Expert: Maria - 1/23/2011

Question
Hi, Could you please translate for me - 'my children are my life' or 'my boys are my life'

Thanks in advance,
Hayley

Answer
Hello,

Both  “My children are my life” and  “My boys are my life” translate as follows:

-“Filii mea sunt vita”  or with a different word order “Filii vita sunt mea”.

See below for grammatical analysis.

Best regards,
Maria
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Note that:

-My = omitted in Latin as it is implied in this context.

-children/ boys  = FILII (subject in the nominative plural of FILIUS)

-are = SUNT (from SUM, I am)

-my = MEA (nominative feminine of the possessive MEUS agreed with VITA)

-life = VITA (nominative case, 1st.declension)

As you can see, 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.