Expert: Maria - 8/16/2011

Question
hi maria! please translate this to latin:

stay with me until my last breath

thanks!

Answer
Hello,

“Mane mecum usque ad extremum halitum meum” is the correct translation for the sentence  “Stay with me until my last breath”, which is very similar to your previous question where you asked me the translation of “Stay with me,father, till my last breath”  without the word “father”(Latin, “pater”).

Read more below.

Best regards,
Maria
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Note that:

-Stay = MANE (2nd.person singular, present imperative of MANEO, I stay)

-with = CUM (preposition which takes the ablative)

-me = ME (ablative of the 1st.person pronoun). Note that Latin uses MECUM where the ablative ME is attached to the  preposition CUM.

-until= USQUE AD ( preposition which takes the accusative case)

-my = MEUM (accusative masculine of the possessive MEUS agreed with HALITUM)

-last = EXTREMUM (accusative masculine of the adjective EXTREMUS agreed with HALITUM)

-breath = HALITUM (accusative of the masculine noun HALITUS, 4th.declension)

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