Latin Reference — Vol. III.d: The Words That Don't Move

Another interstitial, and the negative image of Vol. III. That volume's whole burden was the three-way rule: an adjective agrees with its noun in case, number and gender, always, without exception. This one covers the class of words that sits outside the rule entirely — adverbs, which have no case, no number and no gender, because they aren't attached to a noun in the first place. Once you can tell an adverb from an adjective on sight, a whole set of apparent agreement failures stops being puzzling.

The volume exists because of a river. Duolingo offers:

Flūmen languidē fluit. — The river flows sluggishly.

and the reasonable objection is: why isn't that languidum, agreeing with flūmen? The answer is that languidē isn't describing the river, it's describing the flowing, and there is nothing in a verb for an adjective to agree with. Verbs have person and tense; they don't have case or gender. So the word that modifies a verb has to be a form that doesn't ask for any of that — and Latin's solution is a frozen ending, fixed for good.

Adjective or adverb — what's being described

The test is simple enough to run in your head: does the word tell you something about a thing, or about an action? A sluggish river is a fact about the river; flowing sluggishly is a fact about the flowing. Latin makes you choose, and the two sentences are both perfectly good Latin meaning different things.

Note that third row, because it makes the point better than any explanation: languida has moved to neuter plural to keep up with flūmina, and languidē has stayed exactly as it was. That is the whole distinction, visible in one sentence.

Note also that languidum is the right adjective form and languidem is not, since flūmen is a third-declension neuter (see Vol. II) and languidus is a first/second declension adjective, so its neuter singular is -um whether nominative or accusative. An -em would need a masculine or feminine accusative noun to attach to, and fluit is intransitive — nothing flows the river — so there is no accusative anywhere in the sentence for it to serve.

The two endings

Adverbs built from adjectives split along the same fault line as the adjectives themselves, which is convenient: if you know which declension family an adjective belongs to, you already know how to adverb it.

First/second declension adjectives take -ē. Chop the ending off the stem and add it.

Third declension adjectives take -iter.

Aside — a hook, not an etymology. -iter looks exactly like iter, the noun meaning journey or road, which makes for a serviceable memory peg: the third-declension adverb takes the road. The two almost certainly aren't related — -iter is generally explained as an old adverbial suffix, and the resemblance is coincidence. Use the peg, but don't repeat it as fact.

The -ns sub-pattern. Adjectives whose stem ends in -nt- (nominative -ns) contract to -nter rather than producing the mouthful -ntiter:

The -ō sub-pattern. A minority of first/second declension adjectives make their adverb in -ō instead of -ē, and these have to be learned individually because there's no rule telling you which do it: subitō (suddenly), rārō (rarely), crēbrō (frequently), falsō (falsely), tūtō (safely), continuō (immediately). The -ō is almost certainly an old ablative that hardened into an adverb, which brings us to the group worth the most attention.

Frozen case forms

Some of the commonest adverbs in Latin are not built with a special suffix at all — they are ordinary noun or adjective forms that got stuck in one case and stopped moving. They look as though they ought to decline, and they don't, and this is the single most misleading thing about the class.

Neuter accusative singular, used as an adverb:

So multum labōrat is he works a lot — and multum here is doing adverb work even though it's wearing an accusative ending, which is why it can sit in a sentence that already has an object without competing for the job: multum vīnum bibit (he drinks much wine, adjective agreeing with vīnum) against multum labōrat (he works much, adverb, nothing to agree with). Same form, two different lives.

Note facile especially, since it looks like a straightforward third-declension neuter and is in fact the standard adverb easily — where you might have expected faciliter, which barely exists.

Ablative, used as an adverb:

The logic is the ablative doing exactly what Vol. I said it does — means and manner, the by/with case — until the phrase got used so often that it stopped feeling like a case at all. English has done the same thing to by chance and of course.

Aside — forte, twice over. One for the ambiguity file (Vol. III.c). forte is the ablative of fors and means by chance; forte is also the neuter nominative/accusative singular of fortis and means strong. Identical on the page, unrelated in origin, and only context separates them. The musical forte on a score is the second one, arriving through Italian rather than straight from Latin — so a pianist playing forte and a Roman meeting someone by chance are not, etymologically, doing the same thing at all.

Aside — gratis and ad lib. Two of these are still in English with their case endings intact. Grātīs — "as a favour", ablative plural — is our gratis, free of charge; a favour is precisely something you don't pay for. And libenter belongs to the family of libet (it pleases) and libitum (a thing pleasing), which gives us ad libitum, at pleasure, shortened by musicians and comedians alike to ad lib. Willingly and off-the-cuff turn out to be the same idea.

The irregulars

Four to learn cold, because they're common and they don't follow anything:

Bene and male are worth their weight in English vocabulary — benefit, benevolent, benediction, benign on one side, malevolent, malediction, malignant, malaria (mal'aria, bad air) on the other. Note that bene and male both end in short -e, not the long -ē of the regular formation, which is one of the few places a macron is doing genuine grammatical work rather than just guiding your mouth.

Magnopere is a fossilised phrase — magnō opere, "with great effort" — that fused into one word, another ablative that stopped being an ablative.

Comparing adverbs

This part is unexpectedly tidy, and the shape of it will make more sense once adjective comparison has a volume of its own. The rule in outline: the comparative adverb is simply the neuter singular of the comparative adjective, ending in -ius, and the superlative adverb ends in -ē on the superlative stem.

The irregular sets are the same ones English inherited by a different road: melius and optimē give us ameliorate and optimum; peius and pessimē give pejorative and pessimist; plūs, minus, maximē and minimē need no introduction.

One useful oddity: minimē, literally least, is the ordinary Latin way of saying no, or not in the least. Latin has no plain word for no — you either repeat the verb in the negative (vēnitne? nōn vēnit) or you reach for minimē.

Adverbs that were never anything else

Finally, a large group of very old, very short adverbs that were never derived from adjectives and never had a case to lose. Some of these appeared in Vol. III.a under particles, and the line between "particle" and "adverb" is genuinely blurry — different grammars draw it in different places, and it isn't worth losing sleep over. What matters is that none of them ever change.

Aside — semper on the roof. Semper survives in sempiternal, in the Marines' Semper Fidelis, and — more to your purposes — in Sempervivum, the houseleek, "always-living", so named because the fleshy rosettes survive drought on bare stone. Sempervivum tectōrum is "houseleek of the roofs" (genitive plural of tēctum, a roof), from the old practice of planting it on thatch and tiles across much of Britain and northern Europe to keep off lightning and fire. Whether anyone believed the plant did the warding or simply noticed that a living mat of succulent held damp on a thatch is an open question, and probably both were true at once for centuries. A protective charm with a botanical binomial — the adverb, the genitive plural and the apotropaic tradition all in two words on a plant label.

Adverbs on Romano-British material

Two of the formations above turn up constantly in what you're actually going to be reading, which makes this volume less abstract than it might look.

The altar formula. Vol. V gave you V S L M — vōtum solvit libēns meritō, "fulfilled the vow willingly and deservedly". Now you can parse the last two words properly, and they aren't the same kind of word at all. Libēns is an adjective, nominative singular, agreeing with the dedicator: he is a willing man doing the paying. Meritō is an adverb, that frozen ablative from the table above: the payment is deservedly made, because the god delivered. So the formula shifts halfway through from describing the dedicator to describing the transaction — which is a lot of precision for four letters on a stone.

The Vindolanda letter. Claudia Severa's birthday invitation (also Vol. V) runs rogō libenter faciās ut veniās ad nōs — and there is libenter, the -nter adverb, in the earliest surviving Latin from a woman's hand in Britain. She isn't asking Lepidina to be willing; she's asking her to come gladly, which is warmer, and is exactly the difference an adverb makes.

Tombstones. The commonest adverb in Roman epitaphs anywhere is bene, in the phrase bene merentī — "to the well-deserving", dative, addressed to the person in the grave. Coniugī bene merentī on a stone is "to his well-deserving wife". Merentī is a present participle in the dative (a form still ahead of you), but bene is doing what bene always does, and it means that when you next meet BM or B M abbreviated on a stone you'll know what's under it.

Self-test

A note on sounding them

Since adverbs are where you meet long final vowels most often, they're a good place to practise the length rule from Vol. 0. Stress in Latin never lands on the final syllable of a word of three or more syllables, however long that vowel is — so languidē is LAN-gui-dē with a long final vowel that is unstressed but still held, and celeriter is ce-LE-ri-ter, and fortissimē is for-TIS-si-mē. Holding an unstressed long vowel is the trick English speakers find hardest, because English reduces unstressed vowels to a mumble and Latin does not. The -ē of lātē is the same length as the ē in rēx; it just doesn't get the beat.

And the bene / male pair is the one to watch, since those final -es are short: BE-ne, MA-le, clipped, not the drawn-out -ē of lātē.

The drill

Take any sentence from Vol. IV or Vol. VII and add one adverb to it, out loud, without touching anything else — mīles templum videt → mīles templum saepe videt, → mīles templum celeriter videt. The point of doing it aloud is to feel that nothing else in the sentence has to move to accommodate the new word, which is the opposite of what happens when you bolt on an adjective and have to check three things at once.

Then run it the other way: take five adjectives you already know from Vol. III, produce the adverb, and use each in a sentence where the same adjective also appears in agreement. Mīlitēs fortēs fortiter pugnant is clumsy Latin but excellent practice, because saying fortēs fortiter in one breath puts the whole volume in your mouth at once.