A natural history of Latin
Table 15. The gerund
Case |
Form |
Meaning |
|
|
|
Genitive |
amandi |
‘of loving’ |
Dative |
amando |
‘to/for loving’ |
Accusative |
amandum |
‘loving’ (used only after a preposition) |
Ablative |
amando |
‘with/by loving’ |
|
|
|
The gerund, then, is a verbal noun which is used in circumstances where the meaning is verbal but where the form required is that of a noun. In other words the gerund provides the case forms of the infinitive. The forms themselves are those of a noun in the neuter singular, except that there is no nominative since that function is fulfilled by the infinitive. The declension of the gerund of the verb amare is set out in Table 15.
While the gerund is a noun, the gerundive is an adjective formed from the verb stem just as the present and perfect participles are. Its meaning is ‘which should be done’ or ‘which is worth doing’. The form amandus for example means ‘who should be loved’ or ‘who is worth loving’ or quite simply ‘lovable’. This form is masculine and refers to a man. The corresponding form for a woman is amanda. Both forms have been used as names in the past but only the feminine version is still in common use today.
A simple sentence with a form in the gerundive is puella amanda est ‘the girl should be loved’ or literally ‘the girl is (one) who should be loved’. By the same token Cato’s favourite refrain in the Senate
Praetérea cénseo Cartháginem esse deléndam may be literally translated as ‘Moreover I am of the opinion that Carthage is (a place) which should be destroyed’. These inelegant renderings show that it is not always possible to translate word for word from one language into another, especially when the grammatical constructions required are quite divergent.
There are further complications with the gerundive which mean that in other circumstances it too sometimes has to be translated as if it were an infinitive. I think it is best to let anyone who wants to
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study Latin grammar more thoroughly discover these mysteries for themselves.
What is probably worth reminding ourselves of is that the gerundive is in fact the only Latin word form for which English has no equivalent at all. In all other circumstances the Latin form can be represented quite well with one, two, three, or even on occasion more English words according to specific and quite simple rules. Although the languages may at first seem very different from each other, there is in most cases a direct match between them. It is only when there is not, as with the gerundive, that translation becomes really difficult.
How words are formed
Earlier we saw how Latin nouns, adjectives, and verbs can be divided into a stem and an ending. Sometimes the stems cannot be further broken down, as with puer ‘child’, but quite often the stem itself consists of smaller parts, as with puer-il-is ‘childish’. The word puerílis has been formed from puer by adding a suffix to the stem, just as in English childish is formed from child and -ish. Both Latin and English have many such ways of forming words from other words. In the above instance, the suffix -il- is used to convert a noun into an adjective. Other examples of its use are: civilis ‘civil’ from civis ‘citizen’, virílis ‘virile’ from vir ‘man’, senílis ‘concerning, like an old person’ from senex ‘old man’. In this example note how the meaning is not necessarily pejorative, unlike English senile, and how the noun’s special nominative ending, -ex, is removed before the adjective is formed.
There is a huge variety of suffixes like this, and it is a good idea to remember them since that diminishes the amount of work one has to do to learn words. They are not just used to make adjectives out of nouns but for many different combinations. For instance, the suffix -tas works in the other direction, taking an adjective such as liber ‘free’ and turning it into the noun libértas ‘freedom’, genitive libertátis.
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Table 16. Nouns and adjectives referring to animals in Latin and English
Latin noun |
Latin adjective |
English noun |
English adjective |
|
|
|
|
canis |
caninus |
dog |
canine |
equus |
equinus |
horse |
equine |
feles |
felinus |
cat |
feline |
bos |
bovinus |
cow |
bovine |
vulpes |
vulpinus |
fox |
vulpine |
|
|
|
|
You can even make a noun out of an adjective that comes from a noun, as in puerílitas ‘childishness’, where the English suffix -ness fulfils the same function.
Many of these suffixes have come into English via Latin loans, so that we have for example virile, puerile, infantile. Similarly, Latin nouns in -tas often have counterparts in English in -ty (where the English form of the suffix has been mediated by French): liberty, quality, quantity, identity, and the like. It is interesting too to note the way that English has often borrowed the derived word but not the base on which that word is built. Although we have infant beside infantile, we have not borrowed the other nouns that enter into the pattern with -ilis. Another example of this kind concerns adjectives relating to animals where the Latin suffix is -inus. Table 16 shows the pattern. This pattern comes about because adjectives of this kind are characteristic of learned, scientific language, where Latin borrowings were, as we have seen, common, while there were already perfectly good words for the animals themselves so the nouns did not need to be borrowed.
To provide a full treatment of word formation would require a book of its own, but before leaving the topic it is important to underscore one big difference between word formation and inflection. The inflection of words is in principle predictable: when you know which pattern of inflection to apply for a given word, you know all the forms of the words. But word formation is not regular in this sense. A given suffix is generally used in the same way in all the words in
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which it is used, but you cannot know in advance if a particular suffix can be used with a particular stem. That is true both of Latin and of English. For example, ‘man’ is vir and ‘woman’ is mulier. The adjective meaning ‘relating to man’ is virílis but the adjective which means ‘relating to woman’ is muliébris, which is formed with a completely different suffix. In English we have gentlemanly but ladylike with two different suffixes and in boyish and girlish we have a different suffix again. For these reasons, it is good to know what the most common ways of building words in Latin are, but it is not a good idea to try and form new words by simply extending the patterns.
So far we have only used examples with nouns and adjectives, but in fact verb stems are the ones most commonly deployed in the formation of new words. Latin verbs can very often be discerned in words in English and other modern European languages. The stem of the verb video ‘see’ is contained in provide, where the original Latin meaning was ‘look ahead’ hence ‘make arrangements’ or ‘provide for’ and thus ‘supply’, this last being the most common meaning in modern English. The same stem combined with a different prefix is found in evident, which comes from the present participle of a verb meaning ‘seem, appear’. The verb mitto ‘send’ is at the heart of a number of modern English verbs such as remit, omit, transmit, submit, commit, and permit, and similar prefixes occur with the stem of the verb capio ‘take’ in receive, conceive, perceive, and deceive. In this last example, the fact that the stem -ceive is so altered with respect to its Latin ancestor is due to the fact that this set of verbs came into English via French.
The meaning of a verb with a prefix can sometimes be radically different from the meaning of the original simple verb both in Latin and in English. If we take the -mit set as an example, we can see different degrees of transparency in the ways the parts combine together. Given that -mit means ‘send’ and trans means ‘across’, it is natural that transmit should mean what it does. In the case of submit the prefix sub means ‘under’, and submit means to give in or to fall under a greater force or authority. Similarly, if you submit an essay or an application, you are giving it to someone who for the purposes
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of assessment is higher than you on some scale of authority. With permit it is perhaps less obvious, but this originally meant ‘to send, let through’, a sense which survives most directly in expressions like work permit and residence permit. From this it is a short step to the meaning ‘allow’. There are many more examples in English with stems like -pose ‘put’, -fer ‘carry’, and -mote ‘move’. With the aid of a good dictionary you should be able to puzzle out the way the modern meanings have arisen.
The items that do all the work in the above examples are the prefixes trans-, sub-, per-, pro-, con-, etc. All of these also exist as independent prepositions in Latin, and in this respect the formations here are similar to the combinations you find in English with a verb and a particle, as in give in/out/up/over/etc or take in/out/away/over,etc. Once again the meanings are sometimes fairly self-evident—a take-away meal is one that goes away from the place where it was made—and in other instances pretty obscure. How does take in come to mean ‘deceive’, for example? In other instances in English, too, verb and preposition have become fused, often with a meaning that is no longer transparent, e.g. understand, withstand, outdo, forgo, undergo.
From these scattered examples, you can see that new words can be formed from Latin verb stems in several different ways, and in order to understand the connection you will often need to look at the different parts of the verb as given in the word list. In particular, words derived from verbs are often built on the third form in the list, the past participle. From visus ‘seen’ we have visio ‘sight’, whose accusative form visiónem ultimately gives English vision, and visíbilis, borrowed into English as visible. A compound built on this same stem is revísio, revisiónis, from which we have acquired revision. English has then created a verb out of this, namely revise.
Words of this latter kind are particularly common among the loanwords in modern European languages. English has many hundreds of words in -ion and pretty well all of them are formed from the past participle stem of a Latin verb. A few examples are: information, tradition, organization, illustration and mission. The different shapes of the stem in question can be found by consulting
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the entries for informo, trado, organizo, illustro, and mitto in the word list.
There are many other ways of building words. For instance, it is obviously possible to make verbs from nouns. A case in point is the Latin verb finire ‘end’, which is formed from the noun finis ‘end’ just as the English verb to end comes from the English noun end.
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Part IV
Basic Vocabulary
Lists of words, phrases and quotations
The following wordlist includes all the Latin words that occur in this book. Where a word receives particular discussion or explanation in the text, its entry is followed by a reference to the relevant page(s). The list also gives some basic Latin vocabulary. In choosing the words for inclusion here I have given priority to those which have left frequent traces in modern languages.
In all the words or forms with more than two syllables an accent indicates the position of the stress. Two-syllable words are always stressed on the first syllable. It is important to remember that these accents are meant as an aid to the user of this list and are not employed in ordinary Latin spelling.
The stress indicated is in principle the one which was used in classical times; in most cases this is also the stress which has been used throughout the word’s subsequent history. However, for a certain group of words I have preferred to give an alternative stress, which was the one adopted in the Middle Ages. The words in question are Greek loans ending in -ia, such as philosophía. In Latin as it has been spoken since antiquity such words are stressed in the same way as in Greek, namely on the penultimate syllable, but in classical Latin the stress fell on the antepenultimate syllable, thus philosóphia.
In the grammar section above I have explained which inflected forms are indicated in the wordlist for nouns, adjectives and verbs. For nouns gender is shown by the abbreviations m. for masculine, f. for feminine and n. for neuter.
The wordlist is followed by a compilation of some 500 more or less well-known Latin phrases, expressions and quotations with translations. After each genuine quotation the name of the author or source is indicated in a parenthesis. In the many cases where a well-known expression can be traced back to a rather different wording by a particular writer, the author’s name is generally not given. All the words which occur in the phrases and quotations can also be found as separate entries in the wordlist. Where the phrase is discussed in the body of the book, the entry is followed by a reference to the appropriate page(s).
Basic vocabulary
a, ab from, by
abbas abbátis m. abbot
ábdico abdicávi abdicátus abdicáre renounce, abdicate abdómen abdóminis n. abdomen
abdúco abdúxi abdúctus abdúcere take or bring away
ábeo ábii abíre go away, disappear
abício abiéci abiéctus abícere throw away ábies abíetis f. fir
ablátus abláta ablátum carried away
abnórmis abnórmis abnórme irregular, abnormal abóleo abolévi abólitus abolére efface, destroy abominábilis abominábilis abominábile abominable abóminor abominátus abominári deprecate, detest aborígines aboríginum m. original inhabitants, especially
the ancestors of the Romans
abórtio abortiónis f. miscarriage, abortion
abrúmpo abrúpi abrúptus abrúmpere break off, sever abrúptus abrúpta abrúptum interrupted, steep, sudden ábsens gen. abséntis absent
abséntia abséntiae f. absence absínthium absínthii n. wormwood
absolútus absolúta absolútum perfect, complete absólvo absólvi absolútus absólvere complete; acquit absórbeo absórbui absorbére drink up, swallow
ábstinens gen. abstinéntis abstinent abstinéntia abstinéntiae f. abstinence abstíneo abstínui abstinére abstain
abstráctus abstrácta abstráctum withdrawn, abstract ábstraho abstráxi abstráctus abstráhere drag away, withdraw absum áfui abésse be away, be absent
absúrde absurdly
absúrdus absúrda absúrdum absurd, unreasonable abundántia abundántiae f., abundance, richness abúndo abundávi abundáre overflow