Admit it.
We all have a list of books that we'll tackle "some day." Well . . . some day is here.
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On page 28 of Ulysses, James Joyce includes the following passage: "Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive." This is a Latin phrase meaning "love of mother." But the mention of the two different cases (subjective and objective gentive) renders the phrase ambiguous: is it love of a mother for her child or love of the child for his mother? According to Exercise 10 of the online Latin in Action site: "The basic meaning of the genitive is of, denoting possession. . . . The subjective and objective genitive are used with nouns and "A subjective genitive is one where the noun expressed in the genitive is the subject of the idea which has governed the genitive. . . . "An objective genitive is one where the noun expressed in the genitive is the object of the idea which has governed the genitive." Got it? Me neither. (Maybe the Wikipedia entry will be more helpful.) |
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