Expert: Maria - 2/11/2010

Question
Hi could you please help me with a saying or quote? My children  a gift from above- many thanks
paula

Answer
Hello,

I suppose you want “My children  a gift from above”  to be translated into Latin, not into Ancient Greek,  though you did not specify it.

So, the phrase “My children  a gift from above”  translates as follows:

-”Filii mei  donum sunt coeli” as well as "Donum coeli filii sunt mei" (with a different word order).

See below for grammatical analysis.

Best regards,
Maria
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Note that:

-My = MEI (nominative masculine plural of the possessive MEUS agreed with FILII)

-children  = FILII (nominative plural of FILIUS, 2nd.declension)

-a gift = DONUM (predicate nominative, 2nd declension, neuter noun). In Latin we must add the verb SUNT (3rd.person plural, present of SUM, I am) meaning “are”/"they are".

-from above = COELI (literally, “heaven’s”). Latin uses the genitive COELI (from COELUM, neuter noun, 2nd.declension) to translate “from above”.

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, not by the order of the words.