Latin/Infinitives Lesson 3

Salvēte omnēs! Welcome back to Latin for Wikiversity. Here you can peruse a new lesson in Latin, in a simple format. If you would like to catch up, you can find a directory of lessons, a classified vocabulary list, and Memrise courses at the links on the right.

We are continuing to study present infinitives. Sometimes we see infinitives in more complex uses than just completing a regular verb’s meaning. Our new verbs mean “order” and “forbid.” Frequently these are used with an accusative object plus infinitive, and sometimes the infinitive itself takes an accusative object. For example,
 * Jubet eōs mūrum facere. = He orders them to build a wall.

So the first accusative, eōs, is the object of jubet; and the second accusative, murum, is the object of facere.

Even more common in Latin is a clause construction known as “accusative with infinitive”, which is a way of expressing indirect speech. In English, we would use a clause introduced by “that,” but Latin uses the infinitive. For example:
 * Sciō eum habēre raedam. = I know that he has a car.

The main verb in this kind of sentence describes saying, thinking, knowing, perceiving, etc., and the subject of the infinitive is in the ACCUSATIVE case.

We know that you’ve just learned that subjects are always in the nominative, but here is an important exception. We’ll just do a few shorter sentences of this sort to get you used to the idea. For now, it may help to translate such sentences very literally, at least at first: “I know him to have a car” is what is going on grammatically in the Latin. It kind of makes sense even in English, and some older literature in English uses this kind of syntax. But again, we’re just starting out with some very basic and preliminary sentences.

Practice
For now, we’ll leave infinitives, and the next lesson(s) will deal with imperatives. We will certainly need to return to other infinitive forms once we’ve studied some of the other tenses. Valēte!