nansk Posted March 25, 2014 Share Posted March 25, 2014 Please tell me more about the fourth principal part of Latin verbs. I read that it is the perfect passive participle ("having been verbed"). I have been memorizing it like this: amo, amare, amavi, amatum Today I read this form on a Henle-related site: amo, amare, amavi, amatus So I searched online and found this info but I have some questions. 1. Does the perfect passive participle verb form change based on the gender? (The active forms I am studying now do not change based on the gender of the subject or the object.) 2. So which form of the fourth principal part do you generally memorize (-um or -us)? Or does it not matter? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 25, 2014 Share Posted March 25, 2014 Please tell me more about the fourth principal part of Latin verbs. I read that it is the perfect passive participle ("having been verbed"). I have been memorizing it like this: amo, amare, amavi, amatum Today I read this form on a Henle-related site: amo, amare, amavi, amatus So I searched online and found this info but I have some questions. 1. Does the perfect passive participle verb form change based on the gender? (The active forms I am studying now do not change based on the gender of the subject or the object.) 2. So which form of the fourth principal part do you generally memorize (-um or -us)? Or does it not matter? There is a little disagreement in the Latin community about what the fourth principal part should be in a dictionary entry, but the upshot is that it doesn't matter much. Some use the perfect passive participle as the fourth principal part, like "amatus". Note that participles, while derived from verbs, function as adjectives, and thus have number, gender and case. So, technically, that's "amatus, a, um", but no one writes that all out. Don't worry, they are like 1st/2nd declension adjectives, so you don't need to learn a new set of endings. So, the beloved man is "vir amatus", the beloved girl, "puella amata". (And often, the noun is left out, and the adjective starts to work like a noun: "amatus": "The beloved man".) The problem with this is that only transitive verbs have passive forms. So, intransitive verbs have no passive participles. However, there's a rarely-used verb form, the supine, which looks a lot like a participle. That's the one ending in "um". So, as most verbs have a supine form, some dictionaries just list that as the fourth principle part. Whether you memorize the supine or the participle doesn't matter, as you can easily go from one to the other. What is really confusing is that some dictionaries list the participle for verbs that have them, and the supine for verbs that don't. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nansk Posted March 25, 2014 Author Share Posted March 25, 2014 Thank you! That was very helpful. I am going to re-read your reply a few times. :-) I have one more question, now, if you don't mind. You said "participles, while derived from verbs, function as adjectives", which I understand for sentences like "the beloved girl = puella amata". But the sentence "I have been loved" was translated online as "amata sum". In English, "have been loved" is the passive verb. The "loved" is not considered an adjective. Why does it then decline like an adjective in Latin? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted March 25, 2014 Share Posted March 25, 2014 Thank you! That was very helpful. I am going to re-read your reply a few times. :-) I have one more question, now, if you don't mind. You said "participles, while derived from verbs, function as adjectives", which I understand for sentences like "the beloved girl = puella amata". But the sentence "I have been loved" was translated online as "amata sum". In English, "have been loved" is the passive verb. The "loved" is not considered an adjective. Why does it then decline like an adjective in Latin? Nothing is ever simple, is it? But I think you are on the right track. In this case, "amata sum" is a single compound verb. It is not she _is_ loved, but the amata and sum together function as the _past_ passive finite verb form. Yes, it looks like a single word verb plus a participle, but it isn't. However, the part that looks like a participle is still "corrected" for the right gender and number, but not case. The perfect passive indicative forms of verbs take the nominative form of the participle, corrected for gender and number (but not case), and a form of the present tense of sum, with the correct number and person. I'm afraid that a lot of the "why" questions about any grammar ultimately end up with the answer "it just does"... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nansk Posted March 25, 2014 Author Share Posted March 25, 2014 Thank you, again. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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