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A PROPOSAL FOR NEW CITATION FORMS FOR

LATIN AN D C LA SSIC A L GREEK VERBS

The traditional choice o f the first person singular o f the present indicative as a Latin or Greek verb’s citation form or nam e (and, therefore, its first principal part) has clearly rested on its apparent logical priority (first person before other persons, present tense before other tenses, and indicative mood before other m oods) rather than its actual utility as an unam biguous indicator o f the formal classification o f the verb. In Latin a First C onjugation porto can only be distinguished from a Third Conjugation scrTbd by the inspection o f its second principal p an , the present infinitive —not to m ention the ambiguity o f a Third capid beside a Fourth m unio and o f an Irregular abed beside a Second maned. In Greek the am biguity that all contract verbs would have in this form has been resolved only by the artificial device o f citing them in their uncontracted form s, as (pi^eco, 6 prico, etc .; otherw ise their names would all look the same: <piX.d), 6 p&, and 5r|X6>. I feel that it is unconvincing to say that this is a reference to an earlier uncontracted form since o ther archaic forms are not used as citation forms for Greek vocabulary; it is surely better for a language student to be able to assum e that a citation form is also a form that he will actually use and see used.

Two alternative citation form s that have been used from time to tim e, the present infinitive and the third person singular o f the present indicative do indeed each successfully resolve the am biguities m entioned above by exhibit­ing contrasting stem vowels; yet they are not necessarily more convincing from a sem antic point o f view.

The infinitive, o f course, is the usual citation form in the gram m ars and dictionaries o f m odem European languages. It is indeed probably for that reason that J. D. Sadler used it as the citation form in his M odern Latin (Univ. of O klahom a 1973), but it has also been used in som e traditional reference works as, for exam ple, Lewis R am shorn’s Dictionary o f Latin Synonym s (B utler 1877) and, for G reek, S tu rz’ Lexicon Xenophonteum (Leipzig 1801). The fact, however, that it is norm ally not the main verb of a sentence could provide som e problem s for that self-taught o r ingenuous Am erican who assum es that any citation form is ready to use in the way that the English one is; indeed, I understand from a colleague in m odem languages that there is a kind of stock “ ugly A m erican” character in Latin-A m erican novels, who quite confidently uses nothing but infinitives for his verb forms! The third person singular is a much better choice; it would presum ably sound less unnatural if excessively used in that way by a beginner; in fact the great frequency with which it occurs in narrative and nonfiction has previously led me to prefer it as a citation form to either o f the others so far m entioned. One current Latin textbook that uses it until principal parts are introduced is Lingua Latina Viva by Towey, etc . (M cGraw-Hill 1963). I now w ish, however, to recom m end still another candidate, the second person singular o f the present imperative

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(hereafter referred to as the imperative singular), on the grounds that it has a significant formal advantage over any of the three forms already proposed, and yet is no less sensible a proposal in terms of its meaning and potential formal ambiguity.

The imperative singular is unique among these forms in being normally nothing but the verb’s present stem without any further ending. This makes it a logical starting point for morphological analysis since all forms can be made from it by simple addition while each of the other citation forms requires deletion before any addition. Another common error o f beginners is an attempt to create a desired verb inflection by adding an ending directly to a first person form rather than to the true stem contained within it, and a comparable error could be made with an infinitive or third person form. Surely, then, the best citation form would be one that could better facilitate the analysis and understanding of a language’s forms so that a student would be more inclined to make them , as well as abler. Indeed, if the imperative were adopted as the name of a verb, a grammatical theorist could, if he preferred, think of it as the abstract stem itself while the general student was thinking of it as an imperative. Such a choice, furthermore, would seem especially natural to English-speaking students since an English verb’s citation form, although it is usually considered, because of its origin, to be an infinitive without the normal “ to” (as “ w rite” in “ I can w rite.” ), is also both the stem and the imperative o f that verb.

Since the Latin imperative ends in the indicator o f its verb’s conjugation, the stem vowel, it would also resolve the same ambiguities as does the infinitive o r third singular: First porta versus Third scribe , Third cape versus Fourth m u n i, and Irregular a b i versus Second mane. For Greek it similarly would resolve the ambiguity of the contract verbs: <jn7.ei, o p a , and5qAOu. (An uncontracted thematic verb like rcep7tco would at the same time remain d istinct—as rcepTte.) In fact, the accent on a semi-contract like TiXei would then distinguish it from <t>i7.ei in a way that was never possible in the first singular. The entries of the few Third Conjugation imperatives without stem vowels in standard Latin could have them added in parentheses—as dic(e). There is, o f course, no form that could simultaneously separate cape from both scribe and m iini or by itself indicate that a b i does not completely follow the m orphology of any one conjugation. Any citation form of each of these, therefore, will need to be listed with some additional information before other forms can be derived from it with any confidence. To illustrate at this point a notation that I am developing to provide such information more concisely than a principal part, cape (-i) and a b i (-e) would respectively indicate that cape , unlike scribe , inserts an i in forms like capio and that a b i differs from m iini by using an e instead of an i in those forms. A comparable notation could be used to distinguish the four Greek athematic verbs (riG qpi, e tc .) that have im pera tiv es resem b lin g co n trac t verbs: n 'O ei (-q-)> let (-q-), lax q (-a-), and 5(5ou (-co-); an athematic like 5eikvu, however, would be distinctive alone. If one also uses the actual normal Roman orthography and does not add long marks, an ambiguity will arise between the Second and Third Conjugations, which admittedly are the one pair o f classes that the traditional first person citations maneo and scribo clearly dis­

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tinguished. (O f the new candidates discussed, only the third person forms m anet and scribit would avoid this ambiguity but at the cost o f adding another between all verbs other than the First and Second, namely, scribit, capit, munit, ab it.) One notation that would resolve both o f these ambiguities would appear as follows: scribe -u-), cape -iu-)y and abi (-i-, -eu-): an unmarked verb (like porta , m ane , and muni) would be one in which the stem vowel tends to maintain itself orthographically throughout most forms while the other verbs would be marked with the vowels occurring respectively in the third person singular and plural forms of their present indicative; the occurrence of the third singular will identify scribe and cape as in the Third Conjugation rather than the Second while a double vowel in the plural will separate cape from the normal Thirds as it separates abi (by the use of the e) from the Fourths. As for other truly irregular verbs—for fer(e), formerly fero, is, descriptively, simply a syncopated Third Conjugation verb with suppletion in its principal parts, and fi(e), the new name for fio , besides contraction in present forms has no irregularity but the infinitive fie r i—es (s-) would provide an accurate presentation of the two forms o f the stem of sum , as would es- (ed~) for edo. These are comparable in Greek to writing i'aOi (ei-, to -) , toGi (0 (6-, 18-) and T0i (ei-, i-) for the verbs traditionally cited as e ip u o t8a , and e ip t respectively; it would, o f course, have to be explained that the -0i in these is an ancient imperative singular ending rather than part o f the stem; this small minority o f Greek athem atics, then, admittedly would not offer the advantage of a bare stem for the citation form, but only because none of them ever uses its stem in isolation. Furthermore, I feel that a reconstructed potes (poss-) along with voli (vel-)— after the attested noli— would be equally valid citation forms. These last two verbs are a reminder that, for semantic rather than morphological reasons, an imperative is not attested for verbs with a modal m eaning—also probably not for “ negative” stative verbs (like sorde or siti, not to mention 8(y r | again) although, o f course, the imperatives o f some “ positive” stative verbs do occur (as the salutations salve and vale dem on­strate). The absence of these two irregular imperatives could, then, be a possible objection to my proposal (for after all no one would object to the reconstruction o f the imperative o f a regular verb); the utility of a particular verb form, however, should be a more important factor in selecting it as a citation form than its empirical reality (a utility, however, which the uncon­tracted Greek citation forms mentioned earlier lack). An exception would be if the omission of the expected citation form gives a valuable clue to the syntactic limitations of a word; such a criterion would, for example, continue to justify1 the citation of an impersonal verb like licet in the third person singular and of a deponent verb in a passive form (now, o f course, its imperative, which in Latin happens to look like an active present infinitive, rather than the first person form —as, for example, gradere rather than gradior) even though that would prevent, in this second minority of instances, the use o f the bare stem as the citation form. In Greek deponents, however, except again for the athematic type k g i c t o , the imperative is nothing other than an “0-grade” o f the stem: p ax o o , (po(3oi>, 0eo), and—corresponding to 8i'vj/r| —xpd). (No deponents corresponding to 5qXou appear to be attested.)

Assuming, then, that the formal advantage of the imperative singular as

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citation form has been established, it also seems a reasonable, if unorthodox, candidate for the semantic priority traditionally expected from a citation form. It seems natural enough to consider commands a basic component o f speech, if not the most primitive historically, and it is, in fact, tempting to speculate that this may explain why the imperative singular is nothing but the verb’s stem! Indeed, most philosophers and other theorists have had a traditional bias in favor of the indicative mood. They were undoubtedly primarily influenced by the atemporal gnomic use of the classical present indicative in general statements like (Saepe) scribo , “ I (often) w rite,” as opposed to its temporal function, expressed in English by the present progressive, in references to one specific present time as in (Nunc) scribo , “ I am writing (now).” In reaction to this traditional emphasis, John Dewey, for exam ple, reinterpreted factual statements as practical judgem ents which could be considered to incorporate imperatives, while ethical theorists like R. M. Hare have made a comparable analysis for statements o f obligation. (Thus, although a modal does not normally have an imperative, a modal o f obligation like debe seems to imply an imperative o f whatever verb is used as its complementary infinitive!) It does not, in short, seem intrinsically unreasonable to consider imperatives to be semantically, if not logically, prior to indicatives. Furthermore, the English imperative as well as the classical has a temporal function along with the atemporal so that Scribe can be translated “ Write” whether it is accompanied by nunc or saepe, another clear pedagogical advantage for introducing imperatives first. (The problems of translation presented by the contrast o f the durative Greek present imperative with its instantaneous aorist imperative are unrelated since either Greek imperative may be gnomic or specific.)

If a Latin or Greek program started with imperatives, its first sentences, containing only verbs, would thus be both structurally parallel to their translations and, as long as they used nothing but intransitive verbs or transitive ones like scribe that can be used intransitively, would be completely natural without any nouns. The student would then be able to think of the citation form as the basic starting point for all other forms in the way that English speakers already think of it—namely, as something to which you always add endings to form other inflections without first deleting anything. In this way the concept o f a stem can be presented immediately. Then one can teach the formation of other verb forms from the imperative as soon as he w ants—some of them probably in the very same unit if not lesson —and so introduce the concepts o f personal endings and tense signs as entities that one adds to the stem for the same reasons that English speakers add subject pronouns and auxiliaries along with suffixes. (Com pare, for example, Scribebas with its equivalent “ You were writing” in which the -ba- equals “ were . . . ing” and the -5 means the same as “ You.” ) At the same time the concept of a base, the part o f the verb that never changes (at least within the present system), will be introduced by showing that it is identical with the stem in English but in Latin or Greek ends just before the variable final vowel. For example, Scribe becomes Scribis, etc. leaving only scrib- as the constant element. Every other verb inflection, in short, will clearly be interpreted as both a m orphological and semantic transform o f its citation form, the imperative singular.

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In summary, I have argued that a citation form should ideally be one from which an inflection could be made by adding an ending without any prior deletion, that the imperative singular is such a form in the paradigms of the Latin and Greek verbs, and that it is just as plausible a semantic starting point as the traditional first person singular present indicative.

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