Basque PAU Latin II common mistakes
Basque PAU Latin II · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Translating a subordinate clause with a subjunctive (cum, ut, ne, quod) as if the verb were indicative, producing a flat coordinate clause in Basque or Spanish ("eta... zuen" / "y... hizo") that loses the causal, concessive, final or consecutive nuance the author intended.
Candidates learn the subjunctive as a morphology drill and only recognise it when the ending is obvious; in real prose the verb is often far from its conjunction, and the candidate defaults to the main-clause meaning of the lexeme instead of asking which semantic relation the conjunction plus mood encodes.
What to do instead
Before translating, mark every subordinator and its verb, then decide the relation (cum historicum = temporal/causal; cum concessive = 'nahiz eta'/'aunque'; ut/ne + subjunctive = final or complement; consecutive ut with a signal word like tam/tantus). Write the relation as a short Basque connector first, then fit the clause around it.
Leaving the ablative absolute untranslated as a literal prepositional phrase ("Caesar consulibus" rendered as "Zesar kontsulekin"), instead of turning it into a temporal, causal or concessive clause with its own subject and verb.
The participle looks like an adjective, so the candidate treats the whole phrase as a noun phrase attached to the main subject; the lack of a Latin preposition encourages a word-for-word transfer that Basque and Spanish syntax cannot support.
What to do instead
Always identify the two elements (noun/pronoun + participle) and recast: 'Zesarrek kontsulak zirenean' / 'siendo cónsules César...'. Practise a fixed checklist: is the participle present (simultaneous) or perfect (prior)? Then choose the connector (noiz/bitartean, zeren/bait, nahiz eta).
Confusing passive and deponent forms (e.g. hortatus, secutus, conatus, profectus) and translating a deponent as a true passive ("animatua izan zen" for hortatus est) or, conversely, taking a passive perfect as active.
Form-based recognition: the endings -tur, -tus est look identical to true passives, and the candidate has memorised deponents as vocabulary items rather than as verbs whose voice is active in meaning.
What to do instead
Keep a running list of deponents met in the set texts with their perfect stems, and when a passive-looking form has an accusative object or no agent, test it as active. In translation, check: does the sense demand an agent (a/ab + ablative) or an object (accusative)?
Analysing cases by surface ending alone, e.g. taking a first-declension dative singular (poetae, agricolae) as genitive or nominative plural, or a third-declension -e ablative as accusative, and then building the syntax around the wrong case.
Endings are ambiguous across declensions and the candidate analyses word by word in isolation instead of using agreement, verb government and word order; exam pressure pushes toward the first plausible parse rather than the one the sentence requires.
What to do instead
Parse syntactically before morphologically: locate the finite verb, then assign each noun to a function (subject, object, complement) and only then confirm the case ending. For ambiguous forms, list the two or three possible parses and eliminate by agreement and by the verb's case government (e.g. utor/fruor/potior + ablative).
Mistaking the head noun of a long hyperbaton or genitive chain, so that an adjective agrees with the wrong noun or a genitive is attached to the nearest word rather than the governing one (e.g. in a phrase like magno deorum beneficio).
Latin word order separates agreeing elements deliberately for emphasis; candidates translate left to right and attach each word to whatever preceded it, ignoring agreement in case, number and gender.
What to do instead
Reconstruct the phrase by matching endings before translating: group words that agree, then reorder into a neutral sequence (subject–object–verb). Practise by bracketing noun-adjective pairs in a passage before writing any translation.
Choosing the modern reflex or the most frequent dictionary sense instead of the contextually correct one (e.g. rendering res as 'thing' where it means 'state/affair/battle', or vir as 'man' where virtus is at issue), and ignoring idioms such as rem publicam gerere, operam dare, bellum inferre.
Candidates rely on a single memorised gloss per word and on Spanish/Basque cognates; they do not check whether a multi-word unit functions as one lexical item.
What to do instead
Build a context-gloss list from the set author: for each frequent word (res, ratio, animus, imperium, gratia) record two or three senses and one idiom. In the exam, if a literal gloss produces nonsense, consult the alternative senses and the idiom list before forcing the literal meaning.
Deriving etymology from surface similarity rather than sound laws: claiming e.g. Spanish 'lucha' from Latin 'lucta' without noting the regular change, or inventing a Latin etymon for a word of Arabic or Germanic origin, and confusing learned doublets with popular transmission.
Candidates treat etymology as guesswork based on resemblance; they have not internalised the distinction between inherited popular words (with regular phonetic change) and cultismos borrowed later from written Latin.
What to do instead
For each proposed etymology, state the sound changes explicitly and check the expected outcome (e.g. Latin -ct- > Spanish -ch-: noctem > noche, lactem > leche, luctam > lucha). Mark words of non-Latin origin (Arabic, Germanic) as such; when unsure, say so rather than inventing a link.
Identifying the author, genre and context only vaguely ("a Roman historian", "a poem about love") without naming the work, the speaker, the addressee or the political situation, and without linking formal features (metre, rhetorical structure) to the genre.
Candidates memorise plot summaries rather than the specific framing of the set passage, and treat commentary as an invitation to general knowledge rather than to evidence from the text.
What to do instead
For each set text prepare a one-page card: author, date, work, book/line numbers, speaker and addressee, occasion, genre conventions, and three textual details that support the genre label. In the answer, quote the Latin to anchor each claim.
Scansion errors in the hexameter or elegiac couplet: misplacing the caesura, treating a final -m as a full consonant that blocks elision, ignoring elision across word boundaries, or mis-scanning the fifth foot (spondee instead of the usual dactyl).
Candidates scan by ear or by syllable counting rather than by quantity rules; they forget that final -m is nasalised and elided before a vowel, and that -que is enclitic and does not add a syllable.
What to do instead
Scan mechanically: mark every long syllable by position and by nature, mark the sixth foot (always a spondee or trochee), then work backwards to fix the fifth foot. Apply elision rules explicitly (final vowel or -m before initial vowel or h). Check the caesura falls after the strong position of the third foot in the hexameter.
Treating textual criticism as a single 'right answer': adopting a reading without stating the manuscript evidence, or inventing a conjecture without explaining the corruption (e.g. haplography, dittography, homoeoteleuton) or why the transmitted text is impossible.
Candidates see the apparatus as decoration and have not practised the reasoning from lectio difficilior, usus scribendi and metre; they also overlook that metre itself can decide between variants.
What to do instead
For any variant, write three lines: (1) what the manuscripts read, (2) why that reading is or is not defensible (sense, style, metre), (3) which principle justifies the choice (lectio difficilior, haplography, metrical necessity). Practise on one passage per set author with a known crux.