Grammatica Capitulum XXI · Pugna discipulōrum

The chapter of past time. Until now a thing was happening, had been happening, or was going to happen; here it happened, and it is over. Latin gains a fourth tense — and, for the first time in this course, a form that will not fit in a single word.

What the book teaches and the course cannot yet serve: the pronoun aliquis, aliquid (“someone, something”), whose table our form generator does not have. The word is not taught, and none of its forms appears anywhere. nēmō (capitulum X) and the neuter plurals multa, omnia carry the idea alone.

1. The perfect: six endings for every verb

The six endings — -ī, -istī, -it, -imus, -istis, -ērunt — are the same in all four conjugations and in the irregulars. Two landmarks:

• -istī and -istis occur nowhere else: wherever you read them, the fact is over;
• -ī in the first person, not -ō: nārrō “I tell” against nārrāvī “I told”.

And esse, whose stem has nothing to do with sum:

fu*ī, fuistī, fuit, fuimus, fuistis, fuērunt*

2. The stem, however, cannot be guessed

That is the whole difficulty of the chapter, and the reason a dictionary lists three forms of every verb. Four devices, in this one chapter:

The only remedy is to learn them by heart, one by one — and the chapter gives nine of them.

3. victus, victa, victum — the word that says what HAS BEEN done

Every verb also supplies a word that declines like bonus and agrees with what it describes:

puer victus the beaten boy · vestis mūtāta the changed garment · cornū frāctum the broken horn

It does not conjugate and carries no person. Do not confuse it with the verb:

• vīcit — he conquered (he acts)
• victus — beaten (he undergoes)

Many Latin adjectives are nothing else: falsus, “false”, is the word fallere supplies — what has deceived is what is false. The same was already true of doctus and docēre (capitulum XVII).

4. Two words for a single idea

This is the most important change of form in the whole course. In the present, the passive is read in the verb's ending; in the perfect, it is read in the presence of a second word:

The division of labour is clean:

• the first word agrees with the subject, like an adjective: puer laudāt*us est*, puella laudāt*a est*, puerī laudāt*ī sunt*;
• the second word carries the person, and nothing else: est, sunt, sum, es…

And here is the paradox to accept straight away: the second word stands in the present, though the whole speaks of the past. Cognitus est does not mean “he is recognised” but “he was recognised”.

Bōs ā servō cōnspectus est. — the ox was spotted by the slave.

5. The perfect infinitive in -isse

Perfect stem, plus -isse:

nārrāvisse · vīcisse · fuisse

It serves to report what is claimed about a past fact:

Puer sē nōn pugnāvisse ait. — the boy affirms that he did not fight.

6. The fourth declension gets its neuters

cornū and genū. The whole singular is cornū, except the genitive:

The trap lies in one vowel: the ū of cornū is long, the u of cornua is short. Number is heard; it is barely seen.

7. One does not believe someone — one believes to someone

crēdere puts the person in the dative:

Nēmō puer*ō crēdit.* — nobody believes the boy.

English hides the construction under a plain object. It is the sort of detail one pays for in translation.

8. Two words of place and time

• humī — “on the ground”, with no preposition. It is the locative of capitulum VI, the one in Rōmae and domī (capitulum XV). humus is a feminine second declension, like the names of trees.
• postquam puts one action after another, and the verb it carries stands in the perfect: postquam bōs cognitus est, puer excūsātus est. Its neighbour interim does the reverse: it puts the two facts at the same time.

9. āiō, the verb that only half exists

Of its whole table the book gives only ais, ait, āiunt — like inquit (capitulum XIV) and oportet (capitulum XVII). It affirms, where dīcere merely reports words. Its question even contracts to ain', that is ais-ne: “you don't say?”.

Spelling traps

• bōs carries its long ō in the nominative only: everything else is built on bov- — bovis, bovī, bovem, bove, bovēs. And the plural keeps three forms of its own: boum, bōbus.
• solum, solī n. “the floor”, has a short o. Three words look alike and must not merge: sōlum “only” (long ō, capitulum VII), sōlus, sōla, sōlum “alone” (capitulum V), and this neuter solum.
• cruor has a short o in the nominative alone, and a long ō everywhere else — cruōris, cruōrem — exactly like honor (capitulum XIV). It means spilt blood, where sanguis (capitulum XI) means the blood that keeps one alive.
• venit (short e, he comes) against vēnit (long ē, he came): the costliest trap of the chapter, and it turns on one vowel.
• mentīrī has only the passive's shape — mentior, mentīris, mentītur — like partīrī and largīrī (capitulum XVII). mentit does not exist.
• candidus is the white that shines; albus (capitulum IX) says only the colour.