Lesson video

Thank you, great! This is the translation lesson for the unit on first and second person pronouns.

It's not just that though, because this translation is in fact the first of three translation lessons, which were going to go into in the next unit, which cover the story over their full span, which cover the story of the doomed relationship, the doomed love, between the mythical queen of Carthage called Dido and a Trojan hero, who we've met before, called Aeneas.

And in this first lesson, we're going to see how those two people meet.

Let's have a look.

Practise Translation, Dido and Aeneas Meet.

Our learning objectives are, "Can translate fluently a Latin passage "containing 1st and 2nd person pronouns and possessive adjectives, and have I consolidated previous core vocabulary?" Press pause if you need to to get the things required for this lesson.

And I have nothing but praise for those who came prepared, well done.

Right, let's have a look at this vocab.

These are the 14 most frequent or most difficult words that you must have at your fingertips in order to access today's passage for translation.

If you don't know them all now that's absolutely fine, because we're going to be practising loads over the next few minutes.

And that will start with a close-up on these two words here, hostis and patria.

Hostis first, it's not that tricky.

Don't you worry about it.

Hostis are derivations of words like hostile or hostility.

Someone who is hostile towards you is your enemy.

So you jump to hostile, okay, that's it, and then you go to enemy, all right? You may, I#ll give you a clue, see the plural of this hostes in the passage, but you can still translate that as enemy.

You can either translate the plural as enemies or as enemy.

It's actually more like the enemy, 'cause that implies the sense of there being more than one there, all right? Patria, now this one is quite tricky.

Now, our derivation is the word patriot.

A patriot is someone who fights for or feels extremely strongly about, not their father, but their fatherland, their home country or their homeland.

And patria is precisely what that means, it means homeland.

All right? But do not confuse that with pater, which means a father.

So pater or patra something.

Patria, if you see that A in there at some point, okay, that's going to be father or homeland.

Let's go for homeland, all right? So, let's have a little look and the first thing you're going to do for me is just read these words one time over.

Take a minute to do that, pressing pause now.

Okay, it's quiz questions time.

Are we ready, 'course we are, let's go! Difference between noster and vester? Good, noster is our, vester is your plural.

Your, noster, our.

Amicus verses hostis, which one's which? It's too easy, amicus is a friend, hostis is an enemy.

Patria and pater, what was the difference? So, the one that means homeland is your patria, whereas a pater is your father.

Now, the big one, is it still there? We did this last lesson.

What's the difference between all these words here? Answers in three, press pause if you need longer.

Two.

And, how did we do? Good, next up, now, you see nostram at the beginning of a sentence and you see quaerimus at the end.

Does this mean we search? It's going to be shaking heads, because nostra, nostra, you might see nost and think it means we, but nostra means we search for our, nostra, our.

Okay? Nostram patriam quaerimus, now I'm putting in a patriam, what's that sentence mean? We search for our homeland, very nice, bear that in mind, what've we got next? Meos, does that mean my or me? So, only ever me means me, so meos means my.

What's the difference between possum and sumus? This is one from the irregular verbs unit.

Answers in two, and, so, possum, I am, sumus, sum S-S, sumus.

Are you she, we are.

Mea patria, I told you it would come up again! It means what? Means, two, one.

My homeland.

Vestra patria means what? Is that going to be our? No, it's two, one, your plural homeland.

Now, what about vestram patriam novam? I've added in this adjective novus here.

This would be your new homeland.

Keep this in mind, I'm going to keep building here.

Vestram patriam pulchram, would be what? That would be not your new, but your beautiful homeland.

Right, now, you see the sentence meam urbem pulchram feci? Now, feci at the end, does that mean I make or I made? That is, V-U-X-S-E ed, ed, ed, ed, ed.

Perfect tense, now do the rest for me.

I made what? Good, I made my beautiful city.

You could also mean I made my city beautiful.

Now, bear that in mind, I'm going to change things a bit.

Nostram urbem pulchram servavi, first of all, servavi is I save or I saved, V-U-X-S-E, ed, ed, ed, ed, ed.

Now, do the rest, what did you save? Or, what did I save? Good, now, I made one change, which was from meam to nostram, I saved our beautiful city.

Lovely! Okay, now, what's the difference between me, mecum and mea? Two, and one.

Me only ever means me, mecum is with me, and mea is the possessive adjective, my.

Nos, now, tough one, I'm throwing you in the deep end here.

Do you remember this? Nos debetis, have a go, what do you think that means? Okay, answer in three, two, and.

It's you owe us, let's go over this.

Now, we see nos at the beginning, and we think that's going to mean we or us, we don't know yet, so we jump to the end and we check our verb.

Tis is O-S-T mus tis is you, plural, it's going to be you plural owe us, there you go.

What changes in this one? What's this mean now, vos debetis? Answer in two, and.

There you go, now this one we see vos, and we think, you plural, we don't know whether it's doing or receiving the verb, whether it's nominative or accusative, we check our verb ending, and we know that O-S-T mus tis, that is you plural, so actually, this is just added for emphasis, and it means you plural owe, or you plural ought.

What's the difference between mecum and nobiscum? Come on, it's easy street now, we're fine.

Good! And, you're going to mime to me now.

This'll be an interesting one, mime to me quid, off you go, quid'll be.

Be what, mime to me noster, what's noster? To, well, it's going to be, sort of like.

Would be, I don't know, our, you've got that, saying our.

Mime vester, what's vester? Let's have a look, yep, so going to be your, so something like, I don't know.

Your stuff, over there, yours, your plural.

Mime nobiscum with me.

I just told you what it means! Maybe I did, no, I told you, I said mecum would be with me, mime nobiscum will be, would be, yep, with us, with all of us over here.

What about nobiscum, or vobiscum, vobiscum, we just did nobiscum.

Good, nobiscum is with us, so vobiscum is with you, plural, you could be like, I don't know.

With you, yeah, something like that, I don't know.

Yeah? Okay, right, how did we do, vocab practise time.

Pressing pause, one to 14 down the margin, let's get all of them right, go! Okay, different colour pen, let's see how we did.

And pressing pause to mark those answers in two, and go.

Fantastic, very nice, okay, hands-free, it's going to be listening time again, I'm going to be telling you about Dido and Aeneas, what's the context behind this passage? So.

We've met Aeneas, Aeneas, Aeneas, we've met Aeneas before, way back when, in the past tenses unit, when I say V, you say ed, when I say ba, you say was or were, okay, and at that point, he was a Trojan dux, he was a Trojan leader, and he was in Troy at the time when Troy was infiltrated by the Greeks via the Trojan horse, okay? And once he'd learnt that the Greeks were inside the city he had a dilemma, and it was he wanted, do you remember, I suppose not that much of a dilemma, he wanted to go out and to fight and die gloriously for his country, but then his wife at the time, Creusa, says, "What are you doing? Look after your family!" And so at that point, he did what we see here in this terracotta figurine, where he led his son, Iules, by the hand, and he took his father here on his shoulder, either on the shoulders or on the back, there's two different versions.

His father's called Anchises, and he carried him out of the city and he rescued them.

Where is Creusa, though? Well, she was at the back of the line, all right, when they were leaving, she was at the end of the queue, and when Aeneas gets to a wood outside, or in the, sort of, outside Troy, he looks around, Creusa's not there, and he goes back to find her, and he does find her, but in ghost form, no! Because it turns out she has been killed, we don't know how, and she's there as a ghost, but she says, "Don't worry about the fact that you sort of were responsible for my death, because you have a destiny, you're going to go west to this weird country called Italy." Where's that? "And you're going to found a town that's going to be amazing and it's going to be called Rome." Rome, what, what's that, what are you on about? And so Aeneas then wanders back to see his father and his son after this mysterious prophecy from his ghost wife.

He then goes on a bunch of journeys which resemble those and sort of run parallel to those of Ulysses, who we've learnt about in a previous unit as well, or Odysseus, so he has some Odysseus-like adventures, he gets to Sicily, so, to the south of Italy, and at that point, I'm afraid Anchises doesn't make it, Anchises dies of old age.

From Sicily, he tries to make it back up to Italy, but he is caught, somewhat like Odysseus, in a storm which blows him south, and he ends up landing in an unknown shore after a shipwreck on his own.

And it turns out he goes onto, we'll do this bit in a sec, but he goes onto a hilltop and he sees an urbs lying beneath him, and it turns out this urbs is Carthago, Carthago, is Carthage, Carthage, that's how you pronounce this in English, and Carthage was not only an ancient town, but also would go on to be an ancient empire which would rival Rome's and it's on the North African coast, Carthage is modern Tunisia, that's where it is now.

All right, now, who is regina, who is queen? Doesn't have a king, Carthage has a regina, in this day, a queen, and she is called Dido.

Dido.

Dido.

Okay, and Dido's fate, as we'll find out, her background is actually quite similar to Aeneas's, and we'll read about that in a second.

That's all I'm going to say for now, okay? And, who's this guy down here, Vergilius? This is Virgil, that's how you pronounce this in English, and he is the poeta, he's the poet who wrote this, what I've taken, or what you're going to translate, is, or very lightly, some of it I've not changed that much, lightly adapted versions of his poem, his epic poem that he wrote, at the time of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, about Aeneas, and it's called "The Aeneid", that's the name of his poem.

Okay, and this part of it is probably the most famous bit and it's to do with this doomed love affair, 'cause things aren't going to turn out, I'll tell you now, it's not going to work out for the best between Dido and Aeneas, and let's see how that ends up happening, all right? Now, before we do that, we need to look at some of the tricky stuff you'll be looking at in this passage.

The first difficult thing we'll be looking at, so this is the paragraph you'll be translating on your own in a matter of minutes, and the first tricky thing we're going to be looking at is instances where you either have a pronoun and a possessive adjective, or you just have a possessive adjective and you might be confused into thinking that it's the pronoun, all right? We're going to be looking at some sentences which look like those ones there, they're not going to be exactly the same, 'cause that would be cheating.

Now here we have nunc nostram urbem novam facimus, and it's been mistranslated, there's at least one mistake, as now we make a new city.

10 seconds, what's wrong with that translation there? Go! Two, one, and, let's have a look, so.

This one lies in your use of nostram, 'cause we see this student has seen nostram, and they've thought, ooh, nostram! Looks like nos, and that means we, oh, thank goodness, now we make a new city.

In the bag, in fact, nostram, nostram, means, tell me, it means, not we or us, but means our, nostram, our, okay, do you remember? Yeah, so now we make, not a new city, but now we make our new city, all right? What happened here? This one may have tipped on the other side, in terms of confusing, we did loads of work on this in the last lesson, in terms of confusing the pronouns and the possessive adjectives, but vos amicos servavistis, and it's translated as your friends were saved.

What's happened? 10 seconds.

Three, two, one, and.

Right, let's have a look, so.

Vos means what, tell me? Does vos mean your, vos means? Good, very nice, it means you, singular or plural? Means, plural, good, so it's you plural, and we don't have that down here, this is one where a student has looked at vos, and gone, you, I mean, it's a word that, so gone vos, vos amicos, that means you, that's friends, you can change words a bit in Latin when you translate them, it doesn't matter, your friends, your friends save, V on the end for ed, your friends were saved, ah, I'm a genius, no, come on! Vos means you, so that's our first problem here, so we need you.

Then we go over, friends is okay, hmm, we'll come back to it.

We look at istis on the end here, and we think, well, because look, we've skipped ahead a tiny bit, but we need to remember what's our little alarm bell that goes off when we see vos first word? We jump straight to our verb and we check whether it's going to be nominative or accusative.

And over here, we see istis, E, isti, it, imis, istis, that's going to be you plural, so actually, oh thank goodness, this is our nominative, vos is our nominative here, and we've got you doing the verb over here, so actually, this you plural is in brackets, because we know it's going to be you saved, all right? And then we go to amicos, what letter do plural accusatives end in? S, and we know this is accusative plural, so the whole thing will in fact be, that word, that word, that word, you saved, now our friends, or, is it? No, we haven't got a word there, you saved the friends, all right? So let's get that, there's all manner of bother wrong with that one, you plural saved the friends, full stop, okay, you're going to see something just like that any minute now.

What's happened here? What's happened there? You'll get this one, okay, 10 seconds, go.

Three, two, one, and let's have a look, so, I think we'll see that this one here is to do with looking at meos and thinking, well, it's got me in it, so I'm going to translate that as me.

Whereas we know that me something means not me, but my.

So we get rid of that comma, let's get rid of the me, actually, and we know we've got my, and all the rest of it's fine, they've seen vos, they've gone you, single or plural, let's check it, istis, yeah, this is all the same as before, we've added meos, and it doesn't mean me, but it means my, you saved my friends, all right? The next tricky thing we're looking at is these, now, this is one from the unit we did a while ago on these forms of the verb here which is called the imperative, and I'm going to run you through this first one to here together.

We've not looked at these for a while, but I will remind you, that if you see a verb at the beginning, right at the beginning, the first word, and there's no person ending on the end, so there's no O-S-T, all right, then you've got what's called an imperative, and that's the order form.

Another clue that you sometimes get is an exclamation mark at the end, but not always, and this isn't going to mean I, you, or she doing anything, so it's not going to be this one, this is just going to mean kind of, like the ordering form, so no pronouns, it'll just mean stay, all right? So this one, mane, to stay, mecum, stay with me, there.

If mane mecum means stay with me, what does veni mecum mean? Correct, it means come with me, good.

Now, however, nobiscum manetis means what? Good, so this one isn't imperative, and there's two reasons for that.

One is, we've got this verb ending, O-S-T mus tis, is the you plural ending, and the other one is to do with position, all right? If we had an imperative, it would probably be first word, but here, the verb, as usual, is at the end of the sentence.

Manete, what's that mean? Good, so this is also imperative, and this is the imperative plural, this is if you're giving an order to more than one person.

We've not got an exclamation mark, but we know that te on the end, it's not tis, it's te, that's imperative plural, and it's the first word, that's our other clue.

Venite nobiscum means what, therefore? Correct, so that's come with us, plural, you're ordering more than one person, and nobiscum venis means what? Great, so this isn't imperative, you've got O-S, so it's going to be I, you, you come with us.

Right, we're about ready to get on with our translation, then, so, let's have a little look.

Right, so Aeneas, he's our hero, all right, he's the Trojan, he escaped from Troy, he's been shipwrecked, and he's landed solus in terra ignota, he's landed alone in an unknown terra, unknown land, but in order to remedy that situation, he climbed a montem, a mountain.

Now, desuper, from above, he poterat, he is able, he, good, he was able to see an urbem, a city, erant, first word, bit of irregular verbs practise, means not they were, but, there were, and what does he see? There were portae, there were gates, there were viae, streets, and there was also a theatrum, a theatre.

So it looks like a, you know, well-built city, and circum urbem, around the city, erant, first word, there were also muri, you might have seen a muros, is like a mural, is a wall and they are alti, which I've not given you, but alti is altitude, and tall walls, and per muros, and along the walls, look, a regina, a queen was leading his comites, his companions, so his friends, right.

Right, so the regina est pulcherrima, the queen is beautiful, is that what Aeneas thought? Or was thinking? She is pulcherrima, pulcherrima, the queen is very beautiful, ooh! Aeneas was thinking, or he thought to himself.

He came down the mountain and he festinavit, and he hurried to his companions.

His friend clamavit, shouted, "The regina nos servavit!" The queen saved our, the queen saved nos, saved us.

Then the queen asked, "Qui estis vos?" Who estis vos, who are we? Who estus vos, who are you? Who are you omnes? Who are you all, who are all of you? And Aeneas replied, and now you're going to translate what his reply is and also what Dido's reply back to Aeneas is.

Okay, are we ready? Course you are, press pause and get translating, off you go.

And if you want to attempt the final paragraph as a challenge, then please do so now.

Right, let's see how we did.

Different colour pen at the ready.

So, our translation, our English is as follows.

We are Trojans.

Now we search, or we are searching for our, did we get this, good, our new homeland, 'cause we did loads of practise on that.

You saved my friends.

I am not able to praise you enough.

Well done if you got that, great.

But, quid est tuum, what is your name? Then, the queen replied, I am queen Dido.

Your fortune, your fate, what's happened to you, is just like mine, whereas if you wrote just like my, that's okay, 'cause I've not taught you that my can change to mine if there's no noun there, so please change that now, if you wrote like my, and didn't use your , don't worry about it.

But your fortune is just like mine.

Enemies, or the enemy, killed my husband, oh dear! But then I made a beautiful city, called Carthage.

Manete nobiscum, stay with us! Our city is yours.

But now you ought to eat, so you should eat, you might say.

Come with me.

Let's have a look and see what's going to happen.

So, then omnes means all, here we've not got a noun, so it's going to mean everyone, everyone was eating, laete, e, te, ly, good, they were eating happily.

Post cenam, after the dinner, Dido, go to our verb, rogavit, asked de, about Troy and about Aeneas's travels.

Aeneas narravit, told the rest, reliquam, the rest of the rem, his story.

Right, what's going on? Dido, she was listening, and the queen infelix, this is Virgil's word, not mine, unlucky, she was watching the leader, and lente, slowly, she felt an ignem, a fire, is that real fire, Mr. Virgil, no! She sensit a vulnus, a wound, is that a real wound, Mr., no! What's going on? She sensit amorem, she felt love.

So, she, while listening to this story, while listening to Aeneas tell the story of how he got to Carthage in the first place, she falls in love with him, and this is not a happy process, is it? No, this is in fact infelix, now there's two things to bear in mind here, one of them, and there's usually a student who points it out at this point, they say, well does that mean she falls in love with Aeneas while hearing the story about how his previous wife died? And the answer to that question is, yes.

And the next thing is, well, is this going to be a happy story? No, infelix! She's unlucky for falling in love.

And why is that? Well, you're going to have to wait, or you're going to have to get up to the next story, aren't you, in the next translation lesson, the next unit, okay? And I will see you there.

But before you do that, there's a couple of things you need to do.

One of them is to do that exit quiz, okay? So make sure you complete that, and other than that, the other thing you need to do is to say vale to me, because I'm going to say valete to you.

Valete, very well done, and I look forward to teaching you the next chapter of what's going to happen with Dido and Aeneas.

See you then!.