Expert: Maria - 10/22/2008

Question
Ciao Maria!
I wanna a latin title to my "diary" (poems),  and I think you coud help me,How
do I correctly translate "Immortal love (plural) nourishes me" into Latin? I
think it's [immortales amores me nutrit], but I'm not right about the plural...
and I wanna know the correct plural (sembra molto italiano o portuguese)...

Thank you so much Maria

Baci di Brasile

Patrick

Answer
Salve Patrick!

The correct translation of the phrase “Immortal loves nourish me” (in the plural) is the following:

-“Immortales amores me nutriunt”
or
-“Immortales me nutriunt amores”
with a different word order which in Latin can be variable (See below).

As for the resemblance to Italian  or Portuguese, this happens simply because Latin is the language from which all the Romance languages, i.e. Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian, descend.

Cordiali saluti dall’Italia.
Maria
______________________________________
Note that:

-IMMORTALES (nominative  masculine plural of the adjective IMMORTALIS agreed with AMORES) = immortal

-AMORES (nominative masculine plural of AMOR, 3rd.declension) = loves

-ME = accusative of the personal pronoun

-NUTRIUNT  (3rd.person plural, present indicative of NUTRIO, 4th.conjugation) = nourish.

Latin word order can be different from English, as Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationships are indicated by the endings of each term, not by the order of the words.