Mater vesperi fenestram claudit et domi manet.

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Breakdown of Mater vesperi fenestram claudit et domi manet.

• mater: the mother
• manere: to stay
• domus: the home

Questions & Answers about Mater vesperi fenestram claudit et domi manet.

Why does the verb come at the end in Mater vesperi fenestram claudit et domi manet? Can the word order be changed?

Latin word order is much freer than English because the endings show who is doing what to whom.

• The "default" neutral order is often Subject – Object – Verb:
  Mater (subject) fenestram (object) claudit (verb).
• vesperi (“in the evening”) and domi (“at home”) are adverbial elements, which can move around for emphasis or style.

You could also see versions like:

• Vesperi mater fenestram claudit et domi manet.
• Fenestram mater vesperi claudit et domi manet.

They all mean roughly the same thing; differences are mostly about emphasis, not basic meaning. Latin doesn’t rely on word order the way English does.

Why is there no word for “the” in this sentence? How do we know it’s “the mother” and “the window”?

Classical Latin has no separate words for “the” or “a/an”. Nouns appear without articles:

• mater = mother / the mother / a mother
• fenestra = window / the window / a window

Context (and sometimes word order or prior mention) tells you whether to translate with “the” or “a” in English. Here, English most naturally says “The mother closes the window…”, but Latin just uses bare nouns.

What case is , and what is its role in the sentence?