any Latin teachers around?

[mimsum]

ds is stuck on "vos auxilium mihi semper dabas" he's got "you always help me ????"

any ideas please? it's not in his dictionary and as he can't work out the root verb he's stuck

Dabas is from the verb Do (dare dedi datum) - "to give" and it's the imperfect indicative, ie 'you always (used to give, were in the habit of giving) gave help to me'.

See here for the declensions of Do with 'dabas' in the second table down.

Disclaimer: I'm NOT a Latin teacher, just did it at A-level many years ago so will happily stand corrected Hope that helps though.

Am not a Latin teacher, but I believe the root verb could be irregular???

do = give

Xposted with Apples - at least we came up with the same answer

And two is a very quorum, NotTheVirgin, so we must be right

I hope he gets a good mark for this or we shall feel very guilty!

not teacher and has been ages since I studied but seems reasonably close

I am a Latin teacher and that sentence is slightly dodgy: it's got a plural pronoun (vos= you) and the personal ending of the verb in the singular. It should read either "vos auxilium mihi semper dabatis" or ""tu auxilium mihi semper dabas". But it means what Aples said.

The way to work out the verb would have been:

Start from the back- how much is the personal ending? -s = 2nd person singular (thou).

Is there a tense/mood sign?- yes -ba- making it the imperfect indicative.

what is left is the verb stem da-

for the dictionary form you need to add an -o (for the first person singular) to the verb stem

in verbs where the stem vowel is a, the a is dropped when you add an o, so if you do that here you end up with just d+o.

thanks so much everyone - he had to pick either dabas or dabatis and obviously plumped for the wrong version

they had a cover teacher today, which is probably why he wasn't very clear about what they had to do

right, he can tick that one off on the homework planner