# My brother, my hero.



## weegeth

Hi everybody,
could you help me please with translating the phrase* "My brother, my hero"* to the latin? 
Thanks!


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## wandle

Suggest:
_Mihi frater et heros._
Literally: Brother and hero to me.


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## weegeth

Thank you


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## Maioneselover

Why dative pronouns if there is no copula?
"Fili mi" is very common in Latin, I'd use the possessive form.


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## wandle

Either _es_ or _est_ can be understood.


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## relativamente

The verb sum with a dativ expresses possesion.Mihi est frater means I have a brother.
My brother can be expressed using a possesive adjective frater meus (My brother)  or the genitive of the personal pronoun frater mei ( the brother of mine).
So I suggest "frater meus et heros meus"


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## wandle

As an example, *Seneca, Controversiae*, 7, 16 ad fin:

_'nocens est iste': sed mihi frater est. naturae iura sacra sunt._
'That fellow is harmful'. But he is my brother. The laws of nature are sacred.

This cannot mean 'I have a brother'.


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## Maioneselover

wandle said:


> As an example, *Seneca, Controversiae*, 7, 16 ad fin:
> 
> _'nocens est iste': sed mihi frater est. naturae iura sacra sunt._
> 'That fellow is harmful'. But he is my brother. The laws of nature are sacred.
> 
> This cannot mean 'I have a brother'.



Persuasive  however this doesn't exlcude we can also use "meus" or "mei" (as Relativamente has said), isn't it?


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## wandle

> we can also use "meus" or "mei"


Yes indeed. The point of the English, though, seems to be that he is both 'brother and hero', rather than that he is 'mine'. He is not being distinguished from other hero-brothers, is he?


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## Tinu

I would advice against "heros meus", as it does not quite work like this in Latin. Whereas "hero" in English means not only a heroic figure, but also an admirable and indeed, an admired person, and "my hero" is therefore something close to "my idol", there is, as far as I know, no such dimmension of the word _heros _in Latin. "Heros meus" would simply mean "a hero that somehow belongs to me" (e. g., it could perhaps occur in a narrrative text in the meaning "the hero I was talking about previously, the one I had in mind"). 

Also, please do not translate it _frater mei_. Of course it is true that _mei _is a genitive sg of _ego _and thus it technically can be translated "of mine", but no Latin atuhor would have used it in a possessive construction. It would be a very poor Latin.

I really liked wandle's suggestion, I think that his/her translation works very nicely. It's syntactic structure could perhaps be best rendered in Eglish this way: "For me (= _mihi_), he is a brother and a hero". The dative here would therefore not be a _dativus possessionis_, but a _dativus respectus _(dative of perspective). Does this make sense?


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