Expert: Maria - 2/2/2012

Question
Hi Maria,
How could I correctly "amor" into the Virgil quote, "ne cede malis"?  I would like it to read: yield to love, not evil.  Would "Cede amor, ne malis" be correct grammatically?  
Thanks very much,
Boone,

Answer
Hello,

If you want to have a correct translation of the sentence “Yield to love, not evil” as an adaptation of Virgil's quote "Ne cede malis"(Aeneid, Book 6, line 95), you must say as follows:

1-”Cede amori, non malis!”
or:
2-“Amori, non malis cede!”( with a different word order that in Latin can be variable).

As for "Cede amor, ne malis", I am sorry, but it is wrong, first because AMOR  is a nominative case, not the dative  AMORI which is required by the verb “cedo” whose imperative, 2nd.person singular, is “cede”; second, because NE  is a negative particle used before  an imperative like in “Ne cede malis”, while  the adverb NON is used before a noun (“malis”)  or a verb in many forms, except the negative imperative.

Read more below.

Best regards,
Maria
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Note that:

-Yield = CEDE (2nd.person singular, present imperative of CEDO, I yield / I give up)

-to love = AMORI (dative singular of AMOR, 3rd.declension)

-not = NON ( negative adverb)

-evil = MALIS (dative plural of the neuter noun MALUM, 2nd.declension). Latin uses the dative plural of MALUM  instead of the dative singular.


As for “Ne cede malis” we read in Virgil’s Aeneid, book 6, line 95, it means “Do not yield  to evil” or “Do not give up  to misfortunes”.

Finally, note that Latin word order  can be  different from English because Latin is an inflected language where syntactical relationships are indicated by the inflectional  endings, not by the order of the words.