A Laudator Temporis Acti post that will be of interest to those who enjoy fussy poetico-morphological details:
R.J. Tarrant, “Silver Threads Among the Gold: A Problem in the Text of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Illinois Classical Studies 14.1/2 (Spring/Fall, 1989) 103-117 (at 112-113):
For a poet capable of almost any extravagance in coining adjectives in -fer and -ger, Ovid appears to have been remarkably sparing with adjectives in -ax. The following are securely attested in the Metamorphoses: audax, capax, edax, fallax, ferax, fugax, loquax, minax, pugnax, rapax, sagax, tenax, vivax, and vorax; all of these appear as well in the elegiacs, along with emax, mordax, procax, and salax; sequax and uerax occur once each in the double letters of the Heroides, which are probably late compositions if genuine but whose Ovidian authorship is not beyond doubt.20 Virgil, though not lavish in using these adjectives, is still the probable inventor of pellax and sternax.21 Ovid, on the other hand, has no clear example of a new adjective of this kind; all those just listed had already appeared either in prose or verse, and usually in both.22 Perhaps formations of this kind struck him as disagreeably archaic, or else he found them stylistically inappropriate: many of the bolder experiments of this type are found in passages of comic abuse, such as Plautus’ procax rapax trahax (Pers. 410) and perenniserue lurco edax furax fugax (421) or Lucilius’ manus tagax (1031 M) or the pejorative term linguax attributed by Gellius to the ueteres along with locutuleius and blatero, while others appear in “low” (i.e., commercial or banausic) contexts, like Cato’s precept patrem familias uendacem, non emacem esse oportet (Agr. 2.7) and Gaius’ description of an ideal slave as constantem aut laboriosum aut curracem <aut> uigilacem (Dig. 21.1.18 pr.).23
20 In Her. 4.46 sequacis is a variant for fugacis. This list was compiled by searching the works of Ovid currently available on compact disk for the relevant endings (-ax, -acis, etc.) and by reading through the remaining works (Heroides 16-21, Ibis, Tristia, Ex Ponto). I am grateful to Richard Thomas for encouragement and technological guidance.
21 Virgil seems also to have introduced uivax to elevated poetry; it occurs before him only in Afranius 251 R². I am grateful to Wendell Clausen for information on Virgilian practice and for alerting me to the work of De Nigris Mores cited in n. 19.
22 Bömer on Met. 8.839 notes that uorax is not found in Virgil, Horace, or the elegists, but does not mention the word’s prominent appearances in Republican literature, cf. Catullus 29.2 and 10 impudicus et uorax et aleo, Cic. Phil. 2.67 quae Charybdis tam uorax?; both passages appear as quotations in Quintilian, and the latter was recalled by Ovid in Ib. 385 Scylla uorax Scyllaeque aduersa Charybdis.
23 Ovid’s only use of emax (Ars 1.419 f.) clearly exploits the word’s commercial flavor: insitor ad dominam ueniet discinctus emacem / expediet merces teque sedente suas.
“The work of De Nigris Mores” is S. De Nigris Mores, “Sugli Aggettivi latini in -ax,” Acme 25 (1972) 263-313.
I’ll have to remember linguax, which the Oxford Latin Dictionary defines as ‘loquacious, talkative.’
Did Plautus’s actors have some stage business when they delivered lines like procax rapax trahax (this sort of thing is made explicit in Aristophanes’ “Frogs” with the similar sounding Brek a kek kex koax koax)?
Good question — it would be fun to see a performance…
“Banausic” in English is new to me. I’m familiar with “Banause” in German, but I didn’t know we had it in English too.
Virgil, though not lavish in using these adjectives, is still the probable inventor of pellax and sternax
This looks like the Shakespeare-as-great-coiner-of-neologisms fallacy. Given what a small proportion of Roman literature survives, the assumption that a word was actually freshly invented by the author of the first text we have that contains it is even less trustworthy.
Different in cases where the Romans were consciously making up equivalents of e.g. Greek terms by calquing etc. We sometimes do know who came up with such words (because they actually tell us so.)
This looks like the Shakespeare-as-great-coiner-of-neologisms fallacy.
I had exactly the same thought.
Certain of those Latin adjectives have reflexes, whether immediate or non-immediate, in other languages, such as Spanish audaz, capaz, procaz, rapaz, and sagaz, and English audacious, capacious, rapacious, and sagacious.
The ending is presumably cognate with the Welsh adjective-deriving suffix -og, as in gwlanog “woolly” from gwlân “wool”, tyllog “full of holes”, from twll “hole”, arfog “armed” from arf “weapon.”
Gaelic -ach too, I imagine. I once had a patient called Srònach (which sounds as if it should be the first line of a limerick.)
“Nosey”: it was his surname. Obviously the Highland branch of Ovid’s family.
(There actually is a formally parallel Welsh ffroenog “wide-nostrilled.”)
The Celtic suffix seems to be denominal “having an X”, though, whereas the Latin is deverbal “prone to Xing.”
BTW cognate to Russian -а́к/-я́к.
The denominal ones (Celtic, Slavonic) seem all to be thematic, whereas the Latin (deverbal) forms are third declension. The Latin adjectives seem to be original i-stems rather than consonant-stems (neuter plural audacia, genitive plural audacium), though that probably doesn’t mean much, given the way Latin has muddled i-stems and consonant-stems together so much.
Does the suffix turn up as deriving deverbal adjectives outside Italic? Are there other Indo-European languages which have athematic forms derived with this suffix?
There are some Greek examples, like ἅρπαξ and φύλαξ. The examples I saw seem to be ‘profession/habitual doer’ deverbals, whereas the Latin ones seem to be ‘personal characteristic’ deverbals.
@de
The (similar) deverbals in Irish seem to be grammatical nouns used principally to form the continuous participle of some verbs, i.e., fan “wait” / (ag) fanacht “waiting” , marcaigh “ride” / marcaíocht. There is also léigh “read” and léacht “lecture” (the participle is léamh). But I don’t know if there is any real connection, even if the Latin participles are ex *axtus.
Let’s keep in mind that the /a/ in the Greek examples is short, while in the Latin and Slavic words it’s (originally) long (IIRC, it’s also etymologically long in the Celtic examples).
The forms may still be ablaut variants of the same ending, or different outcomes of laryngeal hardening.
That in particular makes me think of the originally Mainland Celtic placenames in -iācum.
There are only like six consonant-stem adjectives left.
@Y:
Note that ἅρπαξ has a stem ἁρπαγ- with a voiced velar, so it’s in all likelihood unrelated to the adjectives in -ak-. Quite possibly, it is a compound of the root *h₂eǵ- ‘to drive’. The first member is a bit harder to identify.
@Hans:
Yes, it is possible indeed that -āk- and -ăk- go back to same PIE suffix, via different paradigmatic levelings. The long-vowel variant shows up in Attic Greek as -ᾱκ- or -ηκ- depending on phonetic environment.
@David E.:
But isn’t -ia, -ium (as well as abl sing. -ī) the norm for all consonant-stem adjectives in Latin? (The merger between erstwhile i-stems and C-stems was pushed even further in adjectives than in 3rd-declension nouns.)
Not quite all (as DM points out): e.g. vetus. But it’s true that hardly any Latin original consonant-stem adjectives haven’t been totally i-ficated.
Present participles do still have ablative singular -e when they are used predicatively, in the ablative absolute construction.
But yes, the declension of Latin adjectives in -ax isn’t actually evidence against them being original consonant-stems, as my sloppy formulation suggested.
Link doesn’t work. The first part is Languagehat, the second looks like it’s on your harddisk.
The way I was taught it is that actual i-stem forms for adjectives (including present participles) in the acc., abl. and maybe elsewhere are archaic within Classical Latin, and consonant-stem forms are used otherwise; timeo Danaos et dona ferentis, instead of -es, would be a deliberate archaism. But they all take gen. pl. -ium, except for the few exceptions (vetus: veterum, senex: senum, and I forgot the rest).
Harpagornis, formerly.
Harpagolestes, the rob-thief. (It bites.) …Alleged to be a hooked thief, but I can’t see why.
Reminded me of Gothic gredags:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%90%8C%B2%F0%90%8D%82%F0%90%8C%B4%F0%90%8C%B3%F0%90%8C%B0%F0%90%8C%B2%F0%90%8D%83#Gothic
WP says that the proto-Germanic suffix was just *-gaz, and the preceding vowel belonged to the stem of the underlying noun, but this doesn’t actually seem to work.
the acc., abl. and maybe elsewhere are archaic within Classical Latin
No, that’s not right. Neither the Rubenbauer-Hofmann grammar nor Gildersleeve and Lodge say that.
However, I’d forgotten a whole category of consonant-stem adjectives: comparatives in -ior.
The accusative plural -is/-es thing is a separate issue; original -is became -es in later Latin in nouns as well as adjectives, and Tacitus (say) is archaising when he uses -is for added poshness
Sorry for the broken links, I don’t know what went wrong.
The first one was to this paper by Alexander Nikolaev containing an etymological proposal re. ἁρπαγ-: https://www.academia.edu/44480406/Greek_%E1%BC%85%CF%81%CF%80%CE%B1%CE%BE_robber_robbery
The second one was to a paper by Daniel Kölligan on some Greek nouns in -ak-: https://www.academia.edu/29746350/Trois_noms_grecs_en_%CE%B1%CE%BA_%CF%80%E1%BF%96%CE%B4%CE%B1%CE%BE_%CE%BB%E1%BF%A6%CE%BC%CE%B1%CE%BE_%CF%86%CF%8D%CE%BB%CE%B1%CE%BE_pdf
It actually says *-gaz also had variants *-agaz, *-igaz, *-ugaz; by Suffixablaut, only one of the last three needs to be explained, the other two we can just roll our eyes about; maybe the *-u in the stem of the noun helps here.
(Suffixablaut is a label slapped on the chaos that comes, in part, from real PIE ablaut in real PIE suffixes, but also wild analogical extensions thereof in a context where unstressed vowels weren’t particularly stable anymore. For example, the “duck” word, PIE *h₂anh₂t-, got a regular epenthetic *u in Germanic, *anut – which has regular reflexes, but so do *anit and *anat.)
Oh! Yes!
…It’s the warp drive.
et dona ferentis previously here.
Uh… *-d of course in Germanic. It makes sense thanks to not so much Verner’s law as one of Kümmel’s.