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I hope this is the correct place to ask, I have 0 experience with Latin but need this one phrase translated. "A killed B" as in "Tom killed John".
From what I understand, for my context the best verb is "occido" but how would you use this verb?
Google offers several options:
I assume the second option will be translated more like "A was killed by B", so for my purposes I should go with option 1?
Thank you in advance :)
There are many words for killing, but occidere is a good one. The form occidit means "he/she/it kills/killed". For this particular verb the present and perfect tense forms for third person singular look alike, and these forms are also agnostic of gender.
The A and B in "A killed B" are more complicated than you might expect. If you have any such sentence, you cannot replace A and B with any names and expect it to work. Latin is far more concerned with the form of A and B than their order.
To illustrate this, let me replace A with Arrius and B with Baebius. Here are some valid ways to say "Arrius killed Baebius":
- Arrius Baebium occidit.
- Baebium Arrius occidit.
- Arrius occidit Baebium.
- Baebium occidit Arrius.
- Baebius ab Arrio occisus est.
- ab Arrio Baebius occisus est.
- Baebius occisus est ab Arrio.
The list is not exhaustive, and options 5–7 are only valid because Baebius is a man. Who killed whom is not decided by the order of the words — you can shuffle the words freely in a sentence like Arrius Baebium occidit without changing meaning — but by their forms. If you wanted to swap the roles, you can change it to Arrium Baebius occidit.
The first item on my list would be the typical way to phrase it. But if you just say "A B occidit", I would have hard time parsing it. Perhaps "A B" is a person? The least ambiguous way would be "A occidit B".
This is your option 3. The others do not mean what you want. Google Translate is horrible with Latin.
Latin works best if the words can be declined. Foreign names or placeholders like "A" make it a little awkward. The best way to say "A killed B" in Latin is A[nom.] B[acc.] occidit, where A is in the nominative and B in the accusative case. There is no easy general format the way you have in English. The required endings are different for different words, and figuring out how all that works is a key element of learning Latin.
In the specific case "Ludwig kills/killed Maria", you should choose "Ludwig Mariam occidit". The name Maria is used as such in Latin, so the different forms are very natural. There is a Latin version of Ludwig (Ludovicus), but that is not needed to make it all work. The important thing is that Maria is marked as the unambiguous object with the accusative case.
Here are some choices suitable for killing by sword in a battle:
Thomas Johannem occidit.
(Tom cut John down, or Tom "felled" John—a very common way to express this.)Thomas Johannem interfecit.
(Tom did John in—a common, generic way to say "killed" in Latin, regardless of how.)Thomas Johannem obtruncavit.
(Tom killed John by cutting him apart.)Thomas Johannem deiecit.
(Tom brought John down with a mortal wound.)Thomas Johannem percussit.
(Tom killed John by thrusting a weapon through him; suggests great force, enough to get through armor. Suitable for an arrow as well as a sword.)Thomas Johannem peregit.
(Tom ran John through—thrust through, piercing, not implying great force.)
For anyone wanting more options, this blog post by Carla Hurt lists a total of 33 Latin verbs for "kill", with details about each. A common one is neco, the root of the English word "internecine", but neco suggests killing without a weapon.
Indicating who killed whom works differently in Latin than in English. Latin indicates this not by word order but by the "case" of the nouns—exactly like "who" and "whom" in English, but Latin does this on nearly all nouns. The nominative case indicates the killer, and the accusative case indicates who was killed. If John killed Tom, then you say:
I've added links to web pages that show all the cases of each name.
Unlike English, Latin lets you rearrange the words in any order without changing the meaning. The word order creates different emphasis, which we usually indicate in English with intonation or additional words:
Thoman Johannes occidit.
(Regarding Tom, John killed him.)Thoman occidit Johannes.
(Regarding Tom, the one who killed him was John.)Johannes occidit Thoman.
(John killed someone—Tom.)Occidit Thoman Johannes.
(The one who killed Tom was John.)Occidit Johannes Thoman.
(The one whom John killed was Tom.)
If you don't want to deal with noun cases, you can stick with the prosaic word order of "Killer killee verb", as in all the examples in the first section above. Latin has to resort to this word order when dealing with foreign surnames that have no case-endings in Latin.
