![]() Most instances of nostrum/vestrum used a possessive genitive actually make sense when parsed as plural genitives of a substantivized possessive pronoun. Of course, these genitives of the possessive pronouns can start a life of their own and obtain new uses by analogy. (9) The nominal system distinguishes five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative the genitive and dative endings are always the same. The shorter genitive plural ending -um instead of -orum is possible for many words, and nostrum and vestrum sound just like the kind of thing that I expect to wind up having the shorter variant. This reasoning does not extend to all uses of the genitive as such, but the same principle applies.įor partitive genitive, you always have nostrum/vestrum - at least I have never seen nostri/vestri partitively.įor example, "one of us" would be unus nostrum, which I read roughly as unus virorum nostrorum.Īgain, noster is substantivized, and here means "a man from our group". The uses of the genitive may be classified as follows. Hence it is sometimes called the adjective case, to distinguish it from the dative and the ablative, which may be called adverbial cases. Therefore the -i you see is a singular genitive ending, and the connection to plural comes from the meaning of the word noster. The genitive is regularly used to express the relation of one noun to another. ![]() Notice that it is irrelevant that nos is plural the possessive adjective noster is only used in the singular here. The putative noun nostrum is almost synonymous with res nostra, so you could read nostri as rei nostrae. Thus, sui/nostri/vestri/mei/tui are not forms of the personal pronouns themselves, but rather of the related possessive pronoun. My intuition has always been that sui, nostri, vestri and the like are singular genitives of the substantivized neuter adjective suum/nostrum/vestrum. But with masculine honorees there are two different formations. ![]() These special pronouns do not have a genitive form in the completely usual sense. Because the genitive ending -ae is used in organism names honoring women, its unsurprising that names honoring men take the suffix -i the genitive singular ending of the second declension, to which the vast majority of masculine Latin nouns belong. Therefore the role of the genitive is not directly comparable to nouns and most pronouns. Some pronouns ( ego, tu, nos, vos, se) have an associated possessive pronoun ( meus, tuus, noster, vester, suus) that takes some of the functions of the genitive. Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like 1st declension nominative, singular, 1st declension nominative, plural, 2nd declension nominative, singular and more. I have no sources to back this up, but I am posting these thoughts here for scrutiny. The genitive is often used with the ablatives caus, grti ( for the sake of ) erg ( because of ) and the indeclinable nstar ( like ) also with prdi ( the day before) postrdi ( the day after ) tenus ( as far as ). This answer is based on the intuition I have long held: genitives like nostrum and vestri are not forms of the personal pronouns nos and vos, but of the substantivized possessive adjectives.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |