• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
Learn Latin from scratch online

Learn Latin from Scratch

Learn Latin from Scratch following the traditional grammar-translation method: all the grammar and exercises you need, step by step!

  • 🏛️ Learn Latin online
  • 🎭 About
  • 🔐 Log in
  • ✨ Get the course ✨
Latin from Scratch › Fun with Latin! › Quae calor, alima mea!

Quae calor, alima mea!

What a heat, my sour!

It’s so hot in July! It’s very common to complain about how hot the weather is. Even more in Seville, the hottest city in Spain.

There’s a typical Sevillian expression, mi arma (literally ‘my weapon’) used only in vocative function by very old people or very Sevillian people. The origin, though, is mi alma ‘my soul’. The confusion of liquid consonants in syllable-ending position is frequent in Andalusian speech in favor of [ɾ]: alma [ˈaɾma], el niño [eɾˈniɲo], etc. In some Hispanic-American countries, however, we have the opposite: amor [aˈmol].

Do you love classics? Are you interested in Latin? Would you like to receive cool emails about that stuff? I’m quite sure you would: join the newsletter! 📧

To reflect something similar in the Latin translation, I chose alima. The Spanish alma comes from Latin anima, which undergoes syncope of ĭ and would have resulted in *anma; but due to a dissimilation (similar to *canmen —from the verb cano + suffix ‑men—, which dissimilates resulting in carmen) the [n] becomes, in most Romance languages, [l], although in Sicilian and Occitan we find arma instead of alma, and in Old French even anme (without dissimilation) and arme.

It’s customary in Seville (among other places) to consider the noun calor, masculine, as feminine: la calor, also found in phrases such as qué calor más asquerosa ‘what a disgusting heat’. In this case, we can’t see it in Spanish, but in Latin, since quis, quae, quid can be inflected, we can. Therefore, we just have quae calor, feminine, even when calor in Latin is masculine. However, this change of gender is not so strange among 3rd declension nouns ending in ‑or, such as Classic Spanish la color instead of el color or, without going any further, French la chaleur, feminine.

As we already said, mi arma, even when it comes from mi alma ‘my soul’, can be understood as “my weapon”, so here I offer an alternative translation:

Quae calor, telum meum!

Join the Latin from scratch course!

Join the Latin from scratch course!

Theory without practice is absolutely useless!

With a one-time payment you'll have the full course forever, with all the theory explained in video (no dirty YouTube ads) and, most importantly, dozens of hours of practice analyzed and explained step by step by me on the screen. Join now!

Paco Álvarez

About Paco Álvarez

I’m Paco Álvarez, a Spanish classical philologist. For years I’ve been teaching Latin and Greek online to Spanish students. When I saw there was nothing like my AcademiaLatin.com for English-speaking Latin lovers, I decided to create it myself, and that’s how LatinFromScratch.com was born.

New here? Start right now!

👉 And don’t forget to subscribe to the free newsletter!

Primary Sidebar

Paco Álvarez

Salve! This is Paco, your Latin teacher!

Join the newsletter

Do you love classics? Are you interested in Latin? Would you like to receive cool emails about that stuff?

Of course I would!

Legal note | Privacy policy | Terms and conditions | Cookies

Latin from Scratch is a project by Paco Álvarez. Follow me on YouTube 📺. Definitely subscribe to my newsletter 📧.