The same is true of all possessive adjectives, e. Write out a full declension of vita antiqua , and provide at least one correct translation with each form. Also, conjugate fully voco and video in the present tense include the infinitive and imperative forms , and supply three translations for each indicative form e.
This is to be turned in and graded for credit. Sententiae Antiquae. Note the flexibility of Latin word order, especially sentences 4, 6, and 7.
Also note that sentence context predicates the proper translation of - ae forms; cf. You should be prepared to break verbs up into their components and tell what information each components conveys. That means that once we know how a noun inflects in all cases and numbers, in other words, once we know its declension class, we can typically predict its gender.
Such systems are found elsewhere as well. Morphological gender systems are never quite as neat as semantic ones because there is normally a group of nouns where meaning matters more than morphology. Typically, this group includes human beings, and sometimes other animals. Now, many nouns for human beings and animals are themselves marked appropriately, as we have already seen with m-tu m-dogo and wa-tu wa-dogo. Meaning trumps morphology.
In some languages, the sound structure of a word may determine its grammatical gender. When I first encountered such a system, I was a little taken aback, but if we think of gender as classifying nouns according to specific criteria that need not be semantic, phonology is no stranger than morphology. And, as we shall see, such systems are also found in the descendants of Latin! As before, there is always a semantic core where meaning overrides other criteria. In Yimas, a language from Papua New Guinea, there are eleven gender categories.
Genders are determined by meaning, regardless of phonological form: genders 1 and 2 are for male and female humans, respectively; gender 3 is used for higher animals like dogs and crocodiles; and gender 4 is for important plants, like the coconut palm or the sago palm, which provide food. Genders are determined by phonology: for instance, if a noun ends in -mp , it belongs to gender 7.
Gender in Latin is largely assigned by morphological criteria, but again with a semantic core. There are five declension classes, some of them with subclasses. Nouns of the first declension, with a nominative in —a , are feminine. Those of the second declension end in —us or —um and are masculine and neuter, respectively. Nouns of the fourth declension end in —us or —u and are masculine and neuter, respectively. And nouns of the fifth declension end in —es and are feminine.
The third declension contains nouns of all three genders. But again, gender assignment is not random. Many nouns contain derivational suffixes, like —tio for abstract nouns. Such suffixes are associated with specific genders; nouns ending in —tio are feminine, those in —men are neuter, and so on. Let us now look at those cases where meaning overrides morphology.
The first semantic group consists of humans. Human beings are masculine or feminine based on biological sex, which almost always trumps morphology. In Plautine comedy we find the Greek names Astaphium and Pinacium , both diminutives in Greek; in Latin, Astaphium is feminine and Pinacium is masculine because they refer to a woman and a boy, respectively.
Here the original meaning is still felt clearly enough to prevent sex-based gender assignment. Other words for prostitutes and slaves, however, are feminine and masculine. The second group contains trees and cities feminine as well as winds and rivers masculine. And anything ending in —um is neuter, regardless of semantic associations. And finally, we have a few exceptions that can be explained historically, but must have felt random to Romans. Even in the Romance languages, the word is still feminine.
The connection of dies with the deity was no longer obvious in the classical period because the nominative Diespiter had largely been replaced with what started as the vocative, Iupiter. Since all other nouns of the fifth declension are feminine, dies began to take on feminine gender as well. Eventually, the feminine gender prevailed, and all Romance reflexes of dies are feminine. This is a feminine noun which by metathesis becomes forpex , still feminine. Instead, you had to learn every noun with the article, which shows you what gender the noun is.
Studies that were already out when I was at school prove that French gender is largely predictable: human beings are masculine and feminine based on their sex, and for other nouns you can predict gender based on the last sound or sounds of a word. I wish we had learnt those rules at school; it would have been a bit of work at first, but then it would have saved us a lot of trouble.
But how could the Latin system change so dramatically? The answer is, by sound change. Already in later Latin, final consonants were lost. When the distinction between —us and —um disappeared, the latter was reanalysed as masculine. This late two-gender system survives into French. But as final sounds dropped of, and sound change obscured many of the suffixes in the third declension, the system as a whole was reanalysed as a phonological one.
Now it is the last few sounds that tell you what gender a noun is. The semantic core still exists. But notice how even that has undergone simplification. For humans, gender assignment is based on sex. But trees and cities, winds and rivers do not follow the ancient pattern any more because the mythological connections disappeared.
As for the third group, the random exceptions, only the frequent manus remained feminine, la main. Up to this point, everything has been nice and neat.
But some complications await us. Can a noun belong to two genders at once? And what if we combine nouns of different genders? Hybrid nouns and gender resolution. Gender has been quite unambiguous so far: assigning gender to a noun may not be a simple process, because meaning and inflection and sounds may all be involved, but at least once we know what gender a noun belongs to, we are going to be fine.
Or are we? Or is there? But if the base noun is masculine or feminine and also human, a neuter diminutive fits with morphology, but there is a clash with sex-based gender assignment. So what are we going to do about it? Linguists have come up with the so-called Agreement Hierarchy, in the form:.
The more to the left an element is situated, the more likely it is to have agreement in accordance with morphology; the more to the right it is, the more likely it is to follow sex-based assignment. With paidion , the article, an attributive element, will always be neuter; but relative pronouns can show some variation between neuter and masculine or feminine, and personal pronouns, while showing the same variation, have a greater tendency to be masculine or feminine rather than neuter.
But there are also other factors involved in the choice: the older the child, the more obvious its sex is going to be, and the greater the likelihood for semantic agreement with personal pronouns. If this seems complicated, perhaps it may help to look at English hybrid nouns. Yes, English also has a few of those: sun and moon , ships, and also pets.
Sun and moon were feminine and masculine respectively in Old English. Then grammatical gender was reduced to marking on pronouns, and sun and moon became neuter.
But in poetry, we can treat the sun as a he and the moon as a she , the exact opposite from Old English; this is because of a newer mythological association. Still, even then the relative pronoun is inanimate which rather than animate who. Ships can be feminine by personification, so she , but again it is which. And pets are more complicated. My favourite type of hybrid nouns in Latin is pregnant animals of declension classes which are normally associated with masculine gender.
Will biology win over morphology? In other words, will they be feminine or masculine? Varro discusses pregnant hares De re rustica 3. Lepus is a noun of the third declension, and Varro combines it with the masculine relative pronoun qui , even though the animal is obviously female. These two specific points leave me a little bemused.
If you really want a diminutive meaning, you have to say Frauchen and Herrchen , with a different suffix, and these are used affectionately for female and male dog owners. If we now have an adjective referring to both entities, what shape will it take? Different languages adopt different strategies. This is because the adjective stands between article and noun, just like in English, and since Mann is masculine and Frau is feminine, we have to use two different articles.
Why is that? Well, as you can see, the article is used only once now, and so it modifies both men and women, just like the adjective.
This is possible because of a phenomenon called syncretism. Quite often languages make fewer distinctions of form in the plural than in the singular. In German, we have distinct masculine, feminine and neuter paradigms for singular articles and adjectives, but in the plural the three genders look alike and very similar to the feminine singular, but that is a coincidence.
All German speakers are aware of the three genders, but hardly anyone who has not done German grammar realizes that this distinction is only visible in the singular. Depending on which Latin grammar you use, you will find the rules of gender resolution more or less complex, but they are almost always presented as quite firm rules.
The reality, however, is so much messier. There are two conflicting tendencies at play: on the one hand, Latin can go for genuine resolution, and in this case a man and a woman will be modified by a plural adjective, and the default gender is masculine.
If we coordinate inanimate entities of different genders, the plural adjective may be neuter plural. On the other hand, there is another tendency, the tendency for the adjective to agree only with the noun that stands closest to it, even though its meaning extends to all the nouns.
This second tendency makes a great deal of sense; why should a masculine and a feminine noun be combined with a neuter adjective, or why should one gender win out over the other? Latin nouns are masculine, feminine, or neuter. Like English, some of these parts of speech have a natural gender that is based on biological sex. However, the rest have a gender associated with them artificially even where no biological sex is indicated. The gender of Latin words based on biological sex is easy to identify.
Words that naturally refer to males are masculine, such as vir man , puer boy , or rex king. Words that naturally refer to females are feminine, such as femina woman , puella girl , or regina queen. The gender of all other words is more difficult because there is no biological sex associated with them. They only have grammatical gender. Nouns that are neuter in English can be masculine or feminine in Latin. Proper words for names of mountains, rivers, and months of the year are normally masculine while names of cities, countries, and trees are normally feminine.
But the Latin student should never rely on these rules for determining gender. There are too many exceptions. Only words in English that indicate a biological sex have a masculine or feminine gender.
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