Expert: Maria - 2/3/2010

Question
Hi Maria, can you help me with the translation of "God protect those I love"..or "God watch over those I love"..Thank you very much..

Answer
Hello,

here are the correct translations you asked me:

-“Quos amo protege, Deus, quaeso!” ("God protect those I love")

-“Quos amo custodi, Deus, quaeso!” (“God watch over those I love”)

Best regards,
Maria
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS

-God= DEUS (vocative case, 2nd. declension)

-protect = PROTEGE (2nd.person singular, imperative of PROTEGO, I protect) or CUSTODI (2nd. person singular, imperative of CUSTODIO, I watch over)

-those = QUOS (direct object, accusative masculine plural of the pronoun QUI)

-I love =AMO

Note that I’ve added the interjection QUAESO as a polite expression of entreaty meaning ‘I beseech you', ‘I pray', ‘I beg’.

As you can see, Latin word order can be different from English. Latin  is in fact an inflected language where syntactical relationships are indicated by the  inflectional  endings of each term, not by the order of the words.