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jjthebluntlast Thursday at 9:15 PM1 replyview on HN

that makes more sense to me, because i asked thinking it was a typo on ablative with implicit lingua


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schoenlast Friday at 1:21 AM

Yes, one way of referring to Latin is "lingua Latina" or just "Latina", but there's an old custom of using adverbs to refer to use of languages. So Latine is "in Latin" or "Latinly" (and there are similar adverbs available for other languages).

Interestingly, the language adverbs are also used in a construction with scire (to know) or intellegere: "Latine scit" (he or she knows Latin), "Graece intellegit" (he or she understands Greek). In English we would definitely think of this as needing a direct object, but Latin allows it as an adverb, to understand "in a Greek way" (perhaps it would make sense to think of it as something like "in a Greek manner" or "from a Greek perspective").

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