The Census of the Final Letters Occurring in Latin

Tom N. Winter (University of Nebraska, Lincoln)

Suppose a programmer

1. collected every Latin word from a large sample of Latin;
2. flipped them all so they appeared backwards [sdrawkcab, e.g.];
3. alphabetized the backward words;
4. returned them right-side-to for readability, and finally,
5. Took a census of everything a Latin word could end in.

I did it. This presentation is the “highlight film,” so to speak, of a census of the word terminations of Latin. The census is based on the 2,959 words (7,400 words total length) of De Bello Gallico 5. Confirmation of some generalizations was done through an Ibycus search through all of De Bello Civili. Other confirmations were done by running my own programs through the other books of All Gaul. Anything relating to first person was checked in Cicero, Ad Att. 8.

The census, like a rhyming dictionary for would-be poets, can serve for restoration of texts, either of manuscripts or inscriptions: suppose, for example, you only had –mia visible. That would be sufficient to read “praemia.” It’s unique.

Some observations go to style, or to character. Style? In Caesar, the clausula –ere is never the alternative past tense third plural (e.g., continuere, “they contained”). This means that Caesar’s speech in Sallust, where –ere’s roll frequently, is, at least in style, Sallust, not Caesar. Character? One word says a picture: Caesar never says utinam. Similarly, miseram, (“poor [feminine singular]” or “I had sent”) is nowhere to be found. You have to find it in Cicero, where it is the adjective.

The most apparently obvious use of the ending-census is the eternal one for declensions. But unique endings are the minority. Unique, one-case-only, endings are –l, –ns, rs, and –x, nominatives. Is –um accusative? No. There are conjunctions, adverbs, verbs, and prepositions, and genitives. But the letters in front of –um shows this: every -bum is accusative; every –eum is accusative; every -hum is accusative. When is –um genitive? The –um genitives are preceded by i, n, and r. But unless the word is omnium or civium, any –ium is accusative.

Some surprises are uncovered. “Eam” is never a verb! If one has ever wondered how Romans distinguished the forms of their verb “to go,” eo, ire, ii from their pronoun is ea id, the answer is that the verbs whose letters are one-to-one with the pronoun have a prefix, alphabetically ex-, red-, sub-, trans-.

The entire work is now available on the web. What does the “census” look like? Here are two entries:

-di

Every -edi and -udi in Caesar is the passive infinitive of a compound verb. ('dedi', of course, does not occur in Caesar!)

-idi

Of the four cases a final -i can fall into, -idi is uniquely genitive. The -idi set consists of personal names (Calidus, Calidi; Nasidius, Nasidi) and neuter collective nouns oppidum, oppidi, plus the -sidium compounds, e.g., ob-, prae-, and subsidium, subsidi. In Caesar, concidi is the only -idi passive infinitive.