Expert: Maria - 2/9/2011

Question
Hi Maria.
I am planning very shortly to ask my partner of 9 years to marry me.
I would like to have a gift for her engraved with my feelings.
A silver photo album of a history of our time together.
I want to say "You are my everything" and "Without you I WOULD BE  nothing" (as opposed to "I AM nothing") as 2 separate phrases.
I would rather entrust the translation to an expert and know it is grammatically correct than risk an awful online translator which reads as something else entirely!
I trust you may be able to help with this and thank you in advance for any help you may be able to give me.
Kind regards and very best wishes.
Simon.

Answer
Hello,

First of all I have to tell you that the English expression “my everything”  cannot be translated literally into Latin since the Romans would  have used the equivalent of “my life”, just to point out that someone can mean "everything" to a person who loves him/her.

So, "You are my everything" translates as “Tota vita es mea”, while  "Without you I would be  nothing" (as opposed to "I am nothing")  corresponds to : ”Nihil sine te essem”.

All the best to you and your future wife,
Maria
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Note that:

-You are = ES (2nd.person singular, present of SUM, I am)

-my = MEA (nominative feminine agreed with VITA)

-everything = TOTA VITA (literally “All my life”) where TOTA (all) is the nominative feminine of TOTUS  agreed with the feminine noun VITA meaning “life”.




-Without = SINE (preposition that takes the ablative case TE)

-you =TE ( 2nd.person pronoun in the ablative)

-I would be = ESSEM ( imperfect tense, subjunctive mood of SUM, I am)

-nothing = NIHIL


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.