Word order with relative clauses

Question

Last night I watched the movie Matilda, which I really liked, and I decided to write a few sentences about it in Latin. I was attempting to write a sentence involving a relative clause, when I became a little unsure of myself. I wanted to know, is my word order correct in the sentence below?

Est pictura movens de puella intelligente quae amantem familiam vult.

(You'll notice that I use picturam moventem for movie, which is a suggestion I found on Reddit.)

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If it's not too much for one post, I have one more question. I wanted to say the movie is called Matilda. Would this be a correct way of saying it?

Picturae moventi nomen est Matilda.

What would be some other ways of saying it?

I appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

Answer 1

Your word order looks fine—but then Latin is not very particular about word order altogether. You could swap around a few words and it would still be fine. Est at the beginning is perfectly fine. While main verbs often come at the end of a clause or sentence, that is by no means compulsory.

I suspect volo is generally not used without an infinitive; you could use desidero.

Your second sentence looks fine to me. The only thing that springs to mind is that it would probably be part of a longer sentence in natural prose in most situations, but that's not really a problem.

Alternatively, if you still want it to be a short sentence, you could say ecce pictura movens cui nomen Matilda or dicta Matilda or nomine Matilda.

Answer 2

Equidem propono haec:

Est pellicula cinematographica de puella cata, quae familiam amantem habere vult.
Ecce Matilda, pellicula de puella acri ingenio, quae familiam amantem desiderat.

Vocem est ponere potes in initio. Plerumeque in fine invenitur, sed hic clarius est vocem not ponere post enuntiatum secundarium.

Pronomen relativum in forma feminina est quae, non qui. (Nota addita: Rogatum ita emendatum est, ut qui non iam assit.) Et, ut Cerberus quoque scribit, verbo vult non uti potes sic. Dicere potes ea familiam desiderat vel ea familiam habere vult, sed ea familiam vult mihi parum naturale videtur.

Answer 3

Yeah, I'd go for either nomine Matilda ("Matilda by name") or cui titulus/nomen est Matilda ("to which the title is Matilda").

The only possible flaw I see in your word order is that usually (not always, at least not as far as I know) est as the first word in a sentence means "There is." So if you wanted to say "It's a movie about a smart girl," you'd probably write

Pellicula est de puella callida.

If you wanted to be particularly elegant you could put de in between puella and callida:

Pellicula est puella de callida.