| dtewi said: (NOTE: Only for people who have taken at least a year of Latin) Well, on my homework this sentence came up: "Do they know who had been taken by the common people?" At first, I wanted to use the relative pronoun, so it was this: "Sciuntne qui ab vulgo captus erat." But I was stumped, as I had no clue what the antecedent was and couldn't form the sentence correctly. The interrogative pronouns was what I thought next: "Sciuntne quem ab vulgo captus erat." But that doesn't make sense. Then I threw my pen down and just stopped writing. Another thought I had was "who" had a double loyalty, being both an interrogative and relative pronoun, but I have no clue how'd that make sense. Help? |
Oh, dear, it's been abou twenty years since I studied latin... I'll throw in a few cents, but they might be very rusty ones.
Anyway I' d say that the "who" is clearly a relative pronoun, with an ellipsis
"Do they know ['the person] who had been taken by the common people"
And as such I'd go with your first:
"Sciuntne [eum] qui ab vulgo captus erat"
As in latin you also usually ellipsize other pronouns such as this demonstrative one in front of a relative.
As you pointed out, english "who" is ambiguous whe it comes to sex and number of the antecedent, but I'm ignorant of what the latin usage was for that,..
