in Latin: dative of interest, dative of purpose and double dative. The dative does not only work as a …

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