Disputatio:Helenopolis (Montana)

Nonne Cheyenna?--Ioshus ^(disp) 18:03, 6 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Cheyenna

Unde invenisti Helenopolis...Traupman dicit Cheyenna...--Ioshus ^(disp) 20:37, 6 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Someone's confused is all... Helena (Traupmann's Helenopolis) is the capital of Montana, not Wyoming. —Myces Tiberinus 00:12, 7 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Aha. Fixed.--Ioshus ^(disp) 00:23, 7 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Tempora

Perfectum, perfectum:

Urbs die 30 Octobris 1864 condita est postquam aurum ibi inventum est. 'The city was founded on 30 October 1864 after gold was discovered there'. Anglice incorrectum, sed dicis Latine correctum?

Perfectum, pluperfectum

Urbs die 30 Octobris 1864 condita est postquam aurum ibi inventum erat. 'The city was founded on 30 October 1864 after gold had been discovered there'. Anglice correctum, sed dicis Latine incorrectum? IacobusAmor 12:03, 11 Octobris 2007 (UTC)

postquam commands in classical Latin perfect tense ("absolute, not relative time"), only exceptionally it is followed by plusquamperfect. If post-classical writers are included, the picture is somewhat more complicated, see loci at wikt:postquam and b:Grammatica Latina/postquam. --Alex1011 13:19, 11 Octobris 2007 (UTC)

I don't think perf. perf. is incorrect in English (granted the presence of a temporal adverb/preposition also). As a general rule, one isn't forced to overdo the marking of time. For the same reason, with a temporal adverb, you can use the present rather than the future in future sense (tomorrow I am going ...) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:05, 11 Octobris 2007 (UTC)

Yes, most native speakers of English and Latin are/were imprecise in their handling of temporal relationships; and so we often find that postquam 'after', ubi 'when', simul ac and cum primum 'as soon as', and quotiens 'as often as' introduce the perfect, and that the pluperfect comes to mind usually in association with a particular interval, as in Undecimo die postquam a te discesseram, litteris scripsi 'Ten days after I (had) left you, I wrote a letter' (Bradley's Arnold, #428). Even there, many native speakers of English would omit the sign of the pluperfect (had). I'm not one of them. In the questioned sentence, when one envisions what must have happened, one imagines the finding of the gold, then an interval of time during which the news got around, and then a period during which prospectors and then settlers began migrating into the area, and finally, once a critical human mass had come together, the founding of the city. So the best order & way of presenting the facts are: 'On 30 October 1864, [some interval] after gold had been discovered, the city was founded.' The notion of a temporal interval is there, whether the sentence recognizes it or not. ¶ Side note: I'd put the postquam business early in the sentence and save the main verb (condita est) for the end. That's because expository sentences are little narratives—and the cleanest way to present narratives is to convey their facts in the order in which they happened, saving their temporal culmination—their historical climax—for the end. One reserves temporal zigzags ('X happened, but that was after Y had happened') for special effects. IacobusAmor 18:48, 11 Octobris 2007 (UTC)