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devi (imported) wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2015 9:12 am
Uvam = sour (fermented) fruit (grapes).
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I'm no expert but coming from Spanish background this is how I'd see it.
A few Mexicans at this time period would have been familiar with Latin since after all the mass was said in Latin at this time.
But it is true Mexicans and SW Hispanics have been the least into going to church.
Latin is a bit more complicated than Spanish. A lot more complicated, actually. Whereas English and Spanish change the form of pronouns according to the role they play in a sentence--"he" for subject, "his" for possession, "him" for direct object or indirect object, for example--Latin does it for nouns, too, and with a vengeance. English has nominative, objective, and possessive cases for pronouns, but Latin has nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative cases, each with its own set of endings, for nouns, pronouns and adjectives. There was also a vocative case for nouns, used when addressing someone by name.
"Uva" is a noun in the first declension, and the "-a" ending indicates the nominative case--the subject. "Uvam" is the same noun, but in the accusative case--the direct object. So the sentence as written is nonsense, because it has a grape living a grape. If it were living with a grape, the word "cum" (with) would be there, and the second "grape" would be in the ablative case.
The big question is whether the writer of Lonesome Dove screwed up the Latin from his own ignorance or carelessness or to make a point that the characters in the story didn't know their Latin as well as they thought they did.
Sandi
