CHAPTER 25

"All Infinitives Active and Passive;
Indirect Statement"

You've already been working with a couple of infinitive forms of Latin verbs -- the present infinitive active and passive. In this chapter you're going to learn all the remaining infinitives of a Latin verb: infinitives of the perfect and future tenses, both active and passive. Then you'll learn one of the most common uses of infinitives: their use in indirect statement.

TENSES OF THE INFINITIVE: MORPHOLOGY

Let's set out the formulae for all the infinitives you're going to study in this chapter, then we'll work with each in more detail. Here they are: 

                  ACTIVE                          PASSIVE



FUTURE:       fut. act. part.  esse            [supine + iri]

PRESENT:      1st p.p. + re                    1st p.p. + ri

                                               1st p.p. + i

PERFECT:      3rd p.p. + isse                  4th p.p.  esse

FUTURE ACTIVE INFINITIVE

Do you remember how to form the future active participle? You use the fourth principle part + ur + the adjectival endings "-us, -a, -um". (If you're shaky on this, go back to Chapter 23 for a reminder.) The future active infinitive is formed by using the future active participle of the verb and then uses the infinitive of the verb "esse". So the future active infinitive of the verb "laudo" will be "laudaturus (-a, -um) esse". Translating the future active infinitive is a little tricky, however, because we have no simple future active infinitive in English. Two common suggestions -- clumsy though they are -- will at least help you rough-out the Latin until you can polish up the translation: try "to be about to x" or "to be going to x". So "laudaturum esse" can be translated "to be about to (or to be going to) praise".

FUTURE PASSIVE INFINITIVE

This infinitive is put in brackets because it's rare in Latin and won't come up in your work this year, nor in the next most likely. So we can skip it. One thing to remember, however, is that the future passive infinitive is not formed with the future passive participle plus the infinitive of the verb "sum". The future passive participle is the gerundive and has the idiomatic sense of obligation: "must", "ought", "should", etc.

PRESENT ACTIVE AND PASSIVE INFINITIVES

These are the infinitives you've been working with all along. No special explanation should be needed. Remember, though, that the passive infinitives of first, second and fourth conjugations are formed by adding "-ri" to the stem; but the third conjugation deletes the stem vowel and replaces it with a single long "-i".

PERFECT ACTIVE INFINITIVE

The perfect active infinitive is a new form for you: the third principal part with the ending "-isse" attached. The literal translation is our English "to have x". Hence "laudavisse" can be translated "to have praised".

PERFECT PASSIVE INFINITIVE

This infinitive, like the future active infinitive, is made up of a participle followed by the infinitive of the verb "sum". The translation for starters is "to have been xed". Hence "laudatum esse" may be rendered "to have been praised".

DRILLS

Fill in the infinitives for the following paradigm verbs. 

1.   amo (1)

	                  ACTIVE                          PASSIVE



	FUTURE:    ____________________            ____________________



	PRESENT:   ____________________            ____________________



	PERFECT:   ____________________            ____________________





2.   habeo (2), habui, habitus, -a, -um



	                  ACTIVE                          PASSIVE



	FUTURE:    ____________________            ____________________



	PRESENT:   ____________________            ____________________



	PERFECT:   ____________________            ____________________





3.  duco (3), duxi, ductus, -a, -um



	                  ACTIVE                          PASSIVE



	FUTURE:    ____________________            ____________________



	PRESENT:   ____________________            ____________________



	PERFECT:   ____________________            ____________________





3 i-stem.   capio (3), cepi, captus, -a, -um



	                  ACTIVE                          PASSIVE



	FUTURE:    ____________________            ____________________



	PRESENT:   ____________________            ____________________



	PERFECT:   ____________________            ____________________





4.  audio (4), audivi, auditus, -a, -um



	                  ACTIVE                          PASSIVE



	FUTURE:    ____________________            ____________________



	PRESENT:   ____________________            ____________________



	PERFECT:   ____________________            ____________________

THE IDEA OF INDIRECT STATEMENT

So far all the sentences you've been working with in Latin have been in direct speech. The difference between direct and indirect speech is a little difficult to describe completely, but a couple of examples of each may give you a feel for it. Here are some direct statements: In a direct statement, the author cast the thought in a sentence and addresses it directly to the audience. In indirect statement, a thought is treated as the object of a verb, and the thought is being reported to the audience. In English we frequently precede the reported thought, the "indirect statement", with the conjunction "that", or we may omit it. If you analyze these sentences, you see that they are complex sentences (having a main and a subordinate clause). The verb which introduces the indirect statement is the main verb, and the indirect statement, which is treated as an object of the main verb, is the subordinate clause.

There are many verbs which can be followed by an indirect statement, and, naturally enough, they are verbs which conote some kind of mental activity or speaking or perceiving: verbs like "to think [that]", "to say [that]", to hear [that]", "understand [that]", "to suppose [that]".... In short, there are dozens of verbs which can introduce indirect statement, and it would be futile to try to memorize them all outright. Just use your common sense. If a verb is a "head verb" -- if it implies mental activity or speaking or sensing -- then it can be followed by indirect statement.

In English indirect statement, you can see that the form of the original statement or thought is hardly changed at all when it is put into indirect statement. Like this: 


     Original Statement:                  "My friends are coming".

  As Indirect Statement:  "I think [that]  my friends are coming".
Obviously this is going to require some subsequent refinement, but in general, and for now, you can see that English really does very little altering or the original statement when it is made the object of a "head verb" -- i.e., when it is turned into an indirect statement.

LATIN: THE ACCUSATIVE-INFINITIVE CONSTRUCTION

In Latin, this is not true. Latin considerably alters the original statement when it becomes indirect. Two things happen:
  1. The subject of the original statement, which is in the nominative case, is put into the accusative case.
  2. The original finite verb (the verb which has person, 1st, 2nd or 3rd) becomes an infinitive.
The example sentences above would work like this in Latin: 

     Original Statement:        "Mei amici veniunt".

  As Indirect Statement:   "Puto meos amicos venire".
We often call this the accusative-infinitive construction, because the infinitive has a subject which is in the accusative case. The literal translation of the second sentence would be "I think my friends to be coming", and we could make sense of that if we heard someone say it in English like this. In fact, sometimes English can form indirect statement by using this accusative-infinitive construction. For example, you'd have no trouble understanding this: "We think him to be a scoundrel". The original statement behind this is "He is a scoundrel", which then becomes "him to be a scoundrel" after the verb which introduces the thought as an indirect statement. The differences is that in English we sometimes have the option which construction we'll use; but Latin from the period you're studying had only one construction for indirect statement: the accusative-infinitive construction.

There is one more item you need to know before we can pause and try some exercises. As you know, because Latin verbs have personal endings, it's not always necessary to have a subject pronoun expressed in the sentence. We simply look at the personal ending on the verb and insert the correct personal pronoun in our English translation. For example: 


     Meos amicos laudo.     I     am  praising my friends.

     Meos amicos laudas.    You   are praising my friends.

     Meos amicos laudat.    He    is  praising my friends.



     Meos amicos laudamus.  We    are praising my friends.

     Meos amicos laudatis.  You   are praising my friends.

     Meos amicos laudant.   They  are praising my friends.
This shouldn't cause you any anxiety. You've been supplying personal pronouns for twenty-five chapters, and by now it's probably second nature for you. You probably don't even notice any longer that you're doing it. The question, though, is how are we going to make these original direct statements into indirect statements. They have no subjects in their original forms, and you can't just put the verb into the infinitive. Infinitives have no person, so it would be impossible to tell who the agent of the action is.

The solution is really quite simple. You use the accusative case of the personal pronoun which is indicated by the original personal ending on the verb. What that means is that for "laudo", for example, you reconstruct the original nominative form of the personal pronoun -- which would be "ego" -- and then put it into the accusative case -- which is "me" -- and then put the original finite verb into the infintive. The same for the other persons. So these sentence in indirect statement would be this: 


     Meos amicos laudo.    -    Dico me meos amicos laudare.

     Meos amicos laudas.   -    Dico te meos amicos laudare.

     Meos amicos laudat.   -    Dico eum meos amicos laudare.



     Meos amicos laudamus.      -    Dico nos meos amicos laudare.

     Meos amicos laudatis.      -    Dico vos meos amicos laudare.

     Meos amicos laudant.       -    Dico eos meos amicos laudare.
You can see that all indirect statements must have the subject accusative expressed. The infinitive, by its nature, doesn't contain person, so it alone can't tell you its subject. You must have "me, te, etc" or some accusative-subject expressed in indirect statement. Next, how many of you are wondering about the accusative "meos amicos" in the sentences above? You may be wondering how you can tell which accusative is the subject of the infinitive and which is its object, since Latin word order is generally very flexible. That is, what's to keep the first sentence from meaning: "I say that my friends are praising me". Here is one place where word order is very important in Latin.

The normal word order in an indirect statement is this: 


   Subject-Accusative Direct Object Accusative  Infinitive



           me                amicos meos          laudare
It usually is the case that the first word in the indirect statement is the subject accusative. The next accusative, if there is one, will be the direct object of the verb in the infinitive.

DRILLS Change the following direct statements into indirect statements.

Remember:

  1. the original subject nominative becomes the subject accusative;
  2. the original finite verb becomes the infinitive;
  3. where there is no subject expressed, you must use the appropriate pronoun in the accusative case. 

Examples



	A.   Veniunt cum amicis tuis.



	     Puto eos cum amicis venire.



	B.   Veritas sine magno labore inveniri non potest.



	     Intellegunt veritatem sine magno labore inveniri non posse.



1.   Illa puella dona multa patri dat.



     Putamus __________________________________________________



2.   Hoc signum ab Caesare dandum est.



     Nuntiat __________________________________________________



3.   Spes novarum rerum mollibus sententiis alitur.



     Scimus __________________________________________________



4.   Vos iuvamus.



     Scitis __________________________________________________



5.   Tyrannus multas copias in mediam urbem ducit.



     Nuntiant __________________________________________________

TENSES OF INFINITIVES: RELATIVE TENSE

Now that you've mastered the basics of the Latin indirect statement, it's time for some refinement. Earlier I said that English generally leaves the form of the direct statement alone when it becomes and indirect statement. English often simply subordinates the original statement to a "head verb" with the conjunction "that", without changing the original statement at all. But this is not always true. Sometimes we do change the form of the original statement when it becomes indirect statement.

Let's assume that someone says "I am coming", and that you wish to report what he said to someone else. You would say, "He says that he is coming". Except of the logical change in person, you haven't changed the form of the original direct statement at all. But suppose that he said this yesterday. That is, yesterday he said, "I am coming". To report this statement as indirect statement, you would say, "He said that he was coming". Here English lets some of the past tense of the main verb of the sentence -- "said" -- infect the original direct statement: "am coming" is changed to "was coming". He didn't say "I was coming", rather he said "I am coming". But because the leading verb is past tense -- "he said" -- English make the original statement a past tense, too, although logically it shouldn't because it distorts what was actually said. What is worse, it introduces the possiblility for ambiguity. What did he really say? Did he say "I am coming", or did he really say "I was coming"? You can't tell from the sentence "He said that he was coming".

Let's change the example slightly. Suppose he is now saying, "I will come". You would report this as "He says that he will come". No problem. But suppose he said "I will come" yesterday. You would report his statement as "He said that he would come". Once again, you can see that English changes the form of the original statement when it becomes indirect. Here, when a statement referring to the future is reported as a past event, the original simple future becomes the conditional. It's a great big mess.

In Latin there is none of this nonsense. First you have to recognize something about the tenses of the infinitives in Latin: like the tenses of participles, the tenses of infinitives are not absolute, but are only relative to the tense of the leading verb -- the verb which is introducing the indirect statement. Think of it this way. The future tense of a finite verb depicts an action which has not yet occurred, but a future infinitive depicts an action which occurs after the action of the leading verb. The present tense of a finite verb depicts an action which is currently going on, but the present infinitive depicts and action that is going on at the same time as the leading verb. And finally, the perfect tense (or any of the past tenses) of a finite verb depicts an action that has already occurred, but the perfect infinitive depicts an action which occurs before the leading verb. To simplify this we say that a present infinitive shows time contemporaneous, a future infinitive shows time subsequent, and a perfect infinitive shows time prior. Let's look at several examples of this.

  1. Puto eum venire.
    Here the tense of the infinitive in the indirect statement is present, so it is showing time contemporaneous with the time of the leading verb "puto". This means that I think that he is coming now (while I'm thinking). We may translate the sentence, therefore, "I think that he is coming".

  2. Puto eum venturum esse.
    Now the tense of the infinitive is future, showing time subsequent to the action of the leading verb. This means that I am thinking now that he will come -- not that he is coming but that he will come. So we can translate the sentence "I think that he will come (or that he is going to come)".

  3. Puto eum venisse.
    The perfect infinitive shows time prior to the leading verb, so at the moment I'm thinking, the action I'm thinking about has already occurred. So the translation is "I think that he has come (or that he came)".

  4. Putavi eum venire.
    Since the present infinitive shows time contemporaneous, this means that the sentence must be translated "I thought that he was coming". Do you see why? "Venire" shows time contemporaneous with the action of the leading verb, which is depicting a past event, so we have to translate the sentence into English to show this relationship. The trouble here is not with the Latin. As you can see, the indirect statement "eum venire" doesn't change when we use a different tense of the leading verb. The problem is with our English representation of the Latin.

  5. Putavi eum venturum esse.
    How are you going to translate this sentence. The future tense of the infinitive shows time subsequent (after) the time of the leading verb, and how do we do that in English? We say "I thought that he would come".

  6. Putavi eum venisse.
    The translation is "I thought that he had come". Can you explain why? This actually can get a little sticky in English, because we tend to shy away from the pluperfect tense. We might just as possibly say "I thought that he was coming" when we mean that he was coming before I thought about it. In Latin, though, there is no chance for ambiguity. The perfect infinitive "venisse" shows time prior to "putavi", and "putavi is already representing a past event. An event before another event in the past is represented by the pluperfect tense. Hence "I thought that he had come".

THE REFLEXIVE PRONOUN "SE" IN INDIRECT STATEMENT

You're going to get plenty of chances to work with the indirect statement and the tenses of the infinitives soon, but there is one more item in the chapter we have to look at -- although it's really quite simple. Consider the following sentence: "He said that he was a good leader". Is there anyway you can tell whether the sentence means "he said that he himself was a good leader", or "he said that he [somebody else] was good leader"? You can't. This is the same problem we saw before with the third person pronoun: English has no convenient way to distinguish the reflexive from the non-reflexive third person pronoun. In Latin, however, the pronoun "is, ea, id" is always non-reflexive, and the pronoun "sui, sibi, se, se" is reflexive. Consequently, "He said that he [somebody else] was a good leader" is "Dixit eum ducem bonum esse"; and "He said that he [himself] was a good leader" is "Dixit se ducem bonum esse". Remember also that the reflexive pronoun doesn't show difference in number: "Dixerunt se bonos ducos esse" is "They said that they [themselves] were good leaders".

DRILLS


A.   Translate from Latin to English



1.   Putamus omnes bonos viros vitas beatas agere.

     ____________________________________________________________



2.   Putamus omnes bonos viros vitas beatas egisse.

     ____________________________________________________________



3.   Putamus omnes bonos viros vitas beatas acturos esse.

     ____________________________________________________________



4.   Putavimus omnes bonos viros vitas beatas agere.

     ____________________________________________________________



5.   Putavimus omnes bonos viros vitas beatas egisse.

     ____________________________________________________________



6.   Putavimus omnes bonos viros beatas vitas acturos esse.

     ____________________________________________________________



7.   Putabimus omnes bonos viros beatas vitas agere.

     ____________________________________________________________



8.   Putabimus omnes bonos viros beatas vitas egisse.

     ____________________________________________________________



9.   Putabimus omnes bonos viros beatas vitas acturos esse.

     ____________________________________________________________



10.  Putabimus bonum virum vitam beatam acturum esse.

     ____________________________________________________________

B. Translate into Latin


1.   We hear that you (pl.) are coming.

     ____________________________________________________________



2.   We heard that you (pl.) were coming.

     ____________________________________________________________



3.   We heard that you had come.

     ____________________________________________________________



4.   We heard that you would come.

     ____________________________________________________________



5.   They think that the letter was written by us.

     ____________________________________________________________



6.   They think that the letter is being written by us.

     ____________________________________________________________



7.   They thought that the letter was being written by us.

     ____________________________________________________________



8.   They thought that the letter had been written by us.

     ____________________________________________________________



9.   They thought that we would write the letter.

     ____________________________________________________________



10.  They think that we should write the letter.

     ____________________________________________________________

VOCABULARY PUZZLES


hostis, -is (m)      In the singular, it means an enemy -- one

                     person you don't like.  In the plural it

                     means an enemy -- the group of people you

                     don't like -- not a lot of individual

                     enemies.  It means "enemy" in our sense of an

                     enemy of country.



ait, aiunt           "He, she says/ they say". Its first and

                     second persons don't appear in this book, and

                     it's used only in its present tense forms.



spero (1)            "Spero" takes its infinitive in indirect

                     statement in the future tense.  This makes

                     sense, because you generally hope for

                     something that is not now presently the case.

                     "We hope to see our friends" comes over into

                     Latin as "We hope that we will see our

                     friends": "Speramus nos amicos nostros

                     visuros esse".
01/10/93