Scratch

(Going by the memory of imnotbob's learning romanji topic, I'm assuming that this fits here)

I'm teaching myself Latin.  I learned a bit of it in school a few years ago, and am currently trying to better my vocabulary and fix some grammar mistakes.  I've tried a few phrases, but the thing is that my only resource is Google Translate, which has its faults (namely, it doesn't read phrases, just words; for example 'do' means 'i give' and 'dare' means 'give', but when I type 'i give' it translates to 'i dare', because it doesn't recognize 'i' but recognizes 'give').  I was playing around with some phrases, and just want to check if they are correct or extremely awkward.  (And yes, I know that they're all based on the same sentence.)  My translations are below lines of latin in blue.

Sum esse umbra et lux
I am light and a shadow

Sum esse umbra Mordor et lux Gondor
I am the shadow of Mordor and the light of Gondor
(Mordor and Gondor might mean something, but I'm using them as proper nouns here; as in either the cities or countries in the Lord of the Rings)

Es umbra et sum lux.
You are a shadow and I the light

Are these (reasonably) correct, or is it basically just words that have roughly the same meaning?  I'm especially uncertain about my use of 'et'- I'm not sure whether it should be, for example, 'sum esse umbra et lux' or 'sum esse umbra et sum esse lux' or maybe 'sum esse umbra et esse lux'.  But I still think that I got all this right; when I try anything else in Google Translate, it's just nonsense (like 'I am a shadow, and he declared that to be the light').

So am I barely right or completely wrong?

Last edited by maxskywalker (2012-04-19 08:50:30)