Lady of the Island

[Vir Pili]

With apologies to Graham Nash:

In English, with no other context, "my lady of the island" (actual lyrics of the song) and "my lady from the island" have almost the same meaning. In Latin, which would be the more normal construction: "fēmina mea insularum" or "fēmina mea insulā"?
I would guess the latter because the former implies that the island owns the lady.

Still working on basics here.


By the way, I recently discovered that the SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows one to select Latin as a second language. Once this is done all the vowels have macrons available ā ē ī ō ū.

 

[Pacifica]

It's questionable how "my lady" should be translated into Latin (domina might be a better choice than femina) but since you're "still working on the basics", let's leave that idiomatic problem aside and focus on the mere grammar.

Insularum is plural, "of the islands". The singular "of the island" is insulae. Femina mea insulae would be a grammatically correct (though perhaps not very idiomatic) phrase with "island" in the required singular. It doesn't imply that the island literally owns the lady. The Latin genitive, much like English phrases with "of", doesn't always denote literal ownership.

Femina mea insula isn't right, but it could be made right by adding a preposition such as de or ex before insula. This is perhaps preferable to femina mea insulae.

You could also use an adjective: femina mea insulana.

 

[Gregorius Textor]

By the way, I recently discovered that the SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows one to select Latin as a second language. Once this is done all the vowels have macrons available ā ē ī ō ū.

Thanks for mentioning this (though in an odd place, maybe Resources would be better). I've been using the Samsung keyboard, which, I think, is built in on my Galaxy devices. It has macrons for most vowels, but not for o! So I intend to give SwiftKey a try.