Chapter 1: Introduction

If the capacity for rational speech is the one feature that most distinctively sets us apart from other members of the animal kingdom, then the effective use of language should surely be among our highest individual priorities. Fortunately, most intelligent people do not have to be persuaded about the value of clear and precise communication. The message is more or less self-evident: if we wish to speak well, read well, and write well, we must gain control of words, the basic elements of all discourse. We need not aspire to professional careers as writers or scholars in order to profit from a good vocabulary. In practical terms alone, it is a plain fact that oral and written language skills are stepping-stones to advancement in almost every vocation that involves some intellectual challenge.

The good news is that it can be a wonderful adventure acquiring and honing verbal skills. Quite apart from any practical benefits, the study of words often becomes an absorbing quest, a compulsive game, a glorious obsession. Many of us become happy converts to the cause in childhood, and get hooked on words for life. Others, who perhaps had less encouragement at a tender age, will succumb to the enchantment of words as teenagers or adults. Incidentally, the phrase “enchantment of words” is more than just a metaphor, since words lie at the heart of all magical charms and incantations—they are the cherished tools of wizards and witch doctors. If you find words fascinating, you will be pleased to learn that fascinate is derived from Latin fascinum, a bewitching spell. The fascination of words can become a hard spell to break. Like peddlers of seductive drugs, purveyors of word magic should probably be required to flag their books and manuals with an ominous message: “WARNING: THIS COURSE OF STUDY MAY BE ADDICTIVE.”

Chapter 1: Introduction

In the UVic Calendar, Greek and Roman Studies 250 carries a reasonably clear and straightforward title: “Greek and Latin Roots of English in Science and Social Sciences.” Still, it may be a good idea to summarize what this course attempts to achieve, and what it does not. Although Greek and Roman Studies 250 may vary in emphasis from one instructor to the next, its general aims and objectives can be stated as perennial goals.

The course will examine the systematic principles by which a large portion of English vocabulary has evolved from Latin and (to a lesser degree) from Greek. It will try also to impart some skill in the recognition and proper use of these derived words. Notice the stress on principles: although we shall be continually looking at interesting individual words, our constant aim will be to discover predictable general patterns of historical development, so that we may be able to cope with new and unfamiliar words of any type that we have studied. We shall often approach the problem by a procedure known as “word analysis,” which is roughly comparable to the dissection of an interesting specimen in the biology laboratory.

The course assumes no previous knowledge of Latin and Greek, and does not involve the grammatical study of these languages—except for a few basic features of noun and verb formation that will help us to understand the Latin and Greek legacy in English. (If you have already had some encounter with Latin and/or Greek, you are welcome in the course; but you may find the early chapters rather obvious and elementary.) When we turn to consider the Greek material, all students will be asked to learn the Greek alphabet. This skill is not absolutely essential for a general knowledge of Greek roots in English, and it is often not required in courses that deal only with medical and technical terminology. Knowing the alphabet, however, will help you understand a number of otherwise puzzling features of spelling and usage; moreover, it is a challenge that students always find interesting and appealing. (There have been cries of alarm on those occasions when we have asked, in year-end opinion surveys, whether the Greek alphabet requirement should be dropped.)

Although there will be some attention paid to the historical interaction of Latin and Greek with English, Greek and Roman Studies 250  is definitely not a systematic history of the English language. Excellent courses on that topic are taught, from differing vantage points, by the Departments of English and Linguistics. It will be our concern to examine only those elements within English that have been directly or indirectly affected by the two classical languages.

In order to provide the broadest possible service to students, the course will emphasize standard English vocabulary in current use. The more exotic technical vocabulary of science and medicine can be extremely interesting, but it will be explored in only summary fashion. Nevertheless, Greek and Roman Studies 250 should be of considerable value, say, to a would-be botanist or medical doctor, if only by providing the foundation for further specialized enquiry.

Reflecting the design of Greek and Roman Studies 250, this book is divided into two parallel segments, one on Latin and one on Greek. Each is intended to be completed in about six weeks.

Chapter 1: Introduction

If you have even the most general knowledge about the history of western civilization, you will be aware of the crucial role played by ancient Greece and Rome.

It was in the Greek city-states of the eastern Mediterranean, about 2,500 years ago, that many fundamental aspects of western culture had their origin. The Greeks virtually invented politics (from monarchy to tyranny to democracy); they gave us epic and lyric poetry, theatrical drama (both tragedy and comedy), philosophy, rhetoric, and analytical history; they excelled in athletics, music, mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Therefore it should be no surprise to learn that all the italicized English words in the last sentence are derived from classical Greek, a language most brilliantly exploited, perhaps, by the Athenian writers of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC), the Greek language spread throughout the Near and Middle East; some four hundred years later, it would be the tongue in which the Christian apostles brought their message to the west (the very word Christ is Greek, as is apostle). Although the language of modern Athens is a far cry from that of Aristotle or St. Paul, Greek has not changed out of all recognition in over two millennia.

At the time of Aristotle and Alexander, Rome was still an obscure city on the world stage, though it was beginning to assume a dominant role on the Italian peninsula. Within two hundred years, Rome had conquered most of the Mediterranean, including the ancient city-states of Greece. By the first century of the Christian era, the vast Roman empire extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Black Sea, from Egypt to the British Isles. Latin, once merely a regional Italic dialect in and around the city of Rome, had become the spoken and written language for most of what is today western Europe. Boasting a major literature of its own, it was also the medium by which the great achievements of Greece would be transmitted to the west. As Christianity developed, the Hebrew and Greek Bibles were translated into Latin. Even after the fall of Rome and the emergence of medieval Europe, Latin continued to thrive, especially within the powerful Catholic Church. In those areas where the use of Latin had become well established over centuries of empire, regional dialects of Latin evolved into new and distinct vernacular languages, including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian.

Many Greek words would eventually come into English only because they had been borrowed by speakers of Latin. Similarly, vast amounts of Latin vocabulary entered English through French—and to a much lesser extent through Italian or Spanish. In the weeks ahead, we shall explore this process of transmission. Whenever possible, we shall go back to the source, developing analytical skills that will allow us to trace the Latin and Greek ancestry of countless English words.

Chapter 1: Introduction

The scientific study of linguistics began to gain momentum in the late 18th century. At this time, European scholars became fascinated with verbal similarities between their own historical languages, chiefly Latin and Greek, and the classical language of India, Sanskrit, which was just then becoming known in the west. There seemed to be little doubt that some historical link existed between almost all the languages of Europe and several major languages of western Asia. In some areas of vocabulary, such as family relationships and number concepts, the similarities were astonishing:

Chapter 1: Introduction

As we shall see in later chapters, the English language has had a most unusual history, having been subjected over the centuries (like the British Isles themselves) to waves of foreign influence. On account of this historical diversity, English is magnificently supplied with the raw material of words, often having several synonyms for a single concept. Because the grammatical structure of the language is Germanic, the functional linking words (prepositions, conjunctions, and articles) are solidly Germanic: to, from, and, but, however, when, since, the, an. So are the most common everyday nouns, verbs, and adjectives—for example, words for family relationships (mother, father, sister, brother), for number concepts (one, two, ten, hundred); and for fundamental aspects of daily life (house, home, bread, water, hay, harvest, cow, horse, sun, moon; eat, drink, talk, laugh, make love; good, bad, old, young). Not all Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is limited to words of one or two syllables; but we seldom have any problem understanding the longer Germanic forms, such as wonderful, womanhood, lighthearted, nevertheless, overwhelmingly, and unfriendliness.

Alongside this huge stock of native words, one finds at least an equal number of Latin (and/or Greek) loan-words, which entered English at various stages in its evolution. These can be very simple in form and obvious in meaning: mile, wine, cheese, city, school, church, farm, joy, grief, nice, fine, poor. (Here we see proof that not all short, blunt words are Anglo-Saxon.) Some common English words are spelled exactly as they were in the Latin of Julius Caesar: area, focus, actor, index, forum, consensus, data, item, video, referendum. Many others have been adapted to English morphology, but still clearly reveal their classical origins. As a general rule, words of this type tend to be longer than their Anglo-Saxon fellows, and they may often be learned or scholarly: desiccated, exiguous, refulgent, concatenation. Unless we have some knowledge of Latin roots, these may strike us as exotic aliens, polysyllabic and obscure.  We shall meet a delicious label that is applied facetiously to words of this type—the Latin derivative “sesquipedalian.” When they are used skilfully and appropriately, Latin and Greek loan-words can vastly enrich our speech and writing, providing greater clarity and precision, adding subtle connotations that extend the boundaries of meaning, or creating images that could not otherwise be expressed. Unfortunately, the classical vocabulary in English is particularly subject to abuse, for these loan-words are the stock in trade of pedants, posers, and propaganda artists—indeed, of all who avoid plain language in order to hide or bend the truth.

The dual heritage of English, Anglo-Saxon and Latin, has given the language a great many LEARNED VARIANTS, synonyms that offer more scholarly, polite, or devious alternatives for ordinary concepts. Sometimes the variant may be needed in order to avoid any risk of ambiguity—in scientific and medical usage, for instance. In other contexts, the learned variant may be coy or pretentious. Here we meet the sub-class of EUPHEMISMS, expressions that stem from a desire to cloak ugly or embarrassing concepts in less offensive language. Consider the following pairs, where the blunt Anglo-Saxon word is followed by a more refined Latin counterpart:

Quite deliberately, this list is a mixed bag. Some of the variants offer only a minor elevation in tone; others enable us to avoid a crude expression or a downright obscenity. (Almost all our English swear words are Anglo-Saxon.  Exceptions are hard to find. Bastard is from Late Latin, through Old French. The plain-sounding turd, a four-letter classic, is a surprising Latin derivative. During the rebellious 1960s, there was a rather silly campaign to make all obscenities acceptable in “polite” everyday usage. Luckily the cause was doomed to failure, or we might now find ourselves speechless at moments of great stress. Several of the less down-to-earth alternatives are clearly medical terms or technical jargon—does anyone ever expectorate outside the Baseball Rulebook? Still others, like commence and terminate, belong to the world of bureaucratic doublespeak. As a class, learned variants cannot be given blanket approval or condemnation; their appropriateness depends on the situation and the context.

The English language has often adapted Latin adjectives to fill an obvious need, where a simple Germanic noun has no suitable adjectival form. A case in point is suggested by the pair of synonyms listed above—work and labor. To find an English word that means “full of work” or “involving work,” we must resort to the Latin-derived laborious, because there is no workful or worksome or workly. Although there is a Germanic smelly—not to mention stinking—the connotations are negative; if we want an adjective to describe a pleasant “scent” (Latin) or “aroma” (Greek), we can use odorous or fragrant.

Compare these four Germanic nouns with their Latin adjectival companions:

Astronomers and space scientists would be lost without the Latin forms. Of course, we do have the Germanic adjectives sunny and earthy (as well as earthly); but they are very different in meaning from solar and terrestrial.

What percentage of English vocabulary is derived from Latin and Greek? There is really no easy answer to that question, because it makes a big difference whether we are talking about all the words in a huge dictionary (including the highly technical jargon of science and medicine), or the words that an educated person would recognize in reading, or the words that most of us use in daily conversation. Some idea of the debt can be gained from the following crude estimate: of the 20,000 most common words in English, approximately half (10,000 words) are derived from Latin, either directly or through French. A much lower number (but at least 2,000) can be traced back to Greek.

To say that roughly half our standard vocabulary is Latin does not mean that half the words in any given sentence will be Latin. That is because the plain and simple Germanic words are used far more frequently; there may well be two or three occurrences of a word like the or and in the same sentence. Any writer whose Latin word frequency is above 30%, even in a short passage, is likely to be writing complex or technical English.

Let us try a little experiment, analyzing a few sample passages of English in order to test actual practice.

If we are communicating with children, we naturally use words that are short and easily understood. These are likely to be of Anglo-Saxon origin:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Latin derivatives are not all long and learned. The lone specimen in this little verse could hardly be less exotic: it is the plain-sounding wall, which came into the English language at a very early date.

See if you can spot the three non-Germanic words in this nursery rhyme:

Hey, diddle, diddle!
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

You will agree, I think, that the alien words are well disguised. One of them, believe it or not, is cat, which is probably derived from Late Latin cattus. The other non-Germanic words are sport and dish—the last an interesting example, because the original source was the Greek diskos (δίσκος), which became the Latin discus (our word discus, and the source also of English disc or disk). For our present purposes, we can say that dish is derived from Latin. If it isn’t too ponderous to apply statistics to Mother Goose, let us note that the frequency of Latin vocabulary in “Hey, diddle, diddle” is 10% (3 words out of 30).

In the great tradition of plain English style, best represented by the Authorized or King James Version of the Bible, Latin vocabulary is about as infrequent as in Mother Goose. Here is that 1611 version of the Twenty-third Psalm, with the Latin words highlighted in bold type:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me: thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

In this clear and beautiful piece of English prose, the Latin frequency is 9.3% (11 words out of 118)—almost identical to that of our nursery rhyme. William Shakespeare, who was still alive when the King James Bible was published, had a similar preference for plain Anglo-Saxon diction, despite his enormous vocabulary. His famous Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) has a Latin frequency of only 11.4 % (13 words out of 114); in florid theatrical passages, his Latin frequency may run to 20% or more.

John Bunyan (1628-1688) was profoundly influenced by the English Bible; one can hardly imagine simpler language than the opening paragraph of Pilgrim’s Progress:

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and, as I slept, I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book and read therein; and, as he read, he wept, and trembled; and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry, saying, “What shall I do?”

Here Bunyan’s Latin frequency is exactly 10% (11 words out of 110 ).

In contrast, let us consider a selection from a great nineteenth-century stylist, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:  Latin derivatives are here shown in bold type, Greek derivatives in bold italic.

As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style; first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry. Second, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction. (Biographia Literaria, 1817)

In this passage, which is obviously worlds removed from Pilgrim’s Progress in purpose and tone, the combined frequency of Latin and Greek vocabulary is 31.9% (29 out of 91 words). The classical density of Coleridge’s prose is over three times that of Bunyan.

You may find even higher frequencies in a modern textbook or technical treatise. Here, for example, is a job advertisement that appeared in a recent national publication:

* Although Alberta is Teutonic in origin, the name of the Province has a Latin form

At a whopping 44.2% frequency (23 words out of 52), the passage proves that Latin and Greek derivatives are alive and well in contemporary English. But this is hardly a typical piece of English prose. In standard, non-technical writing, most good stylists today try not to sound too heavy and academic. Precise and unusual Latin words will be far more effective if they are met in plain Anglo-Saxon surroundings.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Success in this course will depend, to a great extent, on your effective use of a good English dictionary. Before going any further, make sure that you are thoroughly familiar with the conventions and abbreviations used by LEXICOGRAPHERS (look that word up for starters, if necessary). This is really a matter of getting used to the dictionary of your choice, since the conventions vary somewhat from one authority to the next.

Because there are many fine English dictionaries on the market, you may already own a reliable one that gives you complete satisfaction. If not, here are two popular standards, one British and one American:

Merriam-Webster’s is the best bargain among substantial dictionaries; like its American competitor, Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, it lists the year (or at least the century) when each word is believed to have entered the English language.

That information, and much more, can be found in larger versions of the Oxford dictionaries. If you’ve never browsed in THE Oxford English Dictionary (“OED”), do so at your earliest convenience. This multi-volume set is available at the library (print and online). A useful compromise between the enormous OED and the small Concise Oxford is the highly regarded two-volume abridgement:

 Obviously you’ll be using your dictionary to find the definition of new and unfamiliar words, or to clarify the meaning of words about which you’re a little vague. More often, however, you’ll likely be tracing a word’s ETYMOLOGY (the history of its development from the earliest known source). Usually the etymological entry appears in square brackets, immediately after the listing of the word. (But the Concise Oxford Dictionary and some American dictionaries place the etymology at the very end of each definition.) You must make sure that you learn how to read these entries in your own dictionary. It is unfortunate that lexicographers have never adopted a standardized methodology, or even a common system of abbreviations.  If you’re ever consulting the complete Oxford English Dictionary, don’t be confused by the rather mysterious abbreviations used to describe the degree of change that words have experienced in entering English: a. = adopted without change of form; ad. = derived by adaptation, with adjustment to English speech-habits; f. = formed on (newly shaped on the basis of the foreign form).

In order to stretch your lexicographical muscles, use your dictionary to look up the following words, which have either been mentioned in this chapter or will be used constantly in the weeks ahead:

Pay particular attention to etymologies; notice, for instance, that the image behind the word derivative is that of the flowing stream, whereas the word cognate denotes a kinship relationship. In what sphere of activity did the word hybrid originate?  As you may know, there are dictionaries entirely devoted to word etymologies. For example, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford University Press); A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Elsevier); and Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (Routledge).

Chapter 1: Introduction

If this were a course in the Latin language, we could hardly proceed without devoting a great deal of time to the question of pronunciation. Since we are studying Latin word roots only, that concern is far less important. The best advice is to listen to Latin words as they are spoken aloud in class, so as to learn by imitation. Still, you will likely want to have a little theoretical information, in case your curiosity is later aroused. Please treat the next page as an elementary reference guide, and merely read it through quickly for now.

As a rule, we will be using the CLASSICAL PRONUNCIATION OF LATIN, insofar as it can be reconstructed some 2,000 years later. Surprising though it may seem, we do have a very good idea of how Cicero and Caesar expressed the sounds of Latin, in the first century BC; there is a wealth of evidence, both practical and theoretical. Here are a few general guidelines, with rough and ready English approximations:

As you may know, the pronunciation of Latin changed significantly from the classical to the medieval period; and we may sometimes use the MEDIEVAL PRONUNCIATION to explain the form of an English word. The most notable changes affected the consonants C, G, and T(I), which were palatalized (softened) in some phonetic environments; and V, which was later pronounced as in modern English. In late antiquity, the diphthongs AE and OE both came to resemble long E (“ay”), with the result that caelum (“heaven”), previously pronounced “ky-loom,” was now “chay-loom” in spoken Latin. This change played havoc with spelling, and caelum was often spelled coelum.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

If we were trying to explain precisely how a given English word had evolved from a source-word in the Latin language—that is, if we were giving its full ETYMOLOGY—we should be obliged, ideally, to list all the major changes in form that it had undergone in a thousand years or more of development. In doing so, we would be presenting its complete morphological and phonetic history. However, unless we were professional linguists or lexicographers, this would be an overwhelming task. In a few short months, we can’t hope to acquire such advanced skills. It will be challenging and satisfying enough if we can merely identify the Latin word from which the modern English word derived, and perhaps draw some broad conclusions about how that word changed over the centuries so as to assume its present form. Unless you have a particular interest in the Romance languages, don’t worry about remembering the French, Italian, or Spanish form that may have served as a transition from Latin to English, even if the Romance word is mentioned in this book.

In addition to identifying the original form of the Latin source-word, it will be essential to consider its original meaning. Few aspects of word study are more interesting than the question of SEMANTIC CHANGE. We shall often find that an English derivative has a meaning far removed from that of its Latin source.

Here is an example that will illustrate both aspects—form and meaning. There was an old Latin word persona, which meant “mask”; the identical form is still used in English, with its original meaning basically intact, when literary critics talk about the persona of a poet or novelist.  Students of theatre will be familiar with the Latin phrase dramatis personae, used at the beginning of a play to identify the “characters of the drama.” But that is hardly our common English derivative. Many Latin nouns that end in the vowel –a lose that final vowel in transmission through French. Therefore we can see that English person is derived from Latin persona, and we may wish to speculate about the interesting semantic change that has occurred. Here is a possible surprise: the English word parson also comes from exactly the same source, odd though the semantic connection may seem. Two English words like person and parson, which both derive from a common source-word in another language (here, Latin persona), can be described as DOUBLETS. We’ll see many pairs like this.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

In order to approach Latin word-roots systematically, we’ll be looking in turn at three major grammatical parts of speech—noun, adjective, and verb. If you’re a little vague about the names given to the various parts of speech, don’t panic: each one will be defined and illustrated as it occurs.

The noun is probably the easiest and most obvious of all parts of speech. Quite simply, it is a naming word. If you look up the term in a dictionary, you will see that it comes from the Old French nun or non (the source of the modern French nom), deriving ultimately from the Latin nomen, “name.”

That last rather cumbersome sentence of explanation can be set out more neatly and economically in linguistic shorthand. If we want to express an etymology by moving back in time from present to distant past, we can do it this way:

(Here the symbol < means “derived from”; it has nothing to do with the mathematical symbol “is less than.”) Conversely, if we want to begin in the past and move toward the present, we can use the opposite symbol, > , meaning “derived into”:

This will be our way of presenting Latin etymologies in the briefest possible form, without wasting words. If you think of the symbol as a stylized arrow, and observe the direction in which it is pointing, the linguistic convention will not give you any trouble.

In Latin, as in English, nouns can be subdivided into general semantic classes, depending on the meaning they convey. For our purposes in this course, the two most useful classes are CONCRETE NOUNS, which name objects that we can see, touch or otherwise perceive (woman, book, table, horse, friend, father), and ABSTRACT NOUNS, which name intangible qualities or states (truth, beauty, love, freedom, hopelessness). In Latin, we’ll find that many abstract nouns share common characteristics.

In terms of MORPHOLOGY (physical shape or form), there are five main types (“declensions”) of Latin noun, each showing predictable and consistent features shared by all words of that type. As you may know, Latin is a highly inflected language; every noun, for instance, has at least half a dozen different word-endings, depending on the grammatical role that it plays in its sentence. Each so-called “declension” consists of nouns that are all inflected in a similar manner, a fact that allows us to group them together conveniently by form. It will help you to understand Latin noun vocabulary if you learn the five declension types. Don’t worry about the term DECLENSON: it simply means a classification type or category. And be thankful that we don’t have to learn all the different word-endings for every noun! It’s legitimate to take shortcuts when we are merely studying Latin roots, not the grammar of the whole Latin language.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

To prove that Latin is easy, we’ll start with a straightforward group of words, all of which end in the vowel –a. We have already seen persona. You know many others, since quite a few have come into English without any change in spelling. Here is a sampling:

If you examine this list of ten nouns, you’ll see that four or five of them are standard English words, while the rest have a rather technical flavour. What happens in English when we try to PLURALIZE these words? We would naturally say areas, cameras, arenas, and villas. We might pause over antenna, however; it would make a difference whether we were talking about automobile aerials (antennas) or about insect feelers (antennae). This phenomenon illustrates a fact that will often be apparent when we are dealing with Latin vocabulary: if the word has been thoroughly accepted as a naturalized citizen of the English language, it will be treated as a normal Germanic form (with a plural in –s, for example); but if it still has an aura  In Latin, aura was a 1st declension noun that meant “breeze,” “(breath of) air.” of learning or scholarly precision, it will be treated as an unassimilated immigrant or foreign alien. In the case of 1st declension Latin nouns, the “foreign accent” will appear in the non-Germanic plural ending –ae, as in larvae, pupae, algae, lacunae, etc. How do you pronounce that –ae, by the way? The traditional English pronunciation of larvae and pupae is “larv-ee” and “pewp-ee”; if you say “larv-eye” and “pewp-eye,” you have been influenced (whether you know it or not) by the classical pronunciation of Latin. The syllable is sometimes also pronounced “-ay,” especially in the case of the plural form vertebrae.

Regardless of English pronunciation, THE 1st DECLENSION LATIN NOUN CAN BE INDENTIFIED AS A FORM ENDING IN –a (SINGULAR) and –ae (PLURAL). That is a simple and entirely dependable fact. The unchanging part of the word that precedes the final –a can be described as its BASE. With very few exceptions, Latin 1st declension nouns were feminine in gender. Grammatical gender plays virtually no role in English word formation, affecting only a handful of pronouns (he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, its); but it is very important in many Indo-European languages. The original feminine gender of first declension Latin nouns is regularly maintained in the gender of their French, Spanish, or Italian derivatives. That knowledge can be quite helpful: if you remember the first-declension Latin nouns arena and villa, for example, you can be confident that French arène and ville are feminine.

Latin does not have an article like English the and a(n) or French la and une. Thus the Latin noun femina can mean either “the woman” or “a woman”—la femme or une femme.

You will now meet the first in a series of formal Latin and Greek word-lists. Each of these lists will be presented as a numbered table, so as not to be confused with other illustrative lists. You are expected to study the words on these tables until you are thoroughly familiar with their original form and meaning. It shouldn’t be necessary to “memorize” the words in the way that you might have to learn foreign vocabulary; it ought to be enough to make an intelligent connection between the Latin source-word (ETYMON) and one or more English derivatives.

There are several points that you may have noticed at once about words on this list. First, it appears that the original Latin meaning can often be virtually identical to that of the obvious English derivative; this is true for the Latin words causa, forma, fortuna, and gloria. (If other English synonyms are sometimes given first, that is just to show that the Latin word may be translated in a variety of ways.) From this same list, however, we can see that the English derivative is not always a reliable guide to the original Latin meaning. The English derivative of cura is cure; but that is not at all what the Latin meant. Similarly, fama did not mean what we understand by fame (a concept far closer to Latin gloria), and tabula did not mean a three-dimensional table (the classical Latin word was mensa). If you recognize grace as the English derivative of gratia, you will see that this word, too, has changed in meaning. However, the Latin word littera had the same flexibility as its English derivative letter (< OF lettre): it could mean a letter of the alphabet or a letter written to a friend. The Latin spelling varied between one and two t’s, as we can infer from the related English adjective literal.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

(Here is the first in a series of etymological discussions intended for casual reading and enjoyment, not for intensive study. The words chosen for comment will not necessarily be drawn from the assigned word lists. However, the discussion will always be directly related to the content of the current chapter.)

Though their roots are unrelated, via and vita are sometimes confused, on account of the fact that vita became vie in French. Neither word has given the English language a simple common noun: as we trudge along the road of life, we do so in plain Anglo-Saxon. However English uses via as a convenient term that means “by way of”; and when Canadians take a railway voyage (from Latin viaticum, “travel money”), they go by VIA Rail—if there are any trains left to ride.English idiom has been strained in this sentence, since the word voyage is now restricted mainly to sea travel; a trip by land is better described as a journey (from Latin diurnum, “a day’s travel”). The Roman road was a marvel of ancient engineering. The “layered” or “paved” road, [via] strata, gave us street, one of the oldest Latin words in English. The “broken” or “beaten” road, [via] rupta, came into English much later as route. Lexicographers can’t agree whether viable is derived from vita (“able to maintain life”) or from via (“able to be travelled”)—or possibly from both.

Arena (classical Latin harena) has had a curious semantic history. The original Latin word meant “sand”; then it was specialized to mean “the sand of the amphitheatre”; then it was applied to the scene of the contest, though not to the physical structure. When arena came into English in 1627, it was used to describe the ancient amphitheatre itself; considerably later it was broadened to suggest a battlefield or any other sphere of public action. In today’s Romance languages, the harena derivative may still be a general word for “sand”: this is true of Spanish arena and Italian réna, but not of French arène. In the 20th century, the form aréna has been borrowed by Quebec French as a loan-word from English, to mean a “hockey rink.”

Camera was a technical term in classical Latin—a Greek loan-word that meant “vault” or “arched roof.” In later Latin it came to mean a “room”; and through French it gave us chamber. Thus camera and chamber are perfect examples of English DOUBLETS (§8). Our modern camera was originally called a camera obscura (“dark room”), from the little chamber where the photographic exposure takes place. When a political body goes behind closed doors to meet “inside the room,” it is said to be in camera. From the French adaptation of Spanish camarada and camerado (“roomful,” “roommate”), English acquired camaraderie and comrade. Thus we can say that the ETYMOLOGICAL MEANING of comrade is “roommate.” Because of semantic change, the etymological meaning will often be very different from the modern dictionary meaning.

The Latin word area also changed meaning with the passage of time. In antiquity it denoted a vacant space in or around a house, and in particular a “threshing-floor.” That is the etymological meaning of E area, which obviously has a much broader meaning today.

If you want an example of a simple Latin noun that has undergone some unlikely changes in form, how about cauda (“tail”)? Its descendants include the English words coda, queue, cue, and coward. As Ring Lardner said, you can look it up.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

Now that we’re familiar with one type of Latin noun, the next category should create no problem. The 2nd declension is subdivided into two different forms of noun, one ending in -us (predominantly masculine in gender) and a second ending in -um (invariably neuter). In each type, the BASE can be found by removing that final -us or -um. Let us consider them in turn.

Some 2nd declension nouns in -us still display their original form in modern English:

The Latin plural of stimulus was stimuli, originally pronounced “stimul-ee,” but in English normally pronounced “stimul-eye.” How we pluralize words like this will be a good test of their acceptance into everyday English speech. Campus and circus, for instance, are not considered exotic or technical; no one would dream of saying “campi” or “circi.” In contrast, most of the remaining words do retain that original Latin plural, like bacilli, radii, alumni. Sometimes there’s a choice: cacti and cactuses are both correct, as are fungi and funguses. In the case of asparagus, we just avoid the problem altogether—though the Romans quite logically called the vegetable asparagi. This type of Latin plural can trick us into drawing false analogies. Though you may hear the form octopi, it is historically incorrect, since octopus is a Greek derivative meaning “eight-foot.” We can even invent pseudo-Latin singular forms: in Wayne and Shuster’s famous Shakespearean television skit, when Julius Caesar asked for a double martini, he was told that he could have only one martinus.

A few of these nouns (campus, circus, etc.) we’ve seen already. Locus and terminus have also entered English without change, and you may know animus as a word that suggests “hostile feeling” or “hatred.” Don’t be bothered by the double U in equus; Latin qu was pronounced /kw/, virtually as in English, and the word-base here is equ-. From modus we get the doublets mode and mood (as in the “subjunctive mood”). If you look up mood in the dictionary, you will find that there are two quite different English words, identical in spelling—one Germanic and one Latin. Forms like this can be described as HOMOGRAPHS.

The other type of 2nd declension noun ended in -um. English has borrowed a number of these directly from Roman public and private life: forum, atrium, rostrum, stadium (originally Greek). Others are more complex words whose form we’ll come to understand later in the course: aquarium, auditorium, memorandum, referendum. As you are surely aware, the Latin plural of words in -um is -a. In English, we can choose as we like between forums and fora, auditoriums and auditoria, referendums and referenda. But don’t forget that data and media are plural forms; purists use them only with plural verbs.

Spelled as it was in Latin, the English noun odium suggests the hatred that clings to a person who has become dishonored or disgraced; a close synonym is another Latin 2nd declension derivative, opprobrium. Our word office usually implies either a place of business (“I’m going to the office”) or a position in a hierarchy (“She was elected to high office”). The original Latin meaning can often be found in Elizabethan English, and is still alive in expressions such as “through your kind offices.”

In classical Latin, officium was pronounced “of-fee-kee-oom” and pretium, “preh-tee-oom”; there was no risk of confusing the sounds of ci- and ti-. In late Latin, however, both these syllables were pronounced [tsi], and pretium (now “preh-tsee-oom”) was often misspelled as precium. This fact helps explain the spelling of price and precious. In medieval Latin, the diphthong ae and the long vowel e also became almost identical in sound (“ay”); thus taedium was spelled tedium, and praemium (“reward”), premium.

The Latin word signum was amazingly flexible in meaning. Any kind of mark or indicator, it could be a military standard, a signal, a token, a symptom, a statue, a seal, or a heavenly constellation (a sign of the zodiac). The English derivative is almost as versatile.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

As an English word, campus is a relative newcomer: it is first attested in the United States of 1774. From the original Latin campus, Middle English had only the French derivative champ, which was still used by Elizabethans in phrases like “the champ of battle.” Its link with champion is fairly obvious, but you may not easily see the connection with French champagne and champignon (“mushroom”—a delicacy that grows on the open field). In 1528 the word camp was borrowed (via French) from Italian campo; similarly, campaign (a doublet of champagne) came through French from Italian campagna (from Medieval Latin campania). Except in Norman dialect, Latin ca– always developed into French cha-, unless there was some other form of foreign influence. It is somewhat ironic that campus has recently made its way into French as an English loan-word.

Latin populus forms the P in the celebrated acronym SPQR (senatus populusque Romanus, “the Senate and the Roman people”). In French it became peuple, source of English people. The corresponding Italian form is popolo; by means of an expressive pejorative suffix, popolo was changed to popolaccio (“the bad people”), and English got the word populace. The Spanish derivative of populus, pueblo, came to mean a town or village, and is so used today in English.

There is a small sub-type of the 2nd declension –us noun where the nominative singular (the vocabulary form) ends in –er. Minister and arbiter are English words that have kept their original Latin form. Another Latin noun of this type was magister, “teacher,” “(school-)master.” Through Old French maiestre this word became master; the modern French maître is also used in English as maître d’hôtel or maître d’. Doublets of master are mister, Mr., and maestro, the Italian derivative. A 1st declension feminine counterpart, magistra, became Old French maiestresse, whence English mistress, Mrs., Miss, and Ms.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

The vocabulary of this chapter has shown various degrees of change that Latin nouns may undergo in becoming English words. We can establish a sort of spectrum of MORPHOLOGICAL CHANGE, ranging from the least modified to the totally transformed.

As you may have surmised, most of the changes in types 2 to 4 occurred during and after transmission through French. Many lst declension nouns, for example, survive as French words in –e (type 3.a); cf. L terra > F terre, L luna > F lune. In the Old French period (12th century), words like gloria, memoria, and victoria had assumed the form glorie, mémorie, and victorie, whence English glory, memory, and victory (type 3.c). Later they evolved into modern French gloire, mémoire, and victoire. At a fairly recent date, English borrowed the word memoir from modern French. Thus memoir and memory are English doublets.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

Unlike morphological change, SEMANTIC CHANGE cannot be reduced to neat schemes like those in §14. Changes in form are governed, to some extent, by dependable phonetic laws; changes in meaning, on the other hand, result from social and cultural influences that may be absolutely unique. Scholars have identified and labelled several categories of semantic change, but we shouldn’t expect to squeeze every shift of meaning into one of these pigeonholes.

1. GENERALIZATION:

A word’s original meaning may be extended or enlarged, so as to have a wider semantic application than was originally the case. In Latin a discus was a specific athletic device; the derivative disc (or disk) may refer to anything round and flat. Augustus Caesar built a grand home on the Palatine hill that was called the Palatium; centuries later, the word palace denoted any royal or noble residence—just as Caesar (> czar, Kaiser) came to mean any autocratic ruler.

2. SPECIALIZATION:

The opposite semantic change occurred even more often in the development of English vocabulary from Latin. Time and again we meet English derivatives that have a much narrower meaning that their Latin source-words. Latin fabula was any kind of story, whereas English fable is more limited in scope. Latin pulpitum was simply a platform or scaffolding; English pulpit is a special structure in a church. The sermon delivered from the pulpit is more specialized than its Latin source-word sermo (3rd declension), which meant “a conversation.”

3. METAPHORICAL EXTENSION:

In many cases of semantic change, it is hard to say whether the derived meaning is broader or narrower than the original; the word seems rather to have acquired a figurative or metaphorical force. A stimulus was a goad or spur; the English term refers to a metaphorically sharp incentive that rouses us to action. A radius was, among other things, the spoke of a wheel (a meaning very close to its literal application today in geometry); the derivative ray can be viewed as a figurative spoke—though one could argue equally well that this is a case of generalization. One of the best examples of metaphorical extension is focus, which evolved from an original meaning of “hearth” or “fireplace.”

4. AMELIORATION and PEJORATION (also called ELEVATION and DEGENERATION):

Don’t be cowed by these intimidating labels, which come from the Latin comparative adjectives melior (“better”) and pejor (“worse”). They describe semantic changes as a result of which the original word has either improved or deteriorated in meaning. AMELIORATION can be illustrated by the word minister—in Latin, a lowly servant or attendant, but in English a respected clergyman or senior politician. Again, the Latin adjective nescius (“ignorant”) has been substantially elevated in becoming nice. PEJORATION or degeneration of meaning was already evident in Latin idiota (“uneducated person”), which had begun life as the very respectable Greek word idiōtēs (“private person,” “individual”—compare E idiosyncracy); the English derivative idiot has sunk even lower in semantic respectability. A similar fate overtook the word peculiar, which meant “one’s own” in Latin.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

Although this course is in no sense a history of the English language, you should have some idea about the various historical circumstances that brought English into contact with Latin. Depending upon the chronological period when a Latin word came into English, it may be totally transformed in appearance, or, conversely, retain almost its exact original spelling. In some periods, Latin words were likely to have passed through another language before entering English; at other times, they tended to come directly from Latin to English. A knowledge of the historical context can provide insight into otherwise puzzling features of morphological change, enabling us to appreciate why Latin words assume such a diversity of forms in the English language. In three installments, therefore—here, and in parallel sections of Chapters 3 and 4—you will be given a broad summary of the interrelationship of Latin and English. The story is quite varied and fascinating: it involves military conquest; trade and commercial intercourse; invasions and other population movements; missionary activity; and a powerful cultural and intellectual influence that continues to this day.

You will have no trouble finding any number of books on the history of English, if you wish to pursue this subject in greater depth. One interesting and reliable study is C.M. Millward’s, A Biography of the English Language (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1989).

In the first of these three sections, let us consider the impact of Latin on English in the era prior to the Norman Conquest of AD 1066.

Although the portion of the British Isles now called England had been conquered by the ancient Romans and made part of their empire, that conquest assumes very little importance in our present study. This is not because Rome’s contact with Britain had been casual or superficial: after the Emperor Claudius decided in AD 43 to subjugate this island that had been first raided in 55 BC by his great-grandfather, Julius Caesar, the province of Britain was firmly established within the system of imperial government. It remained that way for some three and a half centuries, until the problems of a disintegrating empire forced the Romans to withdraw in AD 410. The archaeological heritage of the Roman occupation is most impressive, from the great baths and villas of southern England to Hadrian’s Wall in the north. The linguistic legacy, however, is very meagre: it consists mainly of the word mile, derived from Latin mille (“a thousand”The Roman mile comprised a thousand double paces of an army on the march; this worked out to 1,618 English yards, a little less than the later English mile of 1,760 yards. Even the word mile is not a certain legacy of the Roman conquest; many scholars think it entered Old English as a Germanic loan-word.), and a number of English place names that are derived from Latin castra (“army camp”)—Chester, Manchester, Doncaster, Lancaster, and the like. One reason is that the native population of Roman Britain appears not to have been as thoroughly assimilated as their counterparts in Roman Gaul or Spain. Also, we must remember that the Britons of this period were tribal Celts, a people later overwhelmed by successive waves of Germanic invaders. At the time of the Roman occupation, the language that we call “English” had not yet come into being.

Soon after the Romans withdrew, Britain was subjected to a series of invasions by Germanic tribes living along the north German coast, from Frisia in the Netherlands to Denmark. Mainly Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, these invaders brought with them closely related low German dialects that merged into the language popularly known as “Anglo-Saxon,” which scholars prefer to call OLD ENGLISH. (England is “the land of the Angles.”) The earliest of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is traditionally dated to AD 449.

Having come from a region that was close to the Roman imperial frontier, these Germanic peoples had already been in contact with speakers of Latin, through trade and commerce, and they brought with them a number of Latin loan-words that filled gaps in their native vocabulary. These are among the oldest Latin words in English, having likely been part of Anglo-Saxon speech as early as the 5th or 6th centuries AD. Because the first English manuscript written in the Roman alphabet dates only from c.737 AD, it is impossible to document these early words, let alone date them precisely. Probably they were carried to Britain by Anglo-Saxon tribes from the mainland, but they may have entered Old English at a somewhat later date.

Here is a selection, presented in their Modern English form:

The above words all relate, in one way or another, to everyday secular life. However, there is another, rather different group of Latin derivatives that found its way into Old English at a somewhat later time; these are words that have to do with Christianity and aspects of Christian worship. In all likelihood, this terminology was adopted in Britain, during the seventh and eighth centuries, after the arrival of the first Christian missionaries around AD 600.The missionary St. Augustine arrived at Canterbury in AD 597, bringing also the Roman alphabet. Before the end of the seventh century, England could be described as a Christian country. There is a considerable number of these words, many of which go back through Latin to a source in Greek—for Greek was the language in which early Christianity had spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The following is a sample only:

By the time of the Norman Invasion in 1066, there may have been as many as 300 Latin derivatives in Old English. By later standards, this was still a very low number.

Chapter 2: The Latin Noun (Declensions 1 & 2)

1.  Underline the base of these nouns (e.g., FAMA):

TABULA, GRATIA, AQUA, MODUS, RADIUS, FATUM, VERBUM, OFFICIUM.

2.  If you can identify the Latin base at the heart of a long English word, the meaning of that word will often be more precisely understood. Underline the noun base (e.g., INFORMALITY):

INGLORIOUS, PREVIOUS, GRANULAR, DEIFICATION, VULGARITY, PREDETERMINATION, COLLOCATION, INNUMERABLE, ASSIGNMENT, VITIATE.

3.  Using the numerical scheme in §14, describe these changes in form:

4.  What label might you apply to the semantic change of Latin verbum to English verb? ___________________   Of Latin animus to English animus? ___________________

5.  For each of the following English words, find an English doublet—if possible, one that more closely resembles the Latin source-word:

a.crown________________d.prize________________
b.genie________________e.card________________
c.spectre________________f.foil_________________

For Key to Exercises (Latin), see Appendix I.

Chapter 3: The Latin Noun (Declensions 3, 4, 5)

By far the largest and most important category of Latin nouns is the 3rd declension, a group of words comprising all three genders and showing a great diversity of form. Your first reaction may be one of dismay, since this declension has no consistent word-ending, like the -a, -us, and -um of the 1st and 2nd, and appears to have little predictability of any kind. You’ll soon learn that the situation is really not that chaotic, since the 3rd declension does operate on regular and consistent principles.

One subtype of the 3rd declension, a group of nouns ending in -ex or -ix, has given rise to several English words that are pure Latin in form:

When we pluralize these rather technical words, we get English forms like vertices, appendices, matrices, and the like. These, too, are pure Latin, and illustrate the –es plural that is regular for all masculine and feminine nouns of the 3rd declension. (The hybrid plurals indexes and vortexes are correct English, but they differ in usage from indices and vortices.) Since Latin plural endings are always added to the BASE of a word, we can deduce that the base forms of index and vortex are indic– and vortic-. In dealing with the 3rd declension, we’ll find that the base can be quite different from the nominative (vocabulary) form of the word. This is a major contrast with the 1st and 2nd declension, where we merely lop off the final ending to get the base.

Before pursuing this line of enquiry, let us first examine another 3rd declension subtype that may occur unchanged in English—nouns ending in –or. Here is a sampling, presented as Latin words:

The abstract nouns in group 1 are traditionally spelled –our in English, reflecting their French transmission; but ever since the reforms of the great lexicographer Noah Webster (1758-1843), they have been spelled –or in American usage.The Canadian spelling of these words, like many aspects of Canadian life, is a little indecisive. Canadian newspapers have been using the -or forms since the nineteenth century, but Canadian schools—at least, those schools that still teach spelling—cling to the British -our preference. One system is no more “correct” than the other. There are some -our/-or words, like harbour and neighbour, that are actually of Germanic origin. Others, like endeavour, are derived from Latin, but not from Latin -or nouns. For historical reasons, the parallel words in group 2 keep their original Latin form even in British spelling. Group 3, a list that could be greatly extended, consists of AGENT NOUNS—that is, they identify the person performing a verbal action. We’ll see more of groups 2 and 3 when we deal later with the Latin verb. As a general subtype, the Latin –or noun is a particularly easy form, since the NOMINATIVE AND THE WORD BASE ARE IDENTICAL.

There is another subtype of the third declension where the base of the word can be regularly inferred from the nominative form. For a noun like finis (“end”), we merely remove the -is ending to get the base fin-. Similar to finis are civis (“citizen”), hostis (“enemy”), testis (“witness”), vestis (“garment”), and navis (“ship”).

By and large, however, when we are learning a 3rd declension noun—even only for purposes of English word derivations—we must learn TWO FORMS of that noun. It is not enough to know that the Latin word for “king” is rex; we must know also that the base of this word is reg-, if we are to recognize regal as an adjective that means “kingly.” The base reg-, in fact, is considerably more important to us than the nominative form rex. In our tabular word lists, 3rd declension nouns will be presented in this fashion:

The first of these forms, rex, is the NOMINATIVE or subject case, which is the standard vocabulary entry. The second form, regis, is the GENITIVE case (very much like the English possessive form, “king’s”). The reason we’ll be using the genitive is because it is the most dependable way of finding the BASE of every Latin noun or adjective. REMOVE THE –is ENDING OF THE GENITIVE FORM, AND YOU WILL HAVE THE BASE OF ANY 3RD DECLENSION NOUN.

In the vocabulary list that follows, do not be surprised that there are many different nominative endings; that is the way the 3rd declension works. As you study the genitive forms, try always to associate the Latin base with a memorable English derivative. Occasionally, as with pars, partis (base = part-) or origo, originis (base = origin-), the base may even provide the obvious English derivative.

As we saw above, it really isn’t necessary to list two forms for labor or finis, since these bases are predictable; but the second (genitive) form is needed for all the other words. Spelled like its original Latin source-word, English crux (plural cruces) means a “problem” or “critical point.” Most of the other nominative forms, however, are of little use to us. To repeat, it is the BASE forms like leg-, ped-, and hospit– that will play a key role in word derivation, both in Latin and in English. As we progress through the course, we’ll come to understand the links in form between Latin mort– and English mortify or immortality, between Latin urb– and English suburban or conurbation.

Once you feel familiar with Table 3.1, turn to the next group of 3rd declension nouns. Their gender, in every instance, is NEUTER, as opposed to the MASCULINE and FEMININE 3rd declension words that we’ve seen so far. There are two reasons for pointing out this fact. First, neuter nouns of the 3rd declension fall, for the most part, into easily recognized subtypes. Second, it may be useful to know that 3rd declension neuter nouns—like all Latin neuter words—have a plural ending in –a ; just think of our English phrase per capita, which means “by heads”).

The shock here, no doubt, will be the discovery that there is more than one class of Latin nouns ending in –us. This 3rd declension subtype has nothing to do with words like animus or campus, and mustn’t be confused with that 2nd declension group.

The secret of learning these noun bases and remembering their spelling is to think of their adjective derivatives in English: capital, cordial, luminous, ominous, nominal, corporal, temporal, general, and onerous. That trick doesn’t work for opus, but there we can think of the English verb operate. The nominative form opus is an English word, of course, used mainly to identify a work of music; in Latin, it tends to suggest the tangible product of work, rather than the process (labor). Corpus, omen, and genus are other 3rd declension neuter nouns that have entered English without change; of these, only genus regularly keeps its original Latin plural—genera.

Chapter 3: The Latin Noun (Declensions 3, 4, 5)

A third-declension Latin noun of the labor type was umor, source of English humour (humor) and humorous. It may puzzle you to learn that its original meaning was “moisture”—it’s related to humid—unless you know something about the ancient medical theory of the humours, the four fluids that were thought to control human disposition. These were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile). According to this longstanding belief, well-balanced people need a proper mixture (temperamentum) of the four fluids. If our temperament is out of balance, we may perhaps behave in an erratic or “humorous” fashion. By the way, this word humorous has nothing to do with the arm-bone or humerus, an adaptation of Latin umerus, “shoulder.”

Mention has already been made of the English word crux, which means a “problem” or “puzzle.” Latin crux, crucis has given us a variety of other words, too. Christian missionaries from Ireland brought cross into the language during the Old English period. Through Dutch we got cruise, and through Spanish, crusade. Crisscross comes from Christcross. Directly linked with Latin crux are crucify, crucifixion, crucifix, crucifer, cruciform, crucial, cruciate, excruciate, and crucible. In later chapters, we’ll see how some of these derivatives acquired their form.

Another Latin word that has been highly productive in English is caput, capitis, “head.” You will think at once of capital; but that is only the beginning. Here is a partial list of derivatives: chief, chef, kerchief (a “cover-head”), handkerchief, mischief, cattle, chattel (doublets from capitalis), captain, chieftain (doublets from capitanus), cadet, cape (a “headland”), capitol, chapter, biceps (“two-headed”), decapitate, and precipitate.

A “kind” or category in biological classification is a genus (plural genera)—pure Latin. As a result of French transmission, the same word has produced the English doublets gender and genre; both also mean “kind” or “class,” but with useful differences in application. As well as being the standard word for “time,” Latin tempus could also
denote the “temple” (of the head), especially in the plural form tempora. This is apparently because the human temples were viewed as the “timely” or fatal spots. In English, temporal can mean “pertaining to time” or “pertaining to the temples.” The English homograph temple (“shrine”) is derived from an unrelated Latin 2nd declension noun, templum (“sacred enclosure,” “shrine”).

Finally, let us consider the English word host, which is actually three different words. The host who provides hospitality is derived from hospes, hospitis; the host that is a hostile army or a vast multitude (Wordsworth’s “host of golden daffodils”) comes from hostis, hostis, “enemy” (a 3rd declension noun like finis); and the host that is eaten in Christian communion or mass comes from the 1st declension noun hostia, a sacrifice. If you check your dictionary, you will find that these three HOMOGRAPHS (§12) all appear as separate word entries.None of the three is the source of E hostage, which is derived ultimately from L obses, obsidis, “hostage”’; still, it appears that E hostage was influenced by the unrelated Latin word hospes, hospitis.

Chapter 3: The Latin Noun (Declensions 3, 4, 5)

The 4th declension consists of a relatively small but fairly important group of nouns, many of which were derived originally from Latin verbs. You may be perplexed to learn that they all have the ending -us; superficially, therefore, they can be confused with 2nd declension nouns like focus and animus or with 3rd declension neuter nouns like corpus and onus. However, there is one very useful rule-of-thumb for the 4th declension that will seldom let you down:

This rule works because the –u– vowel clings to the Latin base in forming Latin derivatives; and the Latin spelling is regularly maintained in English. For this reason, we shall say that the BASE of manus is manu-. (Contrast 2nd declension foc-us, E foc-al; 3rd declension corpus, corpor-is, E. corpor-al. )

A few 4th declension nouns appear unchanged in English: status, sinus, census, consensus, hiatus, apparatus. If you should want to pluralize any of these words in English, and you mean to follow Latin practice, you will not change the word in spelling—the Latin plural of census is census. It would be correct to say, in English, “one apparatus, two apparatus;” but it would also be acceptable to anglicize and say, “two apparatuses.” Whatever you do, don’t say “two apparati,” since that is neither Latin nor English.Exactly this mistake was made by CBC commentator Brian Williams, who referred to “the four apparati of rhythmic gymnastics,” in an Olympic telecast on August 9, 1984. O tempora, o mores!

Latin manus has no simple noun derivative in English, though it is, of course, the source of French la main. As the French gender reveals, the Latin word was feminine, though most 4th declension nouns were MASCULINE. The following table presents a small sampling of these nouns; you will meet quite a few more when we come to examine the Latin verb, since most 4th declension nouns are derived from verbs.

Our –us rule-of-thumb works for all the words here. On the analogy of manual, just think of English gradual, ritual, sinuous, situate, and spiritual. Therefore, consider these Latin noun bases to be gradu-, ritu-, sinu-, situ-, and spiritu-.

Though Latin sinus could mean any curve or fold, English has limited the meaning of the word to a fold in the facial bone structure. That is an excellent example of the semantic change known as SPECIALIZATION (§15). The sine in trigonometry is a derivative of the same word. Latin situs is the source of English site; and if an artifact is still to be found in its original position, it is said to be in situ (a pure Latin phrase).

Chapter 3: The Latin Noun (Declensions 3, 4, 5)

The 5th Declension is a very small group of Latin nouns, only a few of which have any influence on English. Most of these actually retain their Latin spelling as English derivatives; for example, species, series, and rabies. All these words have changed in pronunciation: Latin rabies (“rage,” “madness”) had three distinct syllables, “rah-bee-ace,” which we have reduced to two, “ray-bees.” Bona fides was a Latin phrase meaning “good faith”; we use it in that form, as well as in the Latin ablative case—bona fide (“in good faith”). In their nominative or vocabulary form, Latin 5th declension nouns always end in -es, and the base is the part of the word that precedes that ending.

The base of faci-es appears in E facial. The origin of our word face, Latin facies suggested the “make” or “appearance” of a person. What is prima facie evidence? This word clearly had some semantic overlap with species, though species was less often used of the human countenance. English species (“spee-sheeze”) denotes the individual “appearance” of a variety of plant or animal life, as opposed to the broad class or genus. Its Latin plural is identical to the singular, as is the case with all 5th declension nouns.

Chapter 3: The Latin Noun (Declensions 3, 4, 5)

Chapter 3: The Latin Noun (Declensions 3, 4, 5)

It is often said that the Norman invasion of AD 1066 was the single most important event in the history of the English language. After William the Conqueror defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, French would be the spoken language of the English royal court and governing class for generations to come. English certainly did not die, or suffer any lack of speakers; it merely went “underground,” as it were. In the thirteenth century it would reassert itself and soon gain the upper hand, even among the aristocracy. When it re-emerged, however, it had been radically changed from Old English, having acquired (among other new features) a substantial stock of Latin-derived French vocabulary, as well as a considerable number of new words borrowed directly from Latin. Though Latin was no longer spoken by large numbers of people, it continued to serve all medieval Europe as the language of Christian religion and scholarship—within the emerging new universities, for example. Because the native Germanic vocabulary of English had become somewhat impoverished from disuse, English would continue to borrow very actively from French and Latin over the next two centuries.

The framing dates of the MIDDLE ENGLISH period are often given as 1066 and 1476—from William the Conqueror to William Caxton, whose establishment of the first printing press in England signalled a new era in the history of the language. We can round off these dates, and say that the Middle English period extended from 1100 to 1500 AD, encompassing the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. The era of Norman dominance covered only the first quarter of that period, and was not by any means the most productive in terms of Latinate vocabulary.

Because of the scarcity of written evidence before 1200, it is often hard to tell whether a loan-word entered English from Norman French in the early stage of the Middle English period, or was derived later from Central or Parisian French (Francien)Beware of a confusing problem of terminology. Most English dictionaries apply the label “Old French” to any French source-word from the 12th to the 14th century. In English lexicography, therefore, the term Old French (OF) corresponds far more closely to Middle English (ME) than to Old English (OE).. Nevertheless there is one area of vocabulary where we do have a very reliable indicator. If a Latin word began with ca-, it was still pronounced and spelled ca- in Norman French—whatever other changes it might have undergone. We know, therefore, that cattle (< L capitalis) must have entered English during the Norman supremacy, before 1200. In Central French, however, Latin ca- was pronounced and spelled cha-, as we see in E chattel, a DOUBLET of cattle that was borrowed at a later date. Accordingly, the following Latin derivatives must be Norman-French: castle (< L castellum, = modF château), canker (< L cancer, = modF chancre), and cauldron (< L calidarium, = modF chaudron). English has several other pairs of doublets like cattle and chattel: canal and channel, catch and chase, car and chariot. In every instance, the ca- form is Norman French.

Literally thousands of Central French words entered our language during the later Middle English period, and the vast majority of them, of course, came ultimately from Latin. Their numbers easily surpass the combined total of all Latin derivatives prior to 1200. Because these French loan-words occur in almost every area of social and economic life, they bear witness to the all-pervasive influence of French culture at that time. It is important to remember, however, that they were being brought into an English language that was now thriving at all levels of society; it was no longer the case that one class spoke only English, while another spoke only French.

Six or seven hundred years later, these borrowed words don’t seem at all alien or exotic. Most of them are as English as the joint of beef or pork on your plate at the dinner table. However, a few look every bit as learned and “correct” as derivatives that would later come directly from Latin, during the Renaissance; medicine, audience, recreation, university, inquest, and evidence are all French loan-words of the Middle-English period.

In A Biography of the English Language,p. 173; see Chapter 2, §16. C.M. Millward provides an interesting list of short and familiar words that came into Middle English from French. Their Latin origins are often heavily concealed; many are explained elsewhere in this book:

Chapter 3: The Latin Noun (Declensions 3, 4, 5)

1.  Underline the base of these nouns (e.g., FAMA; ORIGO, ORIGINIS):

MILES, MILITIS; MANUS; LEX, LEGIS; LUMEN, LUMINIS; SPECIES; ONUS, ONERIS; SINUS.

2.  By underlining, identify the Latin noun base within the following English words (e.g., INFORMALITY):

REGICIDE, DECAPITATION, EXTEMPORANEOUS, SERIAL, MORTIFY, COLLABORATE, ABOMINATION.

3.  Identify each of the following Latin nouns by DECLENSION, and give its BASE and ORIGINAL LATIN MEANING:

4.  For each of the following English words, find an English doublet—if possible, one that more closely resembles the Latin source-word:

For Key to Exercises (Latin), see Appendix I.

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

The Romans used the term adjectivum to identify a word that was “thrown beside” or added to a noun. It is a part of speech that denotes a quality or attribute of a noun: a good woman, a warm kiss, an evil person. Accordingly, we can define an adjective as a WORD THAT DESCRIBES OR MODIFIES A NOUN.

By the structural rules of English, an adjective may occur in two rather different environments: “my —– friend” or “My friend is —–.” Any of the following English adjectives may be used to complete either of those structural patterns:

1. good, old, fat, late, wise, dear
2. better, older, best, oldest, dearest
3. manly, foolish, catlike, wonderful
4. smiling, forgotten, forgetful, bewildered
5. one, first, third
6. ill-mannered, left-handed

All these English examples, as you may have guessed, are adjectives of Germanic descent. The words in group 1 are simple adjectives, whereas those in group 2 are forms in the comparative or superlative degree. Group 3 consists of adjectives that are derived from English nouns, while group 4 illustrates adjectives that are derived from English verbs. Numerals belong to the general category of adjectives, as we see from group 5; of course, if we used a plural number, we would have to pluralize the noun: “my five friends.” Finally, group 6 introduces a couple of compound adjectives.

In due course, you will learn that all these adjectival types existed in the Latin language, and that their various derivatives have had a profound influence on English. In this chapter, however, we are not going to worry about the more complex Latin forms; for the present, we’ll confine our survey to simple adjectives, like those in group 1 above, with a brief glance at the comparatives and superlatives of group 2.

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

The basic Latin adjective that meant “big” or “great” was a word with the base magn-; the ending that followed this base depended on a variety of factors, including the gender of the noun to which the adjective was linked. A “big page” was a Magna Charta; a man known as “Charles the Great”—we call him Charlemagne—had the Latin name of Carolus Magnus; a “big work” (the main achievement of one’s life, perhaps) can be described in Latin as a magnum opus. These are the three genders of the standard Latin adjective: magnus (m.), magna, (f.), and magnum (n.). If it modifies a feminine noun, an adjective of this type will use first-declension endings; for example, when the adjective firmus, firma, firmum is combined with the feminine noun terra, it creates the phrase terra firma (“firm earth”). If attached to a masculine or neuter noun, an adjective of this type will use second-declension endings, as seen in the examples Carolus Magnus and magnum opus above.The phrase magnum opus may help you remember that opus is a neuter noun. It also shows that a Latin adjective is not likely to rhyme with its noun if the noun belongs to a different declension. For obvious reasons, then, this very common type is described as an adjective of the first and second declensions, or a 1ST AND 2ND DECLENSION ADJECTIVE.

For the purposes of this course, we seldom have to worry about questions of Latin gender; and we can blissfully ignore all problems of adjective-noun agreement, a topic that creates some anguish for students of Latin grammar. It will be enough for us to know that most Latin adjectives belong to the same class as magnus, magna, magnum and firmus, firma, firmum. For the sake of brevity, we shall usually refer to words of this type simply as magnus or firmus, assuming the existence of feminine and neuter forms to match the masculine. IF A LATIN ADJECTIVE IS LISTED WITH THE ENDING –us, YOU CAN BE CERTAIN THAT IT BELONGS TO THE 1ST ADN 2ND DECLENSION TYPE. As you would expect from the parallel nouns that we studied in chapter 2, the base of these adjectives can be determined by removing the –us ending.

It is often possible to guess the meaning of a Latin adjective from obvious English clues. We have already met firmus (“firm,” “steadfast”), whose base provides the synonymous English derivative. The same principle applies to Latin adjectives like justus, vastus, solidus, timidus, validus, and rotundus. In meaning, these words may not exactly match their English derivatives, but the differences aren’t worth worrying about. Occasionally, however, semantic changes have occurred—the Latin word crispus, for example, meant “curly-haired.” If you know that Latin curtus meant “clipped” or “shortened,” you may have a better feeling for the connotations of the English word curt. Once in a while, appearances can be deceiving: Latin longus is not the origin of English long, which is a cognate word of Germanic descent.

For hundreds of years, students of Latin have been learning 1st and 2nd declension adjective forms from the model of bonus, bona, bonum (bonus –a –um), one of the commonest words in Latin. It is the origin of the corresponding adjective in the Romance Languages—French bon, Italian buono, and Spanish bueno. Its main derivatives in English, however, are two nouns—bonus and boon. It is not uncommon for adjectives to evolve into nouns in this fashion. In English, as in Latin, we can refer to “the good” as an abstract concept; the Latin phrase summum bonum (“the highest good”) is sometimes used in English. Similarly, we can talk about a “happy medium,” using another Latin adjective as a noun. A medium may also be a physical substance “in the middle,” or a means of mass communication (plural, media), or a spiritualist who attempts contact with the dead. A magnum can be a large (two-quart) bottle—probably of champagne. Another example of the evolution of neuter adjective into noun can be seen in vacuum, an “empty space.”We often use this noun adjectivally in expressions like “vacuum cleaner” and “vacuum bottle.” English is a language where words can jump casually from one grammatical function (part of speech) to another without any change in form. The word home is obviously a noun (“my old home”), but we use it as an adverb in “I’m going home,” and as an adjective in “home town” or “home run.” In highly inflected languages like Latin, words normally can’t switch functions without some change in form. This same Latin adjective has given us the English adjective vacuous.

You will surely spot the connection between aequus and English equal, equity, etc. Don’t be puzzled by the change in spelling: it is a regular development for the Latin diphthong ae to evolve into English e. Problems can arise, however, when this change blurs the contrast between two distinct Latin words. In English spelling terms, there is no difference between the Latin adjective aequus and the Latin noun equus (“horse”), since both of them appear in our language with the base equ-. If Julius Caesar should be suddenly brought back to life today, he might think that the mysterious English word equator referred to a horseback rider, or that equidistant meant that you had a cheap seat at the Kentucky Derby.

Solus and sanus, with their derivatives sole and sane, illustrate a fairly common type of morphological change, where the English word is the Latin base plus silent –e (see §14, 3.a). Further examples are amplus, curvus, and pronus (with its opposite, supinus). The development of Latin sanus to English sane shows also a semantic change: the meaning has been specialized, since Latin sanus involved both physical and mental health. The poet Juvenal said that all of us should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body—mens sana in corpore sano.

Quite a few Latin adjectives ending in –ius and –uus have entered English as adjectives in –ious and –uous. Vacuus > vacuous is one case in point. Further examples include varius > various, pius > pious (and its opposite im-piusThis is our first example of the negative PREFIX in-, of which we’ll see much more later. > impious), spurius (originally, “illegitimate”) > spurious, noxius (“harmful”) > noxious, in-nocuus > innocuous, and strenuus > strenuous.

As in the case of 2nd declension nouns in –us (see §13), there is a small subtype of 1st and 2nd declension adjectives with –er in the masculine singular:

Some of these, like liber and miser, keep the vowel –e– in their base (and therefore in their English derivatives). Others drop the –e-, having bases like pulchr-, sacr-, and integr-. Notice that miser and integer are two English noun derivatives from this list. English sinister is the masculine form of a Latin adjective that meant “left-handed”; throughout human history, southpaws have always been abused linguistically.

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

Although the great majority of Latin adjectives are of the 1st and 2nd declension type, there is a substantial number that belong to the 3rd declension. (You can rest assured that all Latin adjectives are of one type or the other; the 4th and 5th declensions consist only of nouns.) Like 3rd declension nouns, 3rd declension adjectives lack a predictable, easily recognized ending. However, since their vocabulary forms never end in –us, –a, or –um, they aren’t likely to get confused with the 1st and 2nd declension type. Most of the examples that we’re going to meet share a common masculine and feminine –is ending, like brevis, “short” (> E brief). This particular subtype has a neuter singular form that ends in –e (here, breve); because that fact is not really essential for our purposes, only one form will be given in our word-lists for adjectives like brevis or fortis. As in the case of the noun finis, their BASE may be found very easily by taking off the final -is. If you ever see a 3rd declension adjective listed in this book with two forms, like audax, audacis, you can assume that the second form is the genitive, and that the base is the part of the word that precedes the final -is.

This straightforward list shouldn’t cause much trouble. Notice the adjective grandis (> E grand), which is roughly synonymous with the 1st and 2nd declension magnus. Throughout antiquity, magnus was always the standard word for “big,” occurring far more often in Latin literature than grandis. In “vulgar” or popular Latin, however, grandis became the word of choice, gaining such currency that eventually it squeezed magnus out of common use. For this reason, it was grandis that supplied the everyday words for “big” in the Romance languages.

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

Let’s begin with a few DOUBLETS. The adjective planus evolved into two English HOMONYMS, plain and plane, which both have clear semantic links to the meanings “level,” “even,” “flat.” Both plain and plane have various English uses, of course, and can be several different parts of speech. In Italian, where the initial pl– of Latin regularly changed to pi-, planus became piano, an adjective that still means “plain,” “level,” or “flat.” As an adverb, piano suggests “softly,” a meaning it carries as a musical notation. A keyboard instrument that could be played either softly or loudly (“strongly”) was called the pianoforte, which we have shortened to piano. An Italian derivative also provides one of the doublets from Latin rotundus, in the form of rotunda, a round building or a round room. The English words round and rotund are perfect doublets; rotund has become rather specialized in meaning, since we use it only to refer to human girth. Another pair of doublets are integer and entire (< OF entier).

The Latin adjectives pronus and supinus meant “leaning forward” and “bent backward”; and their English derivatives prone and supine still express the literal image of lying face down or face up, respectively. If you are prone to do something, you are eagerly leaning forward (in a metaphorical sense, at least); if your attitude is supine, you are sluggish and inert—flat on your back, so to speak.

In Latin, levis and gravis are exact opposites in meaning (ANTONYMS): both refer to physical weight, but both can be used also in a moral or ethical sense (like our “light” and “heavy” reading). The English derivatives levity and gravity are similarly flexible, but the adjective grave (= “serious,” “solemn”) is not applied to physical weight. This word grave, derived from L gravis, has no connection with the grave in which one is buried; that is a Germanic homograph (§12), from OE græf.

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

Whether they were 1st and 2nd declension words like planus or 3rd declension words like fortis, most Latin adjectives took their comparative and superlative forms according to regular and consistent rules. Thus, “flat, flatter, flattest” was planus, planior, planissimus; and “strong, stronger, strongest” was fortis, fortior, fortissimus. This feature of Latin adjective morphology has had very little effect on English. However, in the forms planissimus and fortissimus you may recognize the origins of the Italian pianissimo and fortissimo, musical terms (abbreviated as pp and ff) that mean “very softly” and “very loudly” (“very strongly”).

Several irregular Latin comparative and superlative forms have left their mark on English. In the Indo-European language family, irregular comparison is a feature of the most commonly used adjectives: consider E “good, better, best” or “bad, worse, worst.” A selection of irregular Latin comparatives and superlatives is given here:

Read that list through for general interest; you are not expected to commit it to memory. Other irregular Latin comparatives have entered English without change; among these are interior (“inner”), exterior (“outer”), superior (“higher”), inferior (“lower”), prior (“former”), posterior (“later”), ulterior (“farther”), junior (“younger”), senior (“older”). Their corresponding superlatives include extremus (“outermost”), supremus or summus (“highest”), and ultimus (“farthest”).

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

As a postscript to our study of Latin adjectives, we shall take no more than a cursory glance at several Latin adverbs. If one were learning the Latin language, more attention to this topic would be needed; but the Latin adverb, as it happens, is one part of speech that has had very little impact on English.

English distinguishes between the adjective good (“We ate a good dinner”) and its corresponding adverb, well (“We ate well”). To say “We ate good” is still considered a mark of ignorance—though our ears are constantly bombarded with such statements as “Walker hit that ball real good.” Latin made a grammatical distinction between the adjective bonus (“good”) and its adverb counterpart, bene (“well”). Malus (“bad”) also had its corresponding adverb, male (“badly”). These two adverbs, bene and male, are among the relatively few in Latin that significantly affect English vocabulary (Chapter 14, §94).

The following English words were originally Latin adverbs. In some cases, they are now used as adjectives or nouns; and their meanings may differ from the ETYMOLOGICAL MEANINGS given here. You will find further examples in the Exercises (§32).

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

Just as Middle English greatly surpassed Old English in its adoption of words with Latin origins, so has Modern English far exceeded Middle English in this regard. When one considers the time frame, that is not surprising, since the term MODERN ENGLISH is applied to the entire period from 1450 or 1500 to the present day. This era is sometimes subdivided into “Early Modern English,” from 1500 to 1800, and “Present-Day English,” the language of the l9th and 20th centuries. The period as a whole is an era when English has become stabilized as a language that would be mutually intelligible to speakers—or at least to readers—from any time within those five hundred years.

If Middle English was heralded by the Norman invasion of AD 1066, the advent of Modern English was signalled by two not unrelated events, the invention of the printing press (by Johannes Gutenberg, a Mainz goldsmith, in 1450)  The celebrated Gutenberg 42-line Bible was printed in 1456; in 1476, William Caxton, who had learned his craft on the European continent, established the first printing press in England. and the great intellectual and cultural movement known as the Renaissance. Arising in Italy in the 15th century and sweeping into northern Europe with full force in the 16th, this new way of looking at the world sparked a passionate reawakening of interest in the classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. The movement was largely caused, of course, by the rediscovery of classical authors and the so-called “Revival of Learning”—a label that is perhaps a little unfair to the excellent Latin scholars of the late Middle Ages, who were the forerunners of the Renaissance. Great works of literature that had previously been accessible only to a learned few were now being keenly studied by a growing circle of literate readers, were being widely disseminated by the new technology of the printed word, and were being translated into English from the original Greek and Latin. The Protestant Reformation caused an upheaval in Christian worship and secular education, with consequences that had a profound effect on the language. During the reign of Elizabeth I, England enjoyed a period unprecedented in its intellectual energy and creativity. William Shakespeare and his fellow poets of the late 16th and early 17th centuries were riding a high crest of linguistic experiment and innovation.

As we observed in Chapter 3 (§23), there had been a certain amount of direct borrowing from Latin during the Middle English period. After 1500, however, the trickle of Latin words became a flood. Poets and scholars vied with each other in coining new English vocabulary that was inspired by their knowledge of the classics—Greek, as well as Latin, though the knowledge of Greek was still rather limited. Some of the results were solid and useful words that have survived to the present day; others were fantastic and preposterous inventions that deserved the early death that was their fate. Students of Elizabethan literature will be aware of the controversy that raged during the 16th century on the propriety of these bizarre and outlandish coinages (“inkhorn terms,” as they were scornfully known). Because scholars and poets on the continent were equally bold and inventive, it was not uncommon for an English writer to borrow a Latin or Greek adaptation that had recently become current in French or Italian usage. If you have access to a dictionary that gives the date of a word’s first attested use in English—for example, the current edition of Webster’s New Collegiate or any of the larger Oxford dictionaries—notice how many Latin derivatives can be dated to the period between 1560 and 1620. That is roughly Shakespeare’s lifetime, but Shakespeare was merely the most conspicuous representative of a widespread general trend.

The extraordinary number of Latin DOUBLETS in modern English can be explained by this activity during the high Renaissance. Though English already had words like chamber and choir, derived through French from Latin camera and chorus, the well-educated writers of the l6th and l7th centuries would go back to the original tongues to adopt forms like camera and chorus as new English words. More often than not, the new word became a naturalized adaptation, rather than an exact adoption: the Latin adjective fragilis, for example, was Anglicized as fragile, now coexisting with its earlier doublet frail. Whenever you are confronted with such a pair of English doublets, it is usually safe to assume that the form that looks less like the Latin original is the older English word, since it probably evolved through French in the Middle English period. The more Latinate form is almost certain to be the learned creation of some Modern English borrower.

In the next few chapters, we will be studying patterns of resemblance between relatively complex Latin words and their corresponding English derivatives. For the most part, our English examples will be drawn from these more learned adaptations of the Modern English period—vocabulary that is unmistakably Latin, once you have had some experience with Latin. There are thousands of words like this in our language, and they continue to be coined at an astonishing rate. The flood of classical neologisms subsided a little in the l7th and 18th centuries, but it began to swell again in the l9th century, as Latin and Greek both began to be exploited for scientific and technical terminology.

Because the English language is so thoroughly stocked with borrowed Latin roots and affixes, speakers of English are now able to invent new combinations of Latin word elements without actually knowing any Latin. Occasionally, a new coinage may cause the scholar some distress, if it violates the standard rules of Latin word formation. A harmless example is the word societal, which will still make a pedantic classicist wince, though it has been around since 1898; it is apparently here to stay, because it is a useful English adjective. No one is startled any longer by the word humanitarian (1831), though it, too, attaches an historically inappropriate Latin suffix to an abstract Latin noun. The great virtue of English is its flexibility and its receptivity to change. We can take Latin words and add Germanic suffixes, creating hybrids like graceful, masterful, brutish, and scholarly. It is an astonishing fact that there are more Latin derivatives in English today than the total number of Latin words in the largest dictionary of classical Latin. We have conquered the Romans on their own linguistic battlefield.

Chapter 4: Simple Latin Adjectives

1.  What word-ending makes it certain that a Latin adjective must belong to the 1st and 2nd declension type?

______________________

2.  List four Latin adjectives whose English derivative is the Latin word-base plus -e:

(Questions 3 and 4 will require the use of your English dictionary.)

3.  For each of the following English adjectives, give the LATIN ADJECTIVE and its ORIGINAL LATIN MEANING (which may or may not be its current meaning today):

4.  Give the ETYMOLOGICAL MEANING of the following English words (all Latin adverbs):

 For Key to Exercises (Latin), see Appendix I.

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

In all languages, a simple word may be expanded and changed in meaning by the attachment or insertion of one or more units of meaning called MORPHEMES. This is a process that often turns the word into a new part of speech. Consider, for example, the English adjective true, which can be converted into the noun truth by the addition of the morpheme –th. Truth, in turn, may become the adjective truthful, or its negative untruthful; similarly, the new adjective truthful may be expanded into the adverbs truthfully and untruthfully, or the new nouns truthfulness and untruthfulness.

So far in this course, we have been dealing only with simple nouns and adjectives. Now we’ll discover how Latin nouns were converted by various morphemes into adjectives; or conversely (in Chapter 6), how simple adjectives were expanded to become nouns. Whatever changes of form occurred originally in Latin are sure to be reflected in English words derived from Latin. Eventually you will understand how a simple Latin noun like via (“way,” “road”) could give rise to English words like impervious [im-per-vi-ous], “not allowing a way through” or deviation [de-vi-at-ion] “a going off the road.” It is at this more complex level of morphology that the study of word derivation becomes really interesting.

The process of adding a morpheme in order to modify the meaning of a word is given the name of AFFIXATION. Depending on its placement in relation to the original word, an AFFIX can be identified as a PREFIX, INFIX, or SUFFIXThese terms are derived from the Latin verb figere, fixus (“fix,” “fasten,” “attach”), and the Latin prefixes prae- (“before”), in- (“in”), and sub- (“under”).. We’ll be dealing mainly with prefixes and suffixes, which are both extremely common in Latin. In this chapter, we are going to see how Latin used a variety of SUFFIXES to turn simple nouns into new and related adjective forms. In linguistic jargon, these new forms are called DERIVED adjectives. Do notice that the terms “derived” and “derivative” can be applied not only to new words in a different language, but also to new words in the same language. This chapter could have been entitled “Derived Adjectives in Latin.”One label that should not be applied to these derived adjectives is “compound,” a term that is misused in several standard etymology textbooks. A compound adjective is one that has two or more base elements, like English red-hot, down-to-earth, vociferous, or multifarious (the last two derived from Latin).

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

By way of preamble, let us see what happens in English when we want to turn simple nouns into corresponding adjectives. What English word expresses the concept “like a man,” or “like a child,” or “like a horse”? How do we say that something resembles blood, or has the qualities of milk or water? How does our English language convey in one word an idea such as “full of sin” or “full of woe”? The following English examples will be drawn from Germanic word roots and Germanic suffixes, so as to provide useful parallels. If you understand the semantic and morphological process for native English words, you will cope more easily with the parallel situation in Latin.

There are at least five common methods for turning a native English noun into an adjective, all involving standard Germanic suffixes:

Suffixes like -y, -ly, -ish, -some, and -ful do have subtle differences in meaning, but these historical distinctions would seem quite academic to the average speaker of English. The situation that we’ll encounter in Latin is closely parallel: slight variations in meaning or usage can be identified among the common adjective-forming suffixes, but these weren’t likely apparent even to educated Romans. The common functional purpose that the suffixes share—creating adjectives from nouns—is far more important than any semantic connotations they may have. Latin normally applied only one adjectival suffix to any given noun; there are few Latin parallels for English pairs like manly and mannish, handy and handsome, awful and aw(e)some. One feature that you will find reassuring about Latin adjective-forming suffixes is that their English derivatives are mainly consistent and logical. To put it another way, you will be able to predict with confidence the Latin source-words for hundreds of English adjectives that have been derived from Latin.

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

More than any comparable Germanic morpheme in English, one Latin suffix was supremely important in forming adjectives from nouns. This is the ending -ālis, which could be attached to the BASE of a great many Latin nouns—and even a few adjectives—to create new adjective forms. Since vita meant “life,” then vitalis meant “pertaining to life,”Although there is always more than one way of translating any Latin morpheme into English, you will find that “pertaining to” is a very useful general definition for all the adjective-forming suffixes in Latin. “full of life,” “lively.” Since mors, mort-is was the Latin noun for “death,” then mort-alis could mean “pertaining to death,” “subject to death,” “deathly.” No matter whether the noun was 1st declension, like vita, or 3rd declension, like mors, mortis, the derived adjective was a 3RD DECLENSION type, as the ending –alis should make self-evident. Latin adjectives in –alis almost always evolved into English words in –al. In fact, if you set out to collect all the English words that end in –al (and there are thousands), you would find that virtually every one of them either is derived from a Latin adjective in –alis or has used this Latin suffix to create a hybrid English form.

Table 5.1 presents a mixture of new masculine, feminine, and neuter words; their gender is not important for us now, though you may recognize limen and semen as neuter nouns like lumen and nomen. The regular suffix –alis can be added to the base of these nouns so as to form Latin adjectives: nav-is > nav-alis (“pertaining to a ship”), flor-is > flor-alis (“pertaining to a flower”), etc. As the English language evolved, these Latin adjectives provided it with very useful derivatives: naval fills a gap caused by the lack of a native English adjective like shippy or shippish, and floral is a much more general word than the metaphorical flowery. (Flower itself is derived from flos, floris, as is its doublet, flour.) The Latin plural form mores is used in English to express its original meaning of “customs” or “character,” but the adjective moral is a far more common English word. Table 5.1 also produces English marginal, ordinal, (sub)liminal (“below the threshold”), and seminal. We’ll soon encounter other derivatives from the last three nouns.

The –alis suffix is by no means limited to 3rd declension nouns:

For some of these English derivatives, we can find almost exact Germanic counterparts, in terms of word structure, though their meanings may be quite dissimilar. For example, formal is closely analogous to shape-ly, verbal to word-y, and corporal to bodi-ly. Even though they may not be synonyms, pairs of this kind are useful etymological parallels.

In special phonetic circumstances, the Latin suffix -ālis had a variant form -āris, which comes into English as –ar (sometimes -ary). If the Latin word base ended in L, the derived adjective was hard to pronounce, so words like *sol-alis and *ocul-alis were changed to sol-aris (solar) and ocul-aris (ocular).The asterisk in front of a word like *solalis shows that it is a hypothetical form; no evidence has survived to prove its historical existence. In fact, if there was an L anywhere in the last two syllables of a noun base, this variant was used, as can be seen from lun-aris (lunar) and milit-aris (military). Other examples from vocabulary that we have met include popularis (popular), vulgaris (vulgar), and similaris (similar). The English words liminal and subliminal were coined by psychologists in the 1880s; because the Latin adjective from limen was liminaris, the modern technical term should perhaps have been liminar or liminary (cf. preliminary < prae-limin-aris, “before the threshold”).

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

In contrast to the huge category that we have just met, there is a rather small number of Latin adjectives formed by adding the suffix -īlisto the noun base. These regularly appear in English as words ending in –ile, occasionally in –il. Most conspicuous, perhaps, are the adjectives relating to the periods of human life (especially, a man’s life). The Latin word for a baby was infans, infant-is; “like a baby” was infant-ilis, whence English infantile. Because “boy” was puer (a 2nd declension subtype), “boyish” was puer-ilis (E puerile). From juvenis (“young man”) came juven-ilis (E juvenile). The noun vir (“man”) produced the adjective vir-ilis (E virile), and senex, sen-is (“old man”) yielded sen-ilis (E. senile). There was also a Latin adjective to describe an old woman—anilis, from the noun ănus (pronounced differently in Latin from ānus [E anus], a word that the Romans considered crude). There does exist an English word anile (“like an old woman”), but its rareness is probably the result of its similarity to anal (< analis, < ānus).

Outside of this coherent little group, there are only a few important –ilis derivatives of this type in English: servile (“like a slave”) < servilis < servus; hostile (“like an enemy”) < hostilis < hostis; civil (“pertaining to a citizen”) < civilis < civis; and gentile (“pertaining to the nations”) < gentilis < gens, gent-is (“clan,” “race”). The last, of course, has had its English meaning specialized to “non-Jewish,” from the Biblical contrast between the Jews and the gentiles. Gentile has three rather curious DOUBLETS—gentle, genteel, and jaunty, all transmitted and influenced by French gentil.

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

So far, we have met two Latin suffixes (-ālis and –īlis) that create 3rd declension adjectives. In this section we see two (-ānus and –īnus) that form adjectives of the 1st and 2nd declension, as we can recognize by the reliable ending –us.

The –ānus group is very small and will be dismissed with two examples:

The Latin word hūmānus (E human) is an odd case. Regardless of appearances, it is not related to hŭmus, “earth,” but is an irregular derivative of the 3rd declension noun homo, hominis, “mankind,” “humankind,” “person” (to be distinguished from vir, the male human being).

The –īnus group is somewhat larger and more productive, from the English point of view. Here are some representative examples:

The corresponding word masculine is derived from masculinus, whose etymology we’ll learn a little later in the course. Notice that the -ine of these -inus derivatives can be pronounced at least three different ways in English.

You will be familiar with at least some Latin-derived adjectives that refer to animals. This was a consistent use of the suffix -inus, forming words that regularly came into English as derivatives in –ine (here pronounced to rhyme with “mine”):

These animal words are mainly clinical and technical. We say “canine distemper,” but “doggy bag”; and no one would ever reverse the two adjectives. On the other hand, we can say that a person moves with feline grace, or that someone’s appearance is porcine. When we’re being uncomplimentary or rude, we generally use Germanic adjectives. To call a man “piggy” or “piggish” is a more direct insult than to call him “porcine”—unless he’s a Latin scholar. You might describe a woman as “horsey,” referring either to her interests or to her appearance; in the second case, at least, that would be a “catty” remark.

How many English animal adjectives in -ine can you think of? How do they differ in connotation from their Germanic counterparts, such as “catty” or “piggish” or “doglike”? Search your own vocabulary honestly, and then consult the Bestiary in §41.

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

Occasionally the Latin language attached the suffix –ārius to a noun in order to form a 1st and 2nd declension adjective with the usual general meaning, “pertaining to”:

Notice, by the way, that we have already met the adjective ordinalis, yet here we find ordinarius. It is uncommon in Latin to have two alternative forms like these, and they will usually have arisen at different periods in history. Also, you should realize that it is hard to predict a Latin source for an English word in -ary, since this suffix may derive from either –aris (military) or –arius (ordinary). Of the two possibilities, –arius is by far the more likely original suffix for any word ending in –ary.Even the Romans apparently found these suffixes confusing: auxilium (“help”) had two adjective derivatives, auxiliaris and auxiliarius, and E auxiliary (= “helpful”) is thought to have derived from the second. The similar English word ancillary is derived from ancillaris, “like a maidservant” (ancilla).

Latin adjectives in –arius were sometimes used as masculine or neuter nouns, creating two groups of words that have a good many English derivatives:

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

Here, for the first time, we meet a Latin adjective-forming suffix that has a somewhat more precise meaning than “pertaining to” or “like a —–.” It is a very productive Latin morpheme, creating a considerable number of English derivatives and influencing many others. The suffix is -ōsus, which regularly meant “full of.” Latin adjectives in –osus appear in English in one of two forms, –ous or –ose.

A. In the following examples, arranged by declension number, the English derivatives in –ous still convey the meaning “full of”; a few Germanic counterparts are supplied:

The immediate predecessor of the English suffix –ous was the Old French –os, –us (Modern French –eux, -euse). Because –ous became so common an adjective ending in English, it was attached to other Latin derivatives that had never been -osus words—words like aqueous (L aqueus), various (L varius), arduous (L arduus) and tenuous (L tenuis). You can find out a lot about suffixes like –ous from a good English dictionary, especially the Oxford English Dictionary. Just look up the morpheme under –ous.

B. The other type of –osus derivative appears in English as an adjective in –ose:

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

The last suffix of this chapter, -lentus, is very close in meaning to -osus, since it also conveys the meaning “full of.” When this element was added to the base of a Latin noun, it had to be joined by a CONNECTING or LINKING VOWEL, a device about which we’ll hear more later. For the suffix -lentus, the linking vowel was usually U or O.

Can you guess the etymological meanings of violent, turbulent, opulent, fraudulent, and flatulent? What about nebulous and facetious (§39)?

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

As promised earlier, here is a list of animal adjectives, in Latin and in English:

A LATIN BESTIARY < bestiarium (< bestia); cf. E bestial < bestialis
Compound adjectives formed from a noun base and suffix –īnus
English meaning: “pertaining to a ——” or like a ——”

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

Now that we are starting to meet more complex Latin derivatives, we need some conventional way to show our knowledge of their origins and our understanding of their form. Of course, we could write out a full professional etymology, but that would be next to impossible without years of linguistic training. Fortunately, there are rough-and-ready shortcuts that allow us to do the job fairly well, and in very few words. One method that we’ll now be using constantly is called word ANALYSIS, from the Greek for “breaking up.” In essence, it involves a division of the complex word into its component parts, and an explanation of each element. Here, for example, is how one might ANALYSE the English words glorious, capital, and asinine:

This is only one way of presenting an analysis; there are quite a few acceptable methods, and we will be looking later at some alternatives. Do notice, however, that you should begin with the full and exact Latin etymon (here, gloriosus, capitalis, asininus); you should give both the noun base and the full nominative form; and you should provide etymological meanings of both the base and the suffix. If you have learned your vocabulary assignments and the important suffixes introduced so far, you should be able to perform simple ANALYSES without the help of any reference book.

There is one aspect of this procedure that may sometimes bend historical truth, though it shouldn’t be allowed to cause you any discomfort. If you were asked to analyse the English word subliminal—to take just one example—you might logically assume that it is derived from a Latin form subliminalis. Yet this is an adjectival form that never existed in spoken or written Latin, since the modern word sprang from the fertile mind of a nineteenth century German psychologist. Nonetheless, you are still advised to begin the analysis with the source-word subliminalis, since it must at least have been a hypothetical Latin form in the inventor’s imagination. And some of these neo-Latin words have actually existed in technical treatises, though they are not listed in dictionaries. Just remember that you are not writing a definitive historical etymology: our type of rough-and-ready word analysis should not be mistaken for scientific lexicography.

Chapter 5: Turning Latin Nouns into Adjectives

1.   Identify the absolutely predictable Latin adjective from which each of the following English adjectives is derived (e.g., capital: capitalis):

2.  Using the format given in §43, write out ANALYSES for the following English words:

3.  The ETYMOLOGICAL MEANING of plumber (plumbarius) is “worker in lead.” Using a dictionary, find the Latin etymon (source-word) and the etymological meaning of (a) carpenter and (b) terrier.

4.  The Latin words calidarium and frigidarium referred to hot (calidus) and cold (frigidus) rooms in the Roman baths. An English derivative from calidarium (through Norman French) is cauldron or caldron, “a hot place.” What modern trademark cleverly suggests “a cold place”?

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5.  Identify the Roman deities behind the following English adjectives:

For Key to Exercises (Latin), see Appendix I.

Chapter 6: Turning Latin Adjectives into Nouns

As the title suggests, this chapter is almost exactly the reverse of Chapter 5—but less complicated. There you encountered a wide variety of Latin suffixes that can turn nouns into adjectives. Now you will meet a much smaller number of Latin suffixes that convert adjectives into ABSTRACT NOUNS.Remember that an abstract noun denotes a state or quality. The adjective good is a descriptive word, used to modify an English noun (a good book, a good woman); the abstract noun goodness denotes the quality of being good. Again, you will probably find the Latin material easier to understand if you think first how English deals with this problem when Germanic roots and suffixes are involved. How are native English adjectives turned into nouns?

First, let us recall something that we learned about adjectives in Chapter 4. In English, as in Latin and in many other languages, an adjective can be used as a noun without any change of form at all. We saw examples like “the highest good” and a “happy medium” (§24). Adjectival nouns such as these may refer concretely to people (“the bad and the beautiful”) or to things (“Money is a necessary evil”). No suffix is required to create that kind of noun, which can be described as a simple adjective used substantively. In contrast, we are now looking for words that have been changed in form—so-called “derived” nouns.

What suffixes, then, does the English language use to turn adjectives into nouns? To find out, take a few common Germanic adjectives, such as good, wicked, fat, short, hard, flat, broad, wide, long, high, free, and wise. From this list you will soon identify three noun-forming suffixes, of which the first is by far the most common:

Apart from a few quirks of spelling and pronunciation (broad > breadth, wise > wisdom), there doesn’t seem to be anything very difficult or complicated here. Even the meaning of the suffix seems to be identical in every case—“the state or quality of being —–”. Fortunately, Latin noun-forming suffixes are just about as easy and straightforward.

Chapter 6: Turning Latin Adjectives into Nouns

In terms of frequency, this suffix is to Latin noun formation what -alis is to Latin adjective formation. The morpheme -itas was regularly attached to the base of Latin adjectives to form literally hundreds of abstract nouns, almost all of which, it seems, have survived as English derivatives ending in -ity. The historical process is so dependable that you can confidently reconstruct a Latin noun in -itas for almost any English word in -ity. What is more, you can then remove the -itas suffix from the Latin noun to uncover its adjective base. If you can then discern the meaning of that Latin adjective, you will know the ETYMOLOGICAL MEANING of the English word. This type of exercise is very good for building English vocabulary.

We’ll begin with a group of ordinary Latin adjectives—some familiar to you, others presented here for the first time. As you see how each one became first a Latin noun and then (many centuries later) an English derivative, there should hardly be any need for comment or explanation:The examples given here represent a deliberate oversimplification. There were several important historical steps between, say, L gravitas and E gravity. The normal progression was Latin -tatem (accusative form) > Old French -tet > OF -te [mod F -té] > Middle English -tie > Modern English -ty.

Conversely, then, we can reconstruct the ancestry of almost any English noun that ends in -ty, working back to an original Latin adjective and a useful etymological meaning:

Sometimes the English derivative has been further modified in form because of phonetic factors in its transmission. The noun charity, for instance, comes from Latin caritas (< carus, “dear”); it manifests the now-familiar change from ca- to cha- that occurred in the Old French period. English cruelty is even more transformed, having evolved from Latin crudelitas (< crudelis, “cruel”). In these cases, the source-word can hardly be predicted without prior knowledge of Latin. But there is nothing surprising about the development of E equity from L aequitas (< aequus, “level,” “fair”), since the Latin diphthong ae is regularly reduced to e in English.

Here is an interesting feature of Latin nouns in -itas. Just as this suffix can turn a simple adjective into a derived noun (as we have been observing), so can it be added to the base of a derived adjective to create a new derived noun. Consider these examples:

This process (noun → adjective → noun) is not uncommon in native English word formation: Germanic live-li-ness is structurally parallel to Latinate vit-al-ity, word-i-ness to verb-os-ity, and man-li-ness to vir-il-ity.Just because two English words are structural or etymological parallels, they will not necessarily be synonyms. Element for element, the Latin derivative formality is closely parallel to the native English word shapeliness, but they are not remotely similar in dictionary meaning.

We saw in Chapter 5 that the adjective suffix -alis has a phonetic variant in -aris. The noun suffix -itas has two phonetic variants. Neither of these is very different from the main type, and both are reflected precisely in their English derivatives:

• If the adjective base ends in -i-, the suffix is not -itas but -etas (> E -ety):

• If the adjective base ends in -r- or -t-, the derived noun will end in -tas (> E –ty):

Chapter 6: Turning Latin Adjectives into Nouns

Although -itudo is a less productive Latin noun-forming suffix than -itas, it has exactly the same function and meaning. There appears to be no logical reason why the Latin language attached -itas to some adjectives and -itudo to others. You will easily recognize -itudo as the source of English nouns that end in -itude. Many of these have come directly from Latin, and others through French; a few are modern coinages on the analogy of those older forms. Again, the examples speak for themselves:

Sometimes this suffix could be attached to a part of speech other than an adjective. The noun servus (“slave”) gave rise to the abstract noun servitudo (“slavery”) > E servitude. There is an odd-looking Latin adverb vicissim, that means “in turn”; this produced the Latin noun vicissitudo and the wonderful English word vicissitude, which is applied to the alternating turns of human fortune. Plenitude is a learned synonym for “fullness,” and is derived regularly from Latin plenitudo < plenus (“full”). It is also the trademark for a facial cream (to get that full-fed appearance?). In later antiquity, there was a variant noun form plenitas, which is the origin of E plenty (as modified by French). A declining awareness of Latin in our own day is perhaps rendering obsolete such English words as rectitude (“uprightness”), pulchritude (“beauty”), and lassitude (“weariness”)—though teachers can still be dismissed for moral turpitude (“foulness of character”). One polysyllabic Latin derivative is still widely used and understood, however; that is the compound noun verisimilitude, from ver-i-simil-itudo (“likeness to the truth”).

Chapter 6: Turning Latin Adjectives into Nouns

This very small category of abstract nouns contains words formed by attaching the suffix -itia to Latin adjectives. Whenever the English derivative has evolved in a normal and regular fashion, it will have an ending in -ice. However, there are perhaps as many exceptions to that rule as there are regular examples. Here are three that run true to form:

The historical reason for the -ice spelling is to be found in the confusion of -itia and -icia during the late Latin period (cf. §12 and see §14.3.b). Within the French language, Latin nouns that had ended in -itia could also evolve into forms in -esse. Accordingly, English has largess(e) < largitia < largus (“abundant,” “bountiful”) and caress < *caritia < carus (“dear). The word caress is closely related in form, if not in meaning, to charity (§45), since the hypothetical *caritia must have been a late Latin variant for caritas. But we have entered an exotic realm of historical morphology, and you certainly shouldn’t worry about remembering these unusual forms.

Chapter 6: Turning Latin Adjectives into Nouns

In the three previous sections, you have seen the most important ways of deriving Latin nouns from Latin adjectives. Later in the course you will meet other noun-forming suffixes that are added to verb bases. There are two morphemes which Latin uses mainly to turn concrete nouns into abstract nouns, but does occasionally attach to adjective bases. One is the suffix -IA, joined to noun bases in milit-ia (< miles, milit-is, “soldier”), custod-ia (< custos, custod-is, “guard”; English custody), and in-somn-ia (< somnus, “sleep”). This morpheme is added to adjective bases in memor-ia (< memor, “mindful”) and inert-ia (< iners, inert-is, “sluggish”). Another suffix that has affected English is –MONIUM, which Latin usually adds (by means of a connecting vowel) to nouns: English matrimony and patrimony come from matr-i-monium and patr-i-monium; testimony from test-i-monium (< test-is, “witness”); and acrimony from acr-i-monium (< acer, acr-is, an adjective meaning “sharp”). Alimony and parsimony go back to Latin verb bases that mean “nurture” and “scrimp,” respectively. From the not-so-private life of actor Lee Marvin, English acquired the amusing BLENDA BLEND, known also as a PORTMANTEAU word, runs two other words into a single combined form—here, pal + alimony; cf. smoke + fog = smog. It was Lewis Carroll, a master of the art, who coined the term “portmanteau” in Through the Looking-Glass (where Humpty Dumpty is explaining to Alice the strange words in “Jabberwocky.”) palimony. Needless to say, Latin had no “palimonium.”Don’t try to force pandemonium into the -monium category. Its Miltonic source is a Greek compound noun that will be seen later. (And it doesn’t mean “a place for pandas”!)

Chapter 6: Turning Latin Adjectives into Nouns

Let’s warm up with some derivatives of the -tas family. Latin has at least three adjectives that mean “empty”: vacuus, vanus, and inanis (E vacuous, vain, and inane). All three formed abstract nouns in –itas: vacuitas, vanitas, and inanitas. Vacuity and inanity are still close in meaning today, but vanity has acquired a specialized meaning associated with pride.

From the noun animus (“mind,” “spirit,” “passion”), Latin derived the adjective animosus (“full of passion”), and from animosus came animositas (E animosity). Unanimous and magnanimous derive from the Latin compound adjectives un-animus (“of one mind”) and magn-animus (“of great spirit”); unanimity and magnanimity are regular derivatives of un-anim-itas and magn-anim-itas. “Even-mindedness” is equanimity, from aequ-anim-itas.

The Latin language developed wonderful abstract nouns from adjectives of size and number. Just as magnus produced magnitudo (“greatness”), so multus yielded multitudo (“many-ness”).The University of Victoria motto, Multitudo sapientium sanitas orbis, means “A multitude of the wise is the health of the world.” It is a quotation from the Biblical Apocrypha (Wisdom of Solomon). As a derivative of quantus (“how big?”), quantitas should mean “how-big-ness”; but in Latin it came to suggest “how-many-ness,” and that meaning endured. What would English do without the words quantity and quality? It was the Roman statesman and writer Cicero who coined qualitas (“what’s-it-like-ness”), from the adjective qualis (“of what kind?”), to translate the Greek philosophical word ποιὁτης. To the chagrin of purists, many people today use quality as an adjective. If you’re going to enjoy a “quality experience,” you’d better make your peace with Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Though English (influenced by French) has the quasi-Latin adjective forms maternal, paternal, and fraternal, Latin in fact added the otherwise rare morpheme -nus to nouns of family relationship: mater > maternus, pater > paternus, and frater > fraternus. These adjectives led to the derived nouns matern-itas, patern-itas, and fratern-itas. In form, mater-n-ity corresponds to the native English mother-li-ness, whereas matri-mony more closely matches mother-hood. A “paternity suit” is, in a manner of speaking, about a motherhood issue—without benefit of matrimony. The brotherly adjective fraternus had no sisterly counterpart in Latin; did the Romans have something against sisters? In later Latin there was a noun sororitas, origin of E sorority (= “sisterhood”).

The rallying cry of the French Revolution was “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”— “Freedom, equality, and brotherhood.” E equality has its source in aequus > aequ-alis > aequal-itas, the same etymology as Fr. égalité!. That French form of the noun has no direct English derivative, though we have borrowed the French egalit-arian.

Chapter 6: Turning Latin Adjectives into Nouns

1. By using one of the suffixes -(I)TAS, -ITUDO, or -ITIA, form a Latin abstract noun from each of the following Latin adjectives, and then show the English noun derivative:

2. The following English abstract nouns are of Germanic origin; can you think of parallel English nouns (semantic and structural counterparts) derived from Latin?

3. Look up the etymology of the English word city, and write down the main stages in its evolution from the original Latin root:

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4. The following English nouns have been disguised during their transmission through French. Find the Latin abstract noun and Latin adjective from which each is derived:

5. Give a schematic analysis for each of the following words:

For Key to Exercises (Latin), see Appendix I.

Chapter 7: Latin Diminutives

The standard rule for Latin diminutives is quite straightforward. For nouns of the first or second declension, the regular diminutive suffix is -ulus (M), -ula (F), or -ulum (N), depending upon the gender of the original noun; for words of the third, fourth, or fifth declensions, the suffix is -culus, -cula, -culum. As the suffix will suggest, the gender of the original noun is maintained in the gender of its diminutive.

Let’s first consider the -ulus -ula -ulum type. If we take the Latin 1st declension feminine noun forma (“shape,” “form”), we discover that its diminutive is form- (word base) + -ula (suffix) = formula (“little shape,” “little form”). It was as simple as that, in Latin. From the English vantage point, it’s often slightly harder, because there aren’t many Latin diminutives that have come into English so totally unchanged as formula. Let’s try the 2nd declension masculine noun modus (“measure,” “manner”); a “little measure” is a mod-ulus, the transparent origin of the English word module. In the same fashion, Latin nodus (“knot,” “node”) produced the diminutive nod-ulus (“little knot”), and the English derivative nodule. To an ancient Roman, the word circus meant the great race-course in the city, the Circus Maximus; a “little circus” is a circ-ulus, only slightly disguised as English circle. For a 2nd declension neuter example we can choose granum, “a [kernel of] grain.” Its predictable diminutive was gran-ulum, English granule.

What about the -culus -cula -culum suffix of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th declensions? Joined to the original word with or without the connecting vowel -i-, it presents no serious problems. If you diminish pars, part-is, F (“part”), you get part-i-cula (“little part”), English particle. From the 4th declension noun artus, M (“joint’) comes the diminutive art-i-culus (“little joint”), English article.In its root origins, artus, M (“joint”) was related to ars, artis, F (“skill,” “art”). Latin might conceivably have developed a noun *articula, “little art”; but there is no evidence of such a word. For 3rd declension neuter nouns like corpus or opus, the suffix appears added to the nominative form, producing the diminutives corpusculum (E corpuscle), “a little body,” and opusculum (E opúscule), “a small or trifling work.” The most startling etymology, no doubt, is mus-culus (E muscle), “a little mouse.” Muscle and corpuscle are just two of perhaps a hundred or more diminutives that occur in the language of anatomy and medicine.

Chapter 7: Latin Diminutives

For reasons of historical phonetics, a Latin diminutive word sometimes assumed a form that used a suffix other than the standard -ulus or -culus. These variants are too complicated to be explained here in full, but they can be summarized in general terms. You are advised to read this section quickly, and not worry about its technical content.

If the original noun had a base ending in the vowel -e-, -i-, or -u-, the suffix was not -ulus, but -olus. Therefore the diminutive of are-a was are-ola, and areola or areole is today an anatomical term that denotes the “little area” of colour around the nipple. If a Latin sword is a gladi-us, a little sword is a gladi-olus. (Many plants and flowers have been named on the basis of such vivid descriptive imagery.) Though classical Latin lacked a diminutive form of vacu-um, the biological word vacuole (from French) was correctly formed to mean “a little empty space.”

The -ellus variant is trickier, since it can have two very different explanations:

• Some nouns with –r- stems, like liber (“book”), underwent a series of phonetic changes that led to diminutive forms like libellus (“little book”);Here is the explanation, for those who are linguistically inclined. The diminutive suffix -ulus was originally a morpheme that can be shown as -(ə)lo-s; by the principles of syncope, samprasáraṇa, and assimilation, there occurred the development *libr-əlo-s > *libṛlos > *liberlos > libellus. There were parallel developments that led to a few diminutive forms in -illus (-a, -um) or -ollus (-a, -um). and because little books can often be abusive or scurrilous, that form became the origin of our word libel. The same phonetic process lies behind the English words castle (L castrum, “fort” > castellum), scalpel (L scalprum, “knife” > scalpellum), and cerebellum (L cerebrum, “brain” > cerebellum).
• Especially in the language of the common people (“Vulgar Latin”), there was a tendency to take familiar diminutive words and diminish their form and meaning even further. This produced a group of double diminutives, which we can perhaps remember as the “itty-bitty” category. Here is an easy example. The basic Latin word for “pig” was the 2nd declension noun porcus; there was a corresponding 1st declension noun porca (“sow”). By the principle we met in §52, a “piglet” became porc-ulus, and a “she-piglet” (Miss Piggy?) was porc-ula. In popular speech, however, Roman farmers preferred the double diminutive porc-ellus—an “itty-bitty” word that corresponds roughly to English “piggy-wig.”The phonetic development was *pork-os > *pork-əlo-s > *pork-əl-əlo-s > porcellus. What is interesting about all this is the fact that porcellus became the standard late Latin word for “pig,” appearing in such Romance derivatives as Italian porcello and French pourceau. Similarly we find vitellus (< vitulus, “calf”), source of It. vitello, Fr. veau, and E veal; and agnellus (< agnus, “lamb”), source of It. agnello and Fr. agneau. Any student of Romance linguistics must come to terms with this Latin double diminutive, since it plays a rather important role in the vocabulary of French, Italian, and Spanish.

Chapter 7: Latin Diminutives

If you think back to Chapter 5 (Turning Latin Nouns into Latin Adjectives), you will recall that any noun-base ending in L used the adjectival suffix -aris, rather than -alis (§35). As we have seen, every diminutive noun in Latin has a base that ends in L. Accordingly, if one wishes to derive a Latin adjective from a Latin diminutive, it will always end in -aris, and its English derivative will regularly end in -ar. These examples should make that situation clear:

Notice that the English adjective derivatives circular, particular, and muscular reflect the original Latin source-words more precisely than their corresponding noun derivatives, circle, particle, and muscle.

Chapter 7: Latin Diminutives

Depending on your taste, you may prefer Latin derivatives like formula, which have remained pure and pristine, or others like libel and veal, which have been modified or wholly transformed. An example of the former group is calculus, “small stone,” “pebble” (< calx, calc-is, “[lime-]stone,” a word we met in §16 as the source of E chalk). Calculus is not only a branch of mathematics, pioneered by Sir Isaac Newton; the word is also applied in medicine to a kidney- or a bladder-stone. In a later chapter, we’ll see exactly how the words calculate and calculation came into being. Another pure Latin word in English is uvula, that “little grape-cluster” that hangs down at the back of your mouth, to help you gargle and pronounce your French r’s. Have you looked at your fingernails recently? See if you can find your cuticle (L cuticula, “little skin”) and lunula (L lunula, “little moon”). The word molecule is from molecula, a modern Latin diminutive of moles, “mass.” An ovule, “little egg” (L ovulum < ovum), gives rise to ovular and ovulate.

The neuter noun vas (“vessel”) appears in English as vase and vas—the vas deferens is the sperm duct from the testicles.A testicle (L testiculus) is a “little witness” (< testis), proof of one’s virility. Without the diminutive suffix, testis had the same anatomical meaning; the comic poet Plautus puns on the double force of testis, “witness” and “sexual witness.” The English word testes is a 3rd declension Latin plural. A “little vessel” was a vasculum, a word still used by botanists for the small tin box in which plants are collected. More familiar, however, is the adjectival derivative vascular (L vascularis), pertaining to the blood vessels.

Sometimes English may perfectly reflect a Latin diminutive adjective, but show no trace of the diminished noun from which it stems. Latin jocus (iocus) is the source of English joke. We make no direct use of its diminutive joculus, but we have adopted the derived adjective jocularis as English jocular, “in the manner of a little joke.”The word juggler was derived ultimately from joculator, “a person who does funny little things.” The Latin word is an agent noun from a denominative verb—a form explained in Chapter 11, §76. Another example is jugular, L jugularis, “pertaining to the collarbone” (jugulum < jugum, “yoke”). Actually, jugulum is the old Latin word for the collarbone; today we call it the clavicle (L clavicula, “little key”).

There is probably a weird link between the English words oral and oscillate, though the Latin etymology is not certain. The regularly formed diminutive of os, oris (N.) was osculum, a “little mouth” that carried the special meaning of a “kiss.” The English words osculate and osculation refer to kissing, usually with pedantic humour. Latin also had an itty-bitty form oscillum, a double diminutive that was applied to a tiny mask or litle face of Bacchus that was hung from a tree and allowed to swing back and forth in the breeze. This is the likely source of the Latin HOMOGRAPH oscillum, which denoted a more general kind of swing. From this curious origin arose the English words oscillate and oscillation, descriptive of actions that swing back and forth.

A fascicle or fascicule (both forms exist in English) is a “little bundle” (< L fascis)—for example, an unbound segment of a large book. In ancient Rome, the plural fasces denoted the bundle of rods that symbolized consular power. In 20th century Italy, that symbolism was revived, and gave rise to the political label Fascist .

If you prefer the transformed and disguised kind of derivatives, English can roll out a fine supply. That four-letter word roll (both verb and noun) conceals the Latin diminutive rotula, “little wheel” (rota). A doublet for module (< L modulus) is mould (US mold), in the sense of “little measure”; the mouldy kind of mould is an entirely different word. Your uncle is descended from Latin avunculus, literally a “little grandfather” (avus); if he’s kind and jolly, like all good uncles, we’ll describe him as avuncular. A carbuncle is an unrelated little piece of coal (carbo)—and one guaranteed cause of a sore foot. From the Latin adjective cavus (“hollow”) comes cavea (“cage,” “coop”); a “little cage” is a *caveola, source of our word jail (which the British still spell as gaol, a form that is slightly closer to the Latin). A seal (the kind that you affix to a document) is derived from sigillum, the diminutive of signum (“sign,” “seal,” etc.).

There are two English homonyms, buccal and buckle, which are both derived from the same noun, though they are not exact doublets. Bucca was the classical Latin word for the human cheek, though it wandered chinward to become the mouth in French (bouche) and Italian (bocca). One can predict the adjective form buccalis, “pertaining to the cheek”; its English derivative, buccal, is a common word in dentistry, applied to the part of the tooth that is nearest the cheek (as opposed to lingual, on the side of the tongue). The medieval Latin diminutive buccula denoted the “cheek-strap” of the helmet and the boss of a shield; it was not too obscure a progression for the word to become generalized as any type of buckle.

If your appetite for Latin diminutives is undiminished, you can look up some of the following: bottle, bugle, chapel, charter, model, novel, panel, pommel, pupil (two kinds), scruple, trestle, and vanilla. The etymology of that last word may make you blush. If you are a French scholar, look up soleil, chapeau, oiseau, abeille, oreille, and genou.

Let us end with a quiet note of warning. Just when you think that you can spot a Latin “little word” at ten paces, you will learn that there is a deceptively similar group of nouns derived from verbs. In a later chapter we’ll meet such English words as curriculum, vestibule, cubicle, vehicle, miracle, oracle, obstacle, and spectacle—with not a diminutive in the bunch. Language study wouldn’t be any fun if it were too easy.

Chapter 8: Latin Prefixes

In the last three chapters, we have been learning how the Latin language could add SUFFIXES to its stock of nouns and adjectives in order to expand and enrich its vocabulary. Now it is time to examine the repertoire of Latin PREFIXES—those morphemes that are added to the beginning of words in order to alter their meaning. There are about twenty-five common prefixes in Latin, some of which are used almost exclusively with verb bases. Because you have not yet been introduced to the Latin verb, those particular prefixes may be hard to illustrate at this stage of the course. Experience suggests, however, that it is useful to present the general topic at this point, since a knowledge of prefixes will greatly facilitate the learning of Latin verb vocabulary.

Most of the common Latin prefixes had an independent existence as Latin prepositions. For example, you will know the Latin words for “before” and “after”—ante and post—from such phrases as ante meridiem (A.M., “before noon”), post meridiem (P.M., “after noon”), or post mortem (“after death”). Although they work as prepositions in those phrases, ante and post can also be attached directly to certain Latin words as prefixes, leading to such English derivatives as antecedent (“going before”), antediluvian (“before the flood”), postpone (“place after”), and postscript (“written after”). Again, super and sub were Latin prepositions of place that meant “over” (or “above”) and “under” (or “below”); as prefixes, they survive in the English words supersede (“sit above”) and submarine (“under the sea”). It is important to realize that if you know the meaning of a Latin prefix in Latin, you will almost certainly be able to observe that meaning at work in any English derivative that contains the prefix. There is one complication that makes the process just a little harder: in English derivatives, as in the original Latin words, some prefixes are occasionally disguised in form because of a phonetic process known as ASSIMILATION. We shall be examining that phenomenon as we proceed (“go forward”).

Before we attack a whole battery of Latin prefixes, let us become familiar with two of the most important of them, using straightforward English illustrations. We’ll start with in- and con-, and then move on to prefixes of place, which include super and sub.

One very common Latin prefix, which we have already seen in passing, was the negative morpheme in-, which corresponds with and is cognate with the Germanic prefix un-. Like un-, Latin in- cannot stand alone as an independent word, but is extremely useful when attached to other forms—adjectives, in particular—to negate their meaning.The standard independent negative in Latin is non, which is usually placed before a verb. Although we have adopted non- as an English prefix, it never had that function in the Latin language. Consider two synonymous Latin adjectives meaning “strong”: firmus and validus (firm and valid). The negative prefix creates two Latin adjectives meaning “weak”: infirmus and invalidus (infirm and invalid). Every mature speaker of English is surely aware of the negative force of this morpheme, but only the student of Latin is likely to realize how systematically it is used in derivative vocabulary. (As a rule, English prefers in- with Latin word bases and un- with Germanic, though HYBRID forms like unfamiliar are not at all uncommon.) The principle of ASSIMILATION can be observed when in- is placed before certain consonants. In Latin, as in any language, the sequence of sounds inp- will inevitably change to imp-, because of the position of the human teeth and lips. Thus the negative of pius (E pious) is impius (E impious). By a full assimilation of consonants, *in-legalis became illegalis (E illegal = unlawful); *in-mortalis became immortalis (E immortal = undying); and *in-regularis became irregularis (E irregular = unruly; see §60). One should not learn the prefix as in- or im- or il- or ir-; it is much better to remember it as in-, and be prepared to cope with various forms of assimilation. A different type of phonetic change is apparent in pairs such as amicus (friendly) and inimicus (unfriendly; > E enemy); here the pronunciation and spelling of the word base was affected by the addition of the prefix. Another example of this type is aptus (“fit,” “proper”) and ineptus (“unfit,” “silly”).In English, the adjectives apt and inept are not generally recognized as opposites; in fact, people will ask why the word “ept” does not exist. By a back-formation, English developed the adjective inapt to serve as the antonym of apt.

Another very common prefix was con– (“with,” “together with”), a combining form of the preposition cum. It appears in the Latin noun con-cord-ia (E concord), “sharing your heart with others,” and the adjective con-tempor-aneus (E contemporaneous), “together in time.” There are hundreds of English words that contain this Latin prefix, which sometimes appears as co-, and which may be changed by assimilation to forms like com-, col-, and cor-. You may already be aware that cooperation and collaboration both mean “working together,” but you probably didn’t realize that company and companion originally denoted the sharing of bread (panis). People who are companionable and gregarious (§42) may feel the urge to congregate (“flock together”).

Chapter 8: Latin Prefixes

Many Latin prefixes are derived from prepositions or adverbs that express spatial concepts. A similar principle can be seen at work in Germanic combinations like intake, outlet, undermine, and overthrow. If one can visualize the images that these prefixes convey, it is not necessary to memorize their meanings. The following schematic chart may provide some sense of the semantic picture. The shaded cube can be regarded as the representation of any space, affected by the various prefixes in the manner shown.

Just as super- and sub- can be viewed as a pair of semantic opposites, so can ad- (“to” or “toward”) be regarded as the opposite of a(b)- (“away,” “away from”). Ad-, which we won’t really be able to appreciate until we have some learned some verb vocabulary, has a bewildering tendency to assimilate with almost every consonant of the alphabet. It is present in the English words accept, affect, aggression, alleviate, announce, apprehend, acquire, arrogant, attract—and assimilate itself, which derives from ad- and similis (“liken toward”). Fortunately, ab- is much less prone to disguise, though it will appear sometimes in English as a- (a-verse) or abs- (abs-tract).

E- or ex- (“out,” “out of”), very common both in Latin and in English derivatives, is an easy prefix to recognize and remember. Eject is “throw out”; expel is “drive out.” In §42 we met egregious (L e-greg-ius), “standing out from the flock.” In classical Latin, de- meant “down (from)”; the etymological meaning of descend is “climb down.” However, it could also suggest “off” or “away,” as in deter, “frighten off,” and devious (L de-vi-us), “going off the road.”

Although they may perhaps overlap slightly in meaning, per- (“through”) and trans- (“across”) are quite straightforward. A perennial flower blooms “through the years,” whereas a transvestite “dresses across.”The word travesty is derived from a form of entertainment in which men dressed as women. If a substance is impervious (L im-per-vi-us), it does not allow a way through. In addition to its spatial force, the prefix per- can also mean “thoroughly” (perfervid, pellucid); and occasionally it carries the strange meaning of “to the bad,” as in pervert, perjure, perfidy, perfidious, perish, and perdition.

The form circum- (“around”) may be the easiest of all Latin prefixes. Even a word as learned and polysyllabic as circumnavigate can be understood by young children, since the force of the prefix is so obvious. Still, we’ll find that circum- has produced some very interesting and unusual English derivatives. It is related to the Latin noun circus, and to the adverb circa, which appears in English dating formulas (c. 1950 or ca. 1950 = “around” 1950).

By now you have surely noticed the alarming fact that there are two separate Latin prefix spelled in-. Earlier we saw the negative form, which is actually less common in Latin than an identical morpheme with the very different English meaning of “in” or “into.” In conjunction with verb bases, in- will usually have this spatial force; thus infer and import both mean “bring in.” You must stay on guard to avoid being tricked by the two different meanings of in-. Sometimes English is downright mean, as in the case of flammable and inflammable, which are exact synonyms. If you want to say that something will not burn, you must call it non-flammable—though there is Christmas tinsel on sale in Victoria which describes itself, with admirable linguistic panache, as ininflammable.

Chapter 8: Latin Prefixes

The time has come to present a summary of the most common Latin prefixes, including several that have not yet been mentioned. The table on the next page is intended mainly for future reference, since Latin prefixes are most closely associated with verb vocabulary. You should learn to recognize them in a general fashion now; their use will become much clearer as you work through the chapters that follow.

It may be helpful to comment on a few of the more important Latin prefixes not yet discussed. One of these is prae- (“before,” “ahead”), which always assumes the English form of pre-, as in the word prefix itself. In Latin, prae- is a close synonym of ante-, meaning “before” either in time or in place. When combined with the noun via, it provides the source of the English adjective previous (L prae-vi-us, “ahead on the road”).

Another common form is ob- (“against”), a prefix that suggests a collision course: if something is obvious (L ob-vi-us), it is on the road directly in front of you. Rather different in meaning is contra-; though it also means “against,” it suggests a deliberate opposition of will or purpose. Watch out for assimilation in the case of ob-: we have just met it in the word opposition, and we’ll see it also in words like occur and offer.

Chapter 8: Latin Prefixes

Two Latin synonyms were norma (“pattern,” “rule”; > E norm) and regula (“wooden ruler,” “rule”; > E rule). “Departing from the rule” is abnormal (ab-norm-alis); “not according to rule” is irregular (ir-regul-aris). Both words are entirely regular Latin adjectives. Why is it quite normal for irregular to begin in ir- and end in -ar?

If you stand “outside your rank,” you can be described as extraordinary (extra-ordin-arius). However, if you are merely “over the number,” then you are a supernumerary (super-numer-arius). Other derivatives of super- are superficial (superficialis) and supercilious (superciliosus). The first comes from the Latin noun superficies (super + facies, “over the face,” “surface”The word superficies (pronounced “super-FISH-eez”) exists also in English; it is a doublet of surface.); the second is from supercilium, “eyebrow” (super + cilium, “over the eyelid”). A supercilious sneer should be full of eyebrows!

Remember that the Latin source for English pre– is always prae-. In §35, we met the word preliminary (prae-limin-aris, “before the threshold”), where prae– is joined to the noun limen. The prefix is combined with an adjective in premature (prae-maturus, “ripe ahead of time.”

Since mundane (L mundanus) means “pertaining to the world” (L mundus), extramundane is an old English word meaning “outside the world,” “not of this world.” Today it has been displaced by extraterrestrial, a modern formation based upon the Latin adjective terrestris (“earthly”). Another space-age word of excellent Latinity is interstellar (L interstellaris), “between [among] the stars.” Don’t confuse inter- and intra-. Unlike intercollegiate sport, intramural athletics are kept “within the walls.” Can you analyse the English word intermediary?

Do realize that there are other Latin prefixes not listed in §59. A synonym of sub- is infra- (“below,” “beneath”), occurring in the hybrid infrared and in the colloquial infra dig (L infra dignitatem, “beneath one’s dignity”). Partially synonymous with super- are ultra- and praeter-, both of which mean “beyond.” Ultraviolet rays are beyond violet in the spectrum; praeternatural events lie beyond the natural.

Chapter 9: The Latin Verb System

In very general terms, we can define a verb as “an action word”—provided that it is the grammatical predicate of the sentence. For example, run is a verb in the sentence, “Your dogs run fast”; but it is a noun in the sentence, “Your dogs had a quick run.” Of course, a verb may also express a state, such as “she is,” “we became,” or “they seem.” By and large, however, it is the concept of action that is most characteristic: eat, drink, bring, make, stand, walk, fall, look. In English, verbs and nouns are often identical in form, and identifying parts of speech can be quite tricky. In Latin, verbs are very clearly delineated. Latin verb roots may be turned into nouns or adjectives by means of various morphemes, but when a verb is acting as a verb it cannot be mistaken for another part of speech.

It is a daunting task to learn the entire Latin verb system, with its complex variations of person, number, tense, mood, and voice. We must remember, however, that our sole purpose is to understand how Latin came to influence English vocabulary. From this point of view, we should need to learn only the root element of each Latin verb, ignoring all those tiresome grammatical aspects. Actually, it’s not quite that simple: because of the history of Latin morphology and of English word derivation, we shall have to learn two related stems or bases for each important verb. But that is still a relatively trivial task, compared to the challenge faced by the student who wants to read Latin.

Chapter 9: The Latin Verb System

From other language study, you are familiar with the concept of PRINCIPAL PARTS—that bare-bones set of information that enables us to predict how any given verb will perform. In French, for instance, if you want to control the verb that means “see,” you have to know the forms “voir, voyant, vu, je vois, je vis.” A foreigner learning English can solve the mysteries of our verb by learning the three forms “see, saw, seen.” For many centuries, Latin verbs have been learned by means of FOUR principal parts; in this case, video, videre, vidi, visus. You’re perhaps aware that our word video is the Latin for “I see”—though there may be more people alive today, using that word in English without knowing its source, than all the speakers of Latin in human history. If you have had any kind of a close encounter with the ancient world, you will know that Julius Caesar is supposed to have said, “veni, vidi, vici” (“I came, I saw, I conquered”); therefore vidi must mean “I saw.” But is there any practical reason for us to learn video and vidi? With very few exceptions—video (“I see”), audio (“I hear”), and credo (“I believe”)—1st person Latin verb forms are not reflected in English. Accordingly, of the four traditional principal parts, we need only concern ourselves with two: vidḗre, the PRESENT INFINITIVE (“to see”), and visus, the PERFECT PARTICIPLE (“seen”). These two forms are the source of countless English words. From videre, the present infinitive, come such derivatives as provide and evident; from visus, the perfect participle, come vision, visible, visual, proviso, and the like. Because the one Latin form cannot be predicted from the other, we must learn them both as vocabulary items. That is not a hard task, however, given their clear resemblance to English derivatives; and it is well worth the effort in terms of the increase it will bring to your understanding of English vocabulary.

For the sake of convenience, we shall be using the terms PRESENT INFINITIVE and PERFECT PARTICIPLE, a verbal adjective that is often called the “past participle” by English lexicographers. Although you should be familiar with the labels, there is no reason to know how the two forms were used grammatically in Latin. In fact, all we really need are the present base (or stem) vid(e)– and the perfect base (or stem) vis-. For most verbs, the present base is obtained by dropping the -re of the infinitive, and the perfect base by dropping the -us ending of the perfect participle. Still, it is probably easier and more memorable to learn them as videre / visus than as vid(e)- / vis-.

If you want an almost infallible trick for remembering any Latin perfect participle, THINK OF AN ENGLISH DERIVATIVE IN -ION. By firmly associating vis-us with the English word vis-ion, you can learn it without any painful effort of memory.

Chapter 9: The Latin Verb System

Like Latin nouns, Latin verbs can be grouped by pattern or type, so as to make them much easier to learn. In Chapters 2 and 3, we learned nouns in groups that we called DECLENSIONS. For some two thousand years, Latin verb groups have been known as CONJUGATIONS (literally, forms “joined together”). Don’t let the label alarm you; once again, we are merely talking about separate types or categories.

The 1st conjugation is an ideal place to begin, since it is the easiest and most regular. It is not the category to which vidēre belongs; all verbs in this first class will have a PRESENT INFINITIVE in –āre, like vocāre (“to call”) or portāre (“to carry”). Because the –ā– of that infinitive ending is a long vowel, we should pronounce the form as vocā́re. (Don’t use those marks in writing the word; they are merely pronunciation guides.) The regular simplicity of the 1st conjugation is best seen in the PERFECT PARTICIPLE, which almost always assumes a form like vocātus or portātus. That reassuring fact makes this conjugation thoroughly predictable—a great blessing, since it is the source of at least a thousand English words. Remember it, then, as the “vowel A” conjugation, characterized by the two forms -ARE and -ATUS.

This is a mere sampling of literally hundreds of Latin verbs that follow this pattern. Just to keep you honest, we have included one that departs from type: the perfect participle of secare does not show the usual -atus ending, but instead is sectus. If you apply the memory trick given in §62, you can easily remember sectus from the English word section (“something cut”).

At first glance, you may not spot a great many English derivatives from the verbs in Table 9.1. The real linguistic dividends start to accrue when you combine these verb bases with the prefixes of the last chapter (§59). Though portare by itself may suggest only the French-derived portage (< late Latin portaticum), the prefixes will soon bring to mind such words as import, important, export, report, deportation (a “carrying away”), disport (to “carry apart” from work)—the source, believe it or not, of our common word sport. A similar assault on putare will yield compute, computer, deputation, dispute, impute, reputable, disreputable, and reputation, as well as more learned words like putative. In earlier chapters we saw that the scope of Latin noun and adjective derivatives is rich and varied; but the extent of Latin verb derivatives in English is simply mind-boggling.

If you know any French, you will recognize cantare as the source of chanter; indeed, it is usual for 1st conjugation Latin verbs in -are to become 1st conjugation French verbs in -er. Thus English chant can be seen as an Old French loan-word, whereas recant and incantation come directly from Latin.Sometimes English will “correct” or “re-Latinize” the spelling of a word taken from French. The term descant, for instance, was derived from L discantus (“singing apart”) through F deschant. Therefore enchant and incant are perfect doublets, while enchantment and incantation are closely related. You may be startled to realize that a sea shanty and a Bach cantata are brothers under the skin.

Don’t be surprised if you find spelling changes in Latin verb derivatives. Our verbs claim (“shout”), exclaim (“shout out”), proclaim (“shout forth”) and reclaim (“shout back”) are all derivatives of clamare. But observe how the corresponding noun derivatives, all from the perfect participle, show the correct Latin spelling: exclamation, proclamation, reclamation. A parallel is seen in derivatives of vocare. From the present stem we get convoke (“call together”), evoke (“call out ”), invoke (“call in”), provoke (“call forth”), and revoke (“call back), whereas the perfect participle provides us with convocation, invocation, and provocation. (We’ll meet later such interesting forms as irrevocable.) Notice, by the way, that reclaim and revoke are very close in etymological meaning, and do have some kinship in meaning today.

Sometimes the English derivatives can be thoroughly disguised. From plicare you would soon discover complicate (“fold together”), implicate (“fold in”) and explication (“a folding out”), and you might then track down implicit and explicit; but you would need an etymological dictionary to uncover plait, pleat, ply (all < plicatus), imply, employ (both < implicare), deploy, display (both < displicare), apply, appliqué (both < applicatus < ad-plicatus), and the noun exploit (< explicatus). If you then learned that the root plic- occurs also in complex, accomplice, simplicity, and multiply (= Germanic manifold), you would realize that you had unfolded a very complicated pattern.

The first time around, you are likely to make a few mistakes. You would be wrong to think that servare is the source of English serve (< L servire); but it is the origin of conserve, conservation, preserve, reservation, reservoir, etc. The important Latin verb stare, status is cognate with—but is not the source of—the Germanic English verb stand; it has given us the derivatives status, station, stature, constant, instant, stance, and inconstancy. There is absolutely no way that you can grasp all these words at once; some of them will be carefully explained in later chapters. The only expectation at present is that you will try to learn the two necessary Latin forms and the basic English meanings for each of the verbs on the table, making intelligent use of any English clues that you can spot.

To review and stress that all-important key to the perfect participle, here is an “-ion” guide to the ten 1st conjugation verbs on Table 9.1: incantation, exclamation, mutation, complication, deportation, reputation, section, conservation, station, and vocation.

Chapter 9: The Latin Verb System

In our original verb vidēre, we have already seen a Latin verb of the 2nd conjugation. Where the 1st conjugation featured an -āre present infinitive, the 2nd has a parallel -ēre form. Unfortunately, there is no predictable perfect participle; the second form for each verb on the following table must simply be learned as a separate vocabulary challenge.

There are several points to notice about this group. First, be sure that you pronounce the infinitives with a stress on the second-to-last syllable: docére, habére, monére, etc. (You will soon learn why this is important.) If you have studied French, you may notice that some these verbs acquired French infinitives in -oir: avoir, mouvoir, s’asseoir, voir—but tenir does not conform. Our “-ion” guide will work for premonition (“forewarning”), motion, session, retention (“holding back”), and vision; for doctus and habitus you can remember doctor (“teacher”) and habit (something “had”). The forms in square brackets below habere show how the two bases are modified when prefixes are added. In this way we get inhibit (“hold in”) and exhibit (“hold out”), along with inhibition and exhibition.

Once again, you should take the prefix chart from §59 and see how many English derivatives you can quickly identify from Table 9.2. The first verb, docere, will not be productive; but you will soon find words like admonish and admonition, emotion, commotion, promotion, contain and contention, detain and detention. If you can’t get very far with sedere, try looking up supersede, preside, president, reside, resident, residue, and dissident. Like habere, its base vowel may be modified when prefixes are added.

Chapter 9: The Latin Verb System

The 3rd conjugation is a very large group of verbs that includes some of the most common and fundamental roots in the Latin language. Its present infinitive does not have a strong ending like the -āre of the 1st and the -ēre of the 2nd; it is spelled -ere, but the vowel is short, so that the accent is placed on the preceding syllable. Typical 3rd conjugation infinitives, therefore, will be ágĕre, cédĕre, míttĕre, régĕre, scríbĕre. Like the 2nd conjugation, the 3rd has no predictable perfect participles; but by studying those forms with English derivatives in mind, it is not an overwhelming task to learn them. If the following list looks intimidating, do at least read it through several times, linking the Latin verb bases with their English meanings and their more obvious English derivatives.

To illustrate how many prefixes can be used with some Latin verb bases, let us take a couple of verbs of motion, cedere and currere. When it stood alone, cedere, cessus tended to mean “yield,” a force that it has in our word cede and the legal term cession. With prefixes attached, it was a more neutral verb of going. Intercede and intercession, for example, suggest “going between”; notice again how our English verb derivative comes from the present infinitive and the noun from the perfect participle. It is distinctly confusing that some cedere derivatives are spelled -ceed and others -cede—but English is that kind of language. Thus we have proceed (“go forward”) and procession; exceed (“go out”) and excess, excessive; succeed (< sub-cedere, literally “go under”) and success, succession. Closer to the Latin spelling are accede (< ad-cedere, “go toward”), concede (“go together”), precede (“go before”), recede (“go back”), and secede (“go apart”), along with all their corresponding nouns in -cession. If flood waters are receding, that is happy news; if male chins or hairlines are receding, that is not so good. After we study Latin present participles, we’ll understand antecedent (“going before,” a word for grammarians) and decedent (“going down” [if not actually “long gone”], a word for Perry Mason fans). Predecessor and ancestor (L antecessor) also belong somewhere on this list.

We can perform the same exercise with currere, cursus, finding derivatives like current, course, cursor, cursory, cursive; concur, concurrent, concurrence, concourse; discourse, discursive; excursus, excursion; occur, occurrence (what is the prefix?); precursor (“forerunner”); recur, recurrent, recurrence, recourse; and succour. Can you relate all these words to running? Succour, for instance is “running beneath” (sub-currere) to offer help. (If you are drowning on the French Riviera, shout “au secours!”; in Italy, try “soccorso!”) Do you see any semantic link between the modern English meanings of concur and concede?

For other prefix exercises of this kind, try mittere, missus (“send”) and trahere, tractus (“drag, draw”). Here are some suggestions to get the juices flowing on mittere: mission, missive, missile, admit, admission, admittance, commit, commission, dismiss, emit, emission, intermittent, intermission, permit, permission, permissive, promise, submit, submission, submissive, transmit, transmission. Similarly, try these for trahere: tractor, traction, abstract, contract, detract, distract, extract, protract, retract, subtract—and all their counterparts in -ion (abstraction, etc.). Notice the virtual disappearance of the base trah- in English; its only survival is the mathematical term subtrahend. Other good verbs on which to practise are ducere, ductus and scribere, scriptus.

The close similarity of cadere, casus (“fall”) and caedere, caesus (“cut”) has been the bane of Latin students through the ages. Cadere has some recognizable derivatives that retain the vowel -a-: cadence, case (the grammatical kind, or “in case I see you”), decadent (“falling away”), and occasion. This verb often became -cĭdere with prefixes, as we see in accident (ad + cadere), incident , coincidence, and occident (ob + cadere). In contrast, all the English derivatives of caedere contain prefixes, with the verb forms changed to -cīdere, -cīsus. Examples of its derivatives are circumcision, concise, decide, decision, decisive, excise, excision, incision, incisive, incisor, precise, precision.

It should be explained that deponents are unusual Latin verbs that do not have active forms—but sequi, loqui, and nasci are present infinitives, nonetheless. We can treat them the same way as any other verbs on our list, realizing that derivatives of loqui will have forms in loque– like eloquent or eloquence, whereas locutus gives us locution, elocution, and interlocutor.

At this point you probably need a word or two of gentle comfort and reassurance. The challenge of mastering Latin verb forms and their English derivatives is not the task of a single evening or even a single week: it can take months or years to assimilate all this knowledge. The immediate goal is merely to introduce you to Latin verb vocabulary.

Chapter 9: The Latin Verb System

In a course of this kind, where the sole objective is gaining insight into English words, it may not be crucially important to remember Latin verbs by conjugation number; that knowledge is admittedly of less practical value than remembering the declension groups of Latin nouns. However, when we come to look at other Latin verb forms, such as present participles and gerundives, you will probably find it helpful to be able to associate Latin verb vocabulary with these numbered categories.

The Latin 4th conjugation always has an infinitive in –i̅re, like audíre or veníre. This easily recognized form, therefore, makes it parallel to the 1st in -āre and the 2nd in –ēre. Once again, unhappily, there is no predictable perfect participle. What is most noticeable about the fourth conjugation is the persistence of that vowel -i- in many of its forms—in audi̠o (“I hear”), for instance, and the English words audi̠ence, sali̠ent, or conveni̠ence.

There is a small but important subtype of 3rd conjugation verbs that can be described as having an “i-stem,” because they also show that same persistent vowel.If we were learning all four principal parts, the contrast between the regular 3rd conjugation verb and this special subtype would be more apparent. Compare the first principal part of ago, agere, egi, actus with that of capio, capere, cepi, captus, or facio, facere, feci, factus. To judge them by the evidence of their English derivatives, they appear more closely associated with the 4th conjugation than with the 3rd. For this reason, they are included on Table 9.4 with the 4th conjugation type. They include capere and facere , which may be the most productive of all Latin verbs, from the standpoint of English vocabulary. The “i-stem” deponent verbs gradi and pati are also very important; it may help to remember them with words like gradient, aggression and patient, passion.

Chapter 9: The Latin Verb System

You will need a little help in becoming acquainted with the verbs capere (“take”) and facere (“make,” “do”). You can remember their perfect participles by caption, captor, capture, and fact, faction, factor, manufacture (“making by hand”). When prefixes are added, phonetic changes produce forms like concept, deception, exception, perception, interceptor, receptive, contraceptive; and affect, effect—don’t confuse those two in English—defect, infection, prefecture, perfection. The perfect (“completed”) tense in grammar is a doublet of that cold confection known as a parfait (it must be “thoroughly made”). The present bases of capere and facere appear in recipient, incipient, efficient, and sufficient. There are many interesting derivatives from these two verbs that have been disguised by transmission through French. Observe, for instance, all the English verbs ending in -ceive that are semantic parallels to nouns ending in -ception. Deceit and receipt are closely akin to deception and reception—and note their inconsistency in spelling. The word recipe is a Latin command, meaning “Take it!”—or maybe “Take it back,” if you don’t admire the cook.The pharmaceutical symbol of a letter R with a cross on the downstroke is the medieval druggist’s abbreviation for recipe, the command to take a prescription. There are English synonyms like receiver and receptor, where one word comes from French and the other from Latin. The English nouns fact and feat are doublets; each is a “thing done,” in French a fait accompli. Similarly, defect and defeat are both derived from defectus. A surfeit is something “overdone” (< *superfactum).

Almost all the derivatives from jacere (“throw”) contain Latin prefixes: think of abject, eject, interject, project, reject, and subject. For practical purposes, -ject is the only base you need to remember.

With such obvious derivatives as audience, audition, auditor, auditory, and auditorium, the verb audire, auditus is not likely to cause any problem. The audio portion of our television set does for the ears what the video does for the eyes. Those of us who find television the ideal soporific (“sleep-maker”) may especially appreciate the dormio virtues of tv entertainment, whenever we are feeling somnolent.

The verb salire, saltus has some interesting English derivatives: in its root form, salire is related to words ranging from salmon to Sault Sainte Marie. As we’ll see in Chapter 12, §80, the present participle salient means “leaping”; a salient fact is one that comes jumping out to hit you. Something resilient comes “leaping back” (resilire, resultus), with an obvious result. To insult is to jump upon someone—etymologically, at least. To exult is to leap out. There was an ancient circus rider called a desultor, who “leapt down” from horse to horse; hence desultory (“leaping about”). English somersault is derived from supra (“above”) and saltus, probably through Spanish. Assail, assailant, and assault have come from ad and saltus, by French transmission.

Because sentire is a general verb of “feeling,” it can be applied to any of the five senses. A sentient being (more correctly pronounced “sen-shunt” than “sen-tee-ent”) is one who has feeling. Sentimental and sensational are related words. A strong divergence of opinion may cause dissension (“feeling apart”), whereas a convergence of belief is consensus (“feeling together”)—a pure Latin word that is often misspelled in English, because it is confused with the unrelated noun census (“a reckoning”).

A 1st conjugation verb not included on Table 9.1 is spirare, spiratus (“breathe”), which is obviously related to the noun spiritus (“breath”). Aspire (< ad-spirareThe Latin prefix ad- will normally lose its -d- before the combination of initial s- and a consonant stop. Compare ascribere (< ad-scribere), E ascribe, ascription, and aspicere (< ad-spicere), E aspect. ) is “to breathe towards”—to desire eagerly—a verb that gave rise to the noun aspiration. In phonetics, the letter H is described as an “aspirate.” To conspire is “to breathe together,” and to expire (ex-spirare) is to exhale (ex-halare) one’s last breath. It should be easy enough to work out the etymological meanings of inspiration, perspiration, and respiration.

If you recall our exercise with cedere and currere in §65, you can perform similar feats of wizardry with the important verb venire (“come”). These forms will get you started: advent, circumvene, circumvention, convene, convent, convention, contravene, event, intervene, prevention, subvention. Another basic verb of motion is gradi, gressus. What is the difference, if any, between a congress and a convention? Between a regression and a recession? Would you consider them both retrograde? Is a digression likely to be discursive? And why is an egress not the opposite of an invention? (It is the same as an exit, which comes from an irregular verb of motion that we haven’t met.)

These reflections suggest both the advantages and shortcomings of knowing Latin etymologies. Once you even partially realize the etymological history of complex English words, your control over their use will be enormously improved. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to think that knowing an etymological meaning will provide a guaranteed understanding of any English word. Occasionally it may be actually misleading to know what an English word should mean, from the Latin point of view. In most cases, however, the verb root and the prefix, when considered together, will present a correct general image of the word. It will then be necessary to learn its precise connotations and typical usage by observing it in a good spoken or written context.

There are no formal EXERCISES included with this chapter. Spend any available time studying the four tables of verb vocabulary, along with the earlier chart of prefixes.

Chapter 10: Turning Latin Verbs into Latin Nouns

As you will have come to expect by now, Latin has various systematic ways of transforming verbs into other parts of speech. In these new Latin words, the semantic action of the original verb will still be evident; but instead of having a purely verbal function, such as “carry,” “hear,” “teach,” “feel,” or “make,” the word will now convey some additional meaning, like “the act of carrying” or “able to be heard” or “the person who teaches” or “the state of feeling” or “a thing made.” In its native Germanic tradition, English is quite limited in its capacity to form new parts of speech this way. For just that reason, vast numbers of Latin verb derivatives have been borrowed over the centuries, to become basic and indispensable English words. If you can learn to understand the relationship between these words and the Latin verbs from which they arose, you will begin to control enormous categories of English vocabulary.

A good many of these verb-derived categories consist of standard Latin noun types, which English has borrowed with only minor adaptations. Because they are standard, they are consistent and predictable. If you know a particular Latin verb such as capere, captus, you will be able with some confidence to construct its related noun forms—captio, captura, captor; and then, no doubt, you will spot the connection between those forms and a variety of English words. Soon you will be able to reverse the procedure, predicting the Latin etymon of any English noun that belongs to a familiar type.

All this verb manipulation will involve one or other of the two key forms that we met in Chapter 9 (§62)—the present infinitive and the perfect participle. The PERFECT PARTICIPLE is particularly useful as an instrument for creating Latin nouns, either by itself or as a base to which various suffixes may be added. To obtain the base of any Latin perfect participle, just remove the -us ending. The Latin perfect participle is actually a 1st and 2nd declension adjective in -us, -a, -um. The form mutatus, for example, is a verbal derivative that means “changed”, and it can be used as a pure adjective in phrases such as vir mutatus, “a changed man,” or femina mutata, “a changed woman.”

Chapter 10: Turning Latin Verbs into Latin Nouns

When we were discussing 1st and 2nd declension adjectives in §26, we saw that the neuter –um form of this type could be used in Latin as a noun; just recall the examples medium, vacuum, and bonum (E boon). It should not be surprising, therefore, that the perfect participle, a verbal adjective, can also work this way. The most prominent example, from the English point of view, is datum (“something given,” “a given”), from the verb dare, datus. This word is still treated in English as an alien Latin form: singular datum, plural data (a grammatical rule that makes a good many speakers of English feel uncomfortable or rebellious). A parallel form was the Latin word stratum (“something spread out”), from sternere, stratus, a verb seen in §11 as the origin of our word street. In English, stratum, strata (“layer”) should operate exactly like datum, data—and we mustn’t let ourselves be confused by stratus clouds and strata title.

It is rare to find English words like datum and stratum, which have kept their original Latin form. More commonly, words of this type have been anglicized in one of the standard ways we learned in §14. From the deponent verb fari, fatus (“speak,” “utter”), Latin derived the neuter noun fatum (“something uttered,” “a divine edict”)—our English word fate. Edict itself is from edictum, “something spoken out” (< edicere, edictus). From tentus, the alternative perfect participle of tendere, came the noun concept tentum (“a thing stretched”), English tent. From the familiar verb facere, factus (“make,” “do”) came factum (“a thing done”), English fact. And the other common verb that meant “do”—agere, actus—produced a Latin neuter noun actum, another “thing done,”: an act. (How would you define the contrast in modern English between a fact and an act?) The “things done” by Roman legislators were written down and circulated as acta diurna, “Daily Deeds,” the original newspaper of the western world.The title of this ancient Hansard combines acta with diurna, an adjective from the noun dies (“day”). Diurnus is the origin of the French derivative jour and the Italian giorno; its longer variant, diurnalis, is the source of French journal and Italian giornale.

Chapter 10: Turning Latin Verbs into Latin Nouns

Just as Latin could turn the neuter (-um) form of the perfect participle into a 2nd declension noun, so could it convert the masculine (-us) form into a regular 4th declension noun. There was originally a contrast between these two, in that the neuter noun was felt to be concrete and the masculine somewhat more abstract; but that contrast is often hard to discern in practice. These fourth declension nouns look exactly like the perfect participle—sensus, ductus, tractus, etc. They are quite numerous, and easy to identify.

Here is a sampling of 4th declension Latin nouns that were derived from perfect participles of verbs. Some of them come from verbs that we met in the last chapter, while others will be less familiar:

Several forms of this type, with prefixes attached, have come into English completely unchanged. We have already seen that a consensus is “a shared feeling.” What are the etymological meanings of conspectus and prospectus? (Like status and state, prospectus and prospect are English doublets.) Convent and congress come from the semantically similar Latin nouns conventus and congressus.

Chapter 10: Turning Latin Verbs Into Latin Nouns

Of all ways to create abstract nouns from Latin verbs, the overwhelming favourite was the addition of the suffix -io to the perfect participle base (or less commonly to the present infinitive base). For example, from dicere, dictus (“speak”), Latin could create an abstract noun dict-io, dict-ionis, which meant “speech” (or “the act of speech,” “the process of speaking,” etc.). Notice that this is a perfectly regular 3rd declension noun, whose base is diction-. Here, then, is the explanation for all those -ion derivatives that we noticed in the last chapter. Historically, English forms in -ion can be traced back through Old French to medieval accusative forms like dictionem, which were prevalent in vulgar Latin at a time when the nominative forms had all but disappeared. For practical purposes, however, we can equate the English -ion spelling with the BASE form of Latin nouns in -io, -ionis.This -ion noun base may be further extended in Latin forms like diction-arium, E dictionary, “a place for words.” (There was also a medieval Latin expression, liber dictionarius, “word-book.”) This is a valid historical approach, because the majority of the -ion forms came into Modern English after the Renaissance, drawn directly from Latin nouns on the analogy of the older -ion derivatives. New examples are still being coined today.

To the student of English vocabulary, this circumstance is nothing less than a godsend. Although you may never have stopped to think how many -ion nouns there are in our language, you can be sure that there are enough to keep you counting for hours on end. Almost without exception (ex-cept-io), they will have a Latin derivation (de-rivat-io), and that knowledge should be reasonReason is a word which has lost its -ion in the French transmission (< trans-missio, “a sending across”). The doublets reason and ration are both derived from ratio, a noun formed from the past participle of reri, ratus (“think”). Similar doublets are fashion (Fr. façon) and faction, both from factio. for great satisfaction (satis-fact-io)—perhaps even be an occasion (oc-cas-io) for exultation (ex-sultat-io). There can be few aspects of English etymology that are more dependable: virtually every -ion noun that you meet can now send you scurrying in search of a Latin perfect participle, whose meaning is almost guaranteed to unlock the semantic secrets of that English noun.

If you want to test that assertion (ad-sert-io), you can take another quick tour of the Latin verbs on Tables 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4, applying the -ion test to the perfect participles. What you will now be uncovering is a series of Latin 3rd declension abstract nouns in -io, -ionis, probably the largest single category of Latin derivatives in English.

Chapter 10: Turning Latin Verbs into Latin Nouns

Alongside these abstract nouns in -io, Latin could form other abstract nouns from the very same perfect participle bases, using the suffix -ura (> E -ure). Thus, from the perfect participle captus, there developed two nouns, captio and captura, both meaning “the act (or process) of taking.” In English, of course, caption and capture are very different words; but the semantic force of the -io and -ura endings is so similar in Latin that it is hardly worth while trying to see any contrast in connotation between those suffixes. For some perfect participles, we may have as many as three different Latin nouns, all extremely close in meaning. Just consider, from stare, status (“stand”), the forms status, statio, and statura, all of which denote some kind of “standing”; their derivatives status, station, and stature have become usefully differentiated in English. The perfect participle of jungere, junctus (“join”) is the source of English joint (junctus), junction (junctio), and juncture (junctura)—three synonymous words in English.

Here are some more familiar examples of this -ura suffix: