Latin/Participles Lesson 1

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 come to participles in this lesson. Participles are verbal adjectives; they are derived from verbs and so express action and can take objects, but they function as adjectives and so have the endings of adjectives and can modify nouns. I like to describe it to my students as having one foot in Verbland and the other in Nounland. Or alternatively, a participle is a verb that thinks it’s an adjective. The “verbals” in Latin include participles, infinitives, gerunds, and gerundives; they increase the flexibility of Latin syntax, as well as its difficulty. So, congratulations to all who have come this far! You have definitely moved past the beginner phase of Latin.

New grammar
This lesson will cover Perfect Passive Participles. The PPP is the fourth principal part of a regular, transitive verb, and we have already seen and used it in the Passive voice, lesson 2 not that many lessons ago. We need it, plus a form of the being verb, to form the perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect passive. For the example verb
 * dō, dare, dedī, datus, 1 = give”

datus is the PPP. In the link above we learned how “datum est” means “it has been given.” In this lesson we will learn how to use it and other PPPs as adjectives. Since it expresses “perfect” action, the tense is perfect or past; since it is passive, the voice is passive, meaning that the noun it modifies receives the action the participle expresses. Thus
 * datus, data, datum is the nominative singular, m, f, n form of this verbal adjective,
 * and the meaning it expresses is “given” or “having been given.”

For any PPP, a way to remember the translation is “verbed” or “having been verbed.” You’ll notice that the -us/-a/-um endings are just like 1st/2nd declension adjectives, and participles can be used to modify nouns of any case, number, or gender.

You can find a lot of PPPs that made their way into English usage: data, from the nom. plural neuter, “things that have been given;” “date” comes from datum, used by scribes to describe when dictation was “given” on x day, month, and year. “Position” comes from positus, describing where something has been placed. And “postscript” comes from post scrīptum, something added “after the thing having been written.”

Of course, with the fourth principal part being used as an adjective, we have just added a vast number of potential adjectives. It helps a great deal to review verbs in their four principal parts: see the Memrise course for a way to do that. There can sometimes be confusion between adjectival use and verb use of the PPP, but I hope some sample sentences will make that clear. When we see a PPP used as an adjective, remember that it expresses an additional past, passive action besides that of the main verb in the clause.

Practice
In future lessons, we plan to add present active participles and future active participles, which each have their own forms. We will also study a common construction of Latin, the “ablative absolute,” which frequently uses participles. As always, if you have questions about the content of this lesson, let me know with a comment on the discuss page and we will do our best to answer it. Valēte et bonam fortūnam!