Ablative absolute: a construction using a noun and participle, both ablative, grammatically independent of the rest of the sentence. See chapter 57.

In both Latin and English words may be reported either in direct or in indirect speech: direct speech is the type that uses quotation marks and repeats the exact words of the original statement, and indirect speech does not use quotation marks, is often introduced by ‘that’, and does not repeat the original words exactly.

A word that refers back to the subject of a sentence is a reflexive. In English reflexives are often indicated with ‘-self’, as ‘He saw himself in the mirror’, in which the word ‘himself’ indicates that the person seen in the mirror is the same as the one seeing. (Compare ‘He saw him in the mirror’, in which the person seen is different from the one seeing.) In Latin the first- and second-person reflexives are the same as the personal pronouns we have already seen; in other words a Roman said ‘me’, ‘you’, or ‘us’ where we would say ‘myself’, ‘yourself’, ‘ourselves’.

Active Versus Passive

So far almost all the verb forms we have seen have been in the active voice; that is, they have indicated action done by the subject. It is also possible for a verb to be passive; that is, to indicate action done to the subject (we have seen this with the perfect participles in chapters 6.2, 23.3, and 24). Compare the following:

Active: He loves. He will love. He loved. He has loved.

Passive: He is loved. He will be loved. He was loved. He has been loved.

In all these pairs of sentences the same person is the subject of the same verb in the same tense, but because one element of the pair is active and the other is passive, the meaning is very different.

Verb Endings for the Passive

In Latin regular verbs form their passives by conjugating like deponent verbs; deponent verbs do not have any passives at all. Another way of thinking about this situation is that the endings you have already learned for the deponent verbs are the passive endings, and that deponent verbs are verbs that take passive endings in the active and that therefore cannot have a passive. So the passive system of the tenses we have so far seen is as shown in the tables on the following pages:

The appendices are designed to help readers consolidate their grammatical skills by means of revision exercises with an answer key. The first exercises focus on helping readers become familiar with the grammatical terminology used to describe Latin; it is important to be able to understand that terminology, because otherwise one has great difficulty understanding explanations of how Latin works. Readers not already used to grammatical terminology may find the new vocabulary daunting, particularly because it is not easily translated into words that such readers already know: the terms used to describe language express concepts that are not expressed at all in non-technical language, so learning the grammatical vocabulary means learning a new set of ideas.

Adverbs are words that modify verbs and adjectives. In English they are often formed by adding -ly to the stem of an adjective, as ‘badly’ from ‘bad’, but many of the most common English adverbs are formed in other ways: ‘well’, ‘always’, and ‘very’ are also adverbs. We have already seen a number of Latin adverbs as independent vocabulary items, including diū ‘for a long time’, numquam ‘never’, bene ‘well’, and saepe ‘often’; as in English, these common adverbs are not formed regularly, but most others are derived from adjectives via a regular process.

Background

There are many different pronunciations of Latin. Currently the most common in English-speaking countries is the restored ancient pronunciation described below, which is a fairly close approximation of the way educated Romans of the late Republic pronounced Latin. Even in antiquity, however, there was some variation in pronunciation, and this variation greatly increased in the middle ages, when Latin was commonly pronounced like the pronouncer's native language. Remnants of the diverse pronunciations produced by this system can be found in what is now known as ecclesiastical or church Latin (which is effectively pronounced like Italian) and in Latin names that have become part of the English language (which are effectively pronounced like English). For example the name Cicerō is pronounced Kikero in the restored pronunciation, Cheechero in the ecclesiastical pronunciation, and Sisero in the English pronunciation. This diversity can lead to serious misunderstanding, because the various pronunciations are not easily mutually comprehensible, so when learning Latin it is important to master the pronunciation used by those who will be teaching you (normally the one described below), so that what you say will be understood correctly.

Consonants

In the restored pronunciation most consonants are pronounced in Latin like one of their pronunciations in English, but Latin consonants normally have only one sound regardless of what other letters appear nearby, whereas in English the same letter may have very different sounds in different words. The differences, therefore, can be considerable in practice. The most important of them are:

c is pronounced hard, like the c in ‘cold’, never soft like the c in ‘city’ (i.e. always like k, never like s).

g is pronounced hard, like the g in ‘get’, never soft like the g in ‘gem’ (i.e. never like j).

i is pronounced like the y in ‘yet’ when it is a consonant (i is usually a consonant when a word begins with i + vowel, and when i appears between two vowels).

qu is pronounced like the qu in ‘quick’, never like the qu in ‘unique’ (i.e. always like kw, never like k).

In addition to the present and imperfect tenses, the subjunctive also has perfect and pluperfect tenses. Like all subjunctive forms, these have no fixed translations but rather a variety of meanings depending on the constructions in which they are found. In formation the perfect subjunctive is very similar to the future perfect indicative, particularly in the active. See the tables on the following pages.