Latin Reference — Vol. IX: The Reported World

The volume VII.a promised. Latin's way of reporting speech and thought — he says that…, she believes that…, they deny that… — runs on a construction with no exact English parallel: the accusative and infinitive. It looked exotic in the druid passages; it is in fact one pattern, learned once, and it opens most of Latin prose, because history, oratory and letters are largely made of people reporting what other people said.

Everything needed was delivered in Vol. VIII: the principal parts now pay out.

The infinitive family

So far the infinitive has meant one form — amāre, the dictionary's second part. There are three (in the active), one per direction of time:

The perfect infinitive is mechanical once Vol. VIII's stems are known: fēcisse, dīxisse, vēnisse, cēpisse — to have made, said, come, taken.

The future infinitive introduces one genuinely new form, the future active participle in -ūrus: an adjective meaning about to —. From sum it gives futūrus — that which is about to be — so the word future is this participle naming itself. It declines like magnus (Vol. III), which matters below.

Aside — moritūrī. The most famous future participle in the world is a plural: Avē, imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant — "Hail, emperor: those about to die salute you." Reported by Suetonius from a staged naval battle under Claudius, said once as gallows wit rather than being the gladiators' standing formula — but the participle carries the whole dread of the line: not the dying, the about to.

The construction

English reports with a that-clause: He says that the soldier is coming. Latin drops that, demotes the reported sentence's subject to the accusative, and its verb to the infinitive:

Mīles venit. → Dīcit mīlitem venīre. — He says the soldier to-be-coming.

Ugly in literal English, frictionless in Latin — and the accusative earns a new job title. Vol. I called it the case of the done-to and the goal; here it marks the person the report is about. The reported world is, grammatically, the object world.

The time dial

Swap the infinitive and the reported event slides through time while everything else stands still:

One sentence, three tenses, one moving part. And note ventūrum — the participle agrees with mīlitem in case, number and gender (Vol. III's rule reaching into the verb system): report a queen instead and it becomes rēgīnam ventūram esse.

Relative time

The infinitive's tense is relative to the main verb, not to the speaker's now. Push the saying into the past and each infinitive keeps its direction, so the English shifts:

This is the pattern-shaped insight of the whole volume: infinitives point forwards, backwards or level from wherever the main verb stands. English re-tenses everything; Latin sets a direction once.

Signal verbs

Any verb of saying, thinking, knowing or perceiving can launch the construction:

sē — the reported self

Inside a report, Latin distinguishes surgically between the speaker himself and someone else, using the reflexive sē:

English needs italics, pointing, or a lawyer to make that distinction; Latin makes it with two letters. Ambiguity about who claims what is engineered out of the reporting system — a language, again, that reads as if drafted by counsel.

Caesar, cashed out

The druid sentences of VII.a can now be parsed rather than trusted:

magnum numerum versuum ēdiscere dīcuntur — they are said to learn a great number of verses. Signal verb dīcuntur; ēdiscere present infinitive: the learning is ongoing at the time of the report.

disciplīnam in Britanniā repertam esse exīstimant — they reckon the doctrine to have been discovered in Britain. Here the infinitive is perfect — the discovering lies before the reckoning — and its shape, repertam esse (4th principal part + esse, agreeing with disciplīnam), is strictly a passive perfect infinitive: to have been found. The passive voice as a system is the library's one remaining unconquered province; for now it is enough to recognise the shape when Caesar deals it, and to notice that the 4th principal part is once again doing the heavy lifting.

The Romance afterlife

The accusative-and-infinitive lost, in the end. Late and Vulgar Latin drifted toward quod and quia + an ordinary verb — "he says that…" — and the daughters inherited the drift wholesale: Spanish dice que viene, French il dit qu'il vient, Italian dice che viene. The Latin Bible already leans that way, which did the new pattern's reputation no harm. So the construction in this volume is the classical high style — and its replacement is sitting in every Romance sentence with a que in it. Learn this one, and you can watch the other being born.

Worked sentences

One boundary stone before closing: reporting a fact takes this construction; reporting a request does not. Claudia Severa's rogō ut veniās — "I ask that you come" — runs on ut plus the subjunctive, the wish-mood of Vol. VI grown up into a full clause system. That system — subjunctive clauses entire — is now the last frontier on the map, and it has a volume number waiting.

The drill

Pure transformation work, ideal for the train. Take any sentence from Vols IV or VIII, prefix dīcit, and convert: subject to accusative, verb to infinitive. Then run the time dial — all three infinitives aloud. Then push the main verb into the past (dīxit) and feel the English translations slide while the Latin barely moves. Ten sentences at three settings each is thirty reps; when negat sē cēpisse comes out faster than its translation, the reported world is annexed.