Epic Latin Question

[dtewi]

WereKitten said:

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,..

Wouldn't the interrogative pronoun work better in place of "the person" as they don't know whom?

Sciuntne quem qui ab vulgo captus erat.

But "quem qui" sounds stupid.