2.3 ‘Missing’ words

Counting words is a rather simplistic way to analyse the difference between Latin and English. Nevertheless, it demonstrates one reason why it is impossible to relate English to Latin on a word-for-word basis. Some words in English have no direct equivalent in Latin. Where, then, are the ‘missing’ words?

There are some words which Latin cheerfully lives without. The lack of indefinite and definite articles (‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’) is perhaps surprising for English speakers. Latin has no direct equivalents, in spite of the fact that the Latin words unus (‘one’) and ille (‘that’) are ancestors of the indefinite and definite article in Romance languages (such as ‘un’, ‘una’ and ‘el’, ‘la’ in Spanish).

However, the ‘missing’ words of most interest here are those which reveal something about the way Latin works. Look again at the translations. The words in bold have no direct equivalents in Latin but are instead represented by the endings of words. We will see how this works in detail in the following pages.