How do I begin tackling an unseen passage of Latin for translation into English?

Here's part of a passage taken from an OCR sample language paper: tum magna turba civium ad templum convenit atque ianuam lapidibus obstruxit ne Pausanias exire posset. deinde tectum deleverunt quod sperabant eum sub caelo aperto celerius moriturum esse. When you are given a passage like this, the first thing to do is to break long sentences down into simpler parts or clauses. How do you do this? The most effective way is to begin by looking for verbs within these sentences, as they give the basic structure of clauses and sentences in Latin. I have underlined the verbs in the passage above. Next, since verbs in Latin have subjects which govern them, we should then proceed to look for nouns and adjectives that are subjects of the sentence. For example, in the first sentence, 'magna turba' is the subject because it has an ending that shows that it is the singular subject, and governs the verb 'convenit' that follows. Some sentences, such as the second one, may not have subjects, which means that the verb itself is also the subject of the sentence. It now remains to look for any grammatical constructions within these sentences. For example, in the first sentence, the word 'ne' signals a negative purpose clause in Latin. Once we have done all this, the sentence should now be more manageable to translate!

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Answered by Ho Ting C. Latin tutor

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