Hello! “Duis te” for “You’re welcome”. I can’t find “Duis te” anywhere on the web. I had six years of Latin and never came across this phrase. The most common phrases we used were “Nihil est” and “Libenter”. If “duis” is a verb, I can’t figure it out; the only thing the Wiktionary has is an alternative form to “bis”. Please check this and if necessary, correct it. Thanks.
@ReidHT
Correction: “uva” doesn’t mean “grapes”; it means [one] “grape”. “Grapes” would be “uvae”.
please provide a link to that course for easy access and also tag the creator of that course…
I am new to Memrise and not sure what to do.
Here is a link to the course:
https://www.memrise.com/course/390143/complete-duolingo-vocabulary-latin/
The creator is ReidHT:
https://www.memrise.com/user/ReidHT/
How do I tag the creator?
—RSvK
Clicky link:
ReidHT is not a user on the forum yet, it seems.
Thanks; I didn’t know ReidHT was not on the forum.
The vocabulary course has a lot of good information, but there are some problems. Sometimes it has an English word, like ‘apple’, with two Latin words, like ‘malum, pomum’, and then after that always insists on both Latin words in the same order. Same in the opposite direction with ‘vir’ and ‘man, husband’. The course also gives ‘woman’ and ‘femina’, and rejects ‘mulier’, which is another perfectly good word for ‘woman’. ‘Niger, nigra, nigrum’ doesn’t really mean ‘black’—it translates to ‘black, black, black’. The course uses it because these are the masculine, feminine, and neuter nominative forms for the adjective, but doesn’t explain that anywhere. ‘Drink’ is translated to ‘bibo’, which really means ‘I drink’, but there’s nothing mentioning that this is a verb.
Ah well. Maybe I’ll try to get in touch with ReidHT.
—RSvK
I’m finally seeing this! I made this course a few years ago and I am ashamed to admit that I have little knowledge of Latin. I wanted to make a course Duolingo style that people could use to learn Latin, so I just directly translated English words from the Duolingo French course to Latin using the ‘Memrise dictionary’ that was available at the time (I don’t know if it’s still available) so there are probably many, if not dozens of mistakes in the course. I’ll try to make some edits.
Another big issue with Latin is its flexible word order. The meaning is given with the cases of the nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. So for English “I love you”, you can say:
Niger nigra and nigrum are different ways to write black. You can write most words in multiple ways. For this you have to know a list. The rows have outputs that let you know when something is a nom, acc, gene, or abl. the nom, acc, gen, dat or abl ensure that words come in a latin sentence so that the sentence makes sense to us therefore there are probably several of the same words.
but to learn just words you only need the nom singular so all words should actually be in the nom (according from what I learnd I’m not an expert).
?? “…all words should actually be in the nom[inative]”.
That’s close but not quite true. To learn a word, you need to learn to learn all its cases (forms). Luckily, most words are regular, so once you learn the root of the word and what declension (nouns, pronouns, adjectives) or conjugation (verbs) the word is
in, you can figure out what all the forms are.
For example, the word dominus (lord) is a masculine noun of the second declension, so here are the forms for it:
Case
Singular
Plural
Nominative
dominus
dominī
Genitive
dominī
dominōrum
Dative
dominō
dominīs
Accusative
dominum
dominōs
Ablative
dominō
dominīs
Vocative
domine
dominī
The root here is “domin”, so you add the suffixes to form the various cases.
Nominative (subject): Dominus dicit - The lord says
Genitive (possessive): canis domini - the lord’s dog
Dative (indirect object): Do aurum domino - I give gold to the lord.
Accusative (direct object): Amo dominum - I love the lord.
Ablative (by which, object of some prepositions): Hic factus est a domino - This was done by the lord.
Vocative (address): Domine, audi me. - Lord, hear me.
…trying to keep this simple. We don’t learn this all in one day.
Trivia note for the day: “prius” is actually a Latin word, so the plural (which people have been arguing about) is “priora”. It basically means the same as English “prior”.
Cheers,
–R. S. van Keuren