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Post by Bitmap on Mar 28, 2023 10:34:02 GMT
Callahan's talk about French adjectives made me wonder about the tripartition of Latin 3rd declension adjectives. I never really understood how that partition came about historically. I mean, not in terms of terminology, but in terms of Latin language development. Maybe somebody knows more about that, like LonginusNaso? I take it that adjectives with three terminations, like acer or celer, simply follow some historic pattern similar to -us, -a, -um, just with -ø, -is, -e. For two-termination adjectives, like dulcis or gravis the endings for m. and f. were probably identical, i.e. -es, and there was a different ending for the neuter, -e. There are also some one-termination endings where the neuter ending was simply adopted from the -es in m./f., like ferox or audax. And some seem to be taken from participles to then be declined like adjectives, like sapiens. All of those seem to fall in a relatively regular pattern. They are all declined according to the vocalic declination (-i in abl. sing., -ium gen. pl., ia. n. nom/acc pl.). What I find interesting is the category of one-termination adjectives that seem to have none of the endings I mentioned, like vetus, dives, pauper, uber, memor. They all lean towards the consonant declension and essentially act like nouns. I wonder if those words had originally been nouns that were used as attributes. When I looked up vetus, I saw that it originally meant "year" ... and its literal Greek equivalen ἔτος actually does mean "year". Dives appears to come from divus, and the word is obviously often used as a noun as well ... possibly even more often so, I don't know. I take it uber (adj.) simply comes from uber (noun)?! I'm not sure about the other words. Does anyone not know more about that?
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Post by LonginusNaso on Mar 28, 2023 22:43:26 GMT
An interesting topic, old boy. Thanks for the tag.
A general statement about (Indo-European) adjectives is that they are not infrequently morphologically indistinguishable from nouns of the same class. The older & therefore 'purer' the language in question, this is increasingly true (that is, Hittite & Vedic Sanscrit are more likely to prove this than, say, Modern Lithuanian). And so our belief is that, at one very ancient time, they were 'one & the same thing', whatever that means.
In Latin (& Italic generally), the i-stem adjective predominates considerably with respect to other IE families because it has: (1) in effect absorbed the u-stems in their entirety (cf. Latin suāvis against G ἡδύς & S स्वादु svādu), a feature it has more or less in common with Lithuanian & Latvian; (2) extended the old so-called dēvī-type noun, which is itself a reduced i-stem + fem. suffix 2nd laryngeal (yielding G words like πότνια with short alpha, cf. L genetrīx against S patnī, janatrī); (3) reassigned most of the consonant-stems to itself; (4) even conditioned the reassignment of certain inherited o-stems (cf. similis against G ὁμαλός).
Regarding the tripartite split (incidentally, I was recently looking over a section of a book on Arabic grammar when I came across the pertinent term 'triptote', a noun having three cases), I can do no better than Sihler's comparative grammar, which I quote: 'The type with different masc. and fem. endings in the nom.sg., like acer m. 'sharp', but acris f., is a development from the normal type, as follows. A regular sound law (74.3) would give masc. AND fem. acer from *ākris via *ākers. Beside this there was a restored ācris, likewise epicene †[meaning grammatically applicable to both genders] in OL; it was reconstituted on the pattern of other i-stems. In the o-stems, however, syncopated forms like ruber 'red' < *-ros (74.4), are masc.-only (cf. rubra f., rubrum n.), and this provided the basis for the specialization of i-stems in -er as masculine-only.'
†My own note. I wasn't familiar with this term till recently, which maybe comes as a surprise.
And so, the answer, as always, is analogy. The tripartite endings operate analogically on the fact that 2nd decl. nouns ending in -er are always masculine (from an older -os, e.g. OL puerus > CL puer), such that any -er ending in i-stems must also be masc. Meanwhile, the 2nd decl. has 3 distinct endings, so the 3rd 'should also have them', a Roman might say.
I never knew that about vetus, but I just supposed it was an old s-stem adj., of the type which Sanscrit has in abundance. If I had to guess, I'd say dives is related to G δαίμων, from an extended IE root (*dH3-y-) for 'give, apportion', which we all know forward & back from L dare. I also don't think it impossible that noun uber rather comes from the adjective, much in the way the IE word for 'honey' is rather a substantivized neuter u-stem for 'sweet (thing)'.
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 29, 2023 8:24:39 GMT
Thank you! That was some amazing input! And so our belief is that, at one very ancient time, they were 'one & the same thing', whatever that means. That was partly my intuition. As I said (or may not have said), some of that even still echoes in Latin. I mean, Latin does not really have an adjective for "victorious" or "siegreich" ... it's just victor in Latin. So nouns can be attributes as well, even in our languages (if only as appositions), which means that the old origins still resonate. It is interesting that this is not some leftover from what had previously been there, but something that was reinvented in terms of analogy. I like the driving force of analogy. I suppose if you took some linguistics exam with a question you don't actually understand on a topic you have no idea about, just writing "analogy." would at the very least yield you 1 point (maybe some extra points for the fascinating brevity). That makes me glad Well, ok ... that's essentially the same thing for me. I said that the adjective may come from the noun, but I can also fathom the inverse route. What I was trying to say is that there must have been some common origin ... see your first sentence above.
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 29, 2023 15:01:49 GMT
some of that even still echoes in Latin. Perhaps it even echoes in their terminology... I mean, what we call nouns and adjectives were all lumped together by ancient grammarians under the single category nomen.Then at some point (I don't know when) someone felt the need to distinguish the two and labeled adjectives as a special kind of nomen— nomen adjectivum, that is a nomen that's typically added to another nomen. Still further down the road nomen was dropped from the phrase so that, in English etc., the word adjective is a noun.
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 29, 2023 15:24:26 GMT
That's a fascinating story. I suppose that's why the terminus technicus attribute was introduced.
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 29, 2023 15:47:45 GMT
The translations for "adjective" suggested by my English-Latin dictionary are:
- adjectivum nomen (cited as appearing in Priscian), - adjectivum alone (Macrobius), - appositum (Quintilian).
So the distinction may have been made as early as Quintilian (but one would have to see the context; whether appositum was really meant as a category of words or if it was just like "in this particular case this word happens to be added to that one").
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 29, 2023 15:58:27 GMT
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 29, 2023 15:59:23 GMT
So sequens may be another word for it, hm.
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 29, 2023 16:11:02 GMT
On the other hand you have stuff like this where the claim is that tres partes orationis sunt quae casibus declinantur, nomen pronomen participium, where adjectives aren't mentioned separately and must be subsumed under nomen. latin.packhum.org/loc/2349/2/14/100-116,397-413,574-590,676-692@1#14
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 29, 2023 16:13:52 GMT
Well, yes, I'm aware that a lot of our terminology came from Quintilian. However, an adposition is just a subcategory of an attribute.
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Post by Pacifica on Mar 29, 2023 16:24:59 GMT
In the passages I found, Quintilian wasn't applying the word appositum to what we call appositions, but to adjectives.
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Post by LonginusNaso on Mar 30, 2023 5:00:01 GMT
That's exactly right. It seems that even in many non-IE langs, the class of 'adjective' which is signaled by some morphological innovation has its origins in words that emphasize how someone/something is, as opposed to what he/it 'does'. In your example of 'victor', the semantic emphasis is not on the 'beating (that took place in the past)' but on the present status of being one who has beaten.
Your example also shows the special relationship between agentive nouns & (derivative) participles, which we commonly call 'verbal adjectives' but we could just as rightly call 'adjectival verbs'. In fact, before the Germanic langs had the suffix -er < L -ārius as in 'singer', they chiefly used the inherited present participle for agent nouns, like friend & fiend (< PG *frijōnd(i)z and fijand(i)z, respectively: [one who loves] & [one who hates]).
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Post by Bitmap on Mar 30, 2023 7:47:44 GMT
Your example also shows the special relationship between agentive nouns & (derivative) participles, which we commonly call 'verbal adjectives' but we could just as rightly call 'adjectival verbs'. In fact, before the Germanic langs had the suffix -er < L -ārius as in 'singer', they chiefly used the inherited present participle for agent nouns, like friend & fiend (< PG * frijōnd(i)z and fijand(i)z, respectively: [one who loves] & [one who hates]). I didn't know that.
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