Expert: Maria - 4/16/2010

Question
Hi Maria, hope you enjoyed your time off!  I am trying to find the translation for "God give us the strength" or "God grant us the strength" into Latin. I will be engraving police officer's badges with the translation. Thank you in advanced.

Answer
Hello,

Both “God give us the strength" or "God grant us the strength"  translate as follows:

-“Da nobis, Deus, fortitudinem!”

or with a different word order:

-“Fortitudinem da nobis, Deus!”

Best regards,
Maria
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Note that:

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

-give/ grant = DA (2nd.person singular, imperative mood of the verb DO, I give/I grant)

-us= NOBIS (indirect object in the dative case)

-the strength=FORTITUDINEM (direct object, accusative case of FORTITUDO, 3rd.declension)

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