Talk:Grammatical tense in Latin

Proposed merge of Latin tenses with Grammatical tense in Latin
Article already exists. — Sago tree spirit  (talk) 01:47, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

No, it doesn't exist. The article Latin tenses is not about grammatical tense and the article keeper wants it not to be about grammatical tense, but about how verb forms are traditionally called and what these forms mean. Please see the talk page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Daniel Couto Vale (talk • contribs) 02:10, 4 February 2020 (UTC)


 * No, this article should not be merged with Latin tenses. This article is an attempt to look at Latin tenses from the point of view of modern linguistics, which is a different aim from the other article. Moreover, this article, as it stands, is under-sourced and under-researched: only a single reference is made to any modern linguistics textbook (Halliday).


 * Most of the opinions are those of the author, and some of them are questionable. For example, the sentence from Cicero "I now come to the testimony of the Dorylensians" is ascribed by the author to a category which he calls "Recency of past events". But this is plainly wrong. The sentence is a Performative utterance, and is of the same kind as "I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth" or "I pronounce you man and wife"; the action mentioned takes place at the moment of utterance, and thus is present time, not recent past.


 * You might have some reason in your complaint and I acknowledge that I do not know the context of each clause in detail. Is the person saying this trying to enter the tribunal while telling others (possibly a guard) what he is currently doing (present event) or is this person already inside the tribunal telling others what he came to the tribunal for (past event)? Please note that performative dialog acts are necessarily about verbal processes from Austin’s perspective, so telling others that you came to a tribunal with a given purpose is informative/indicative in first line. It is the fact that the purpose of this material action indicated is a non-observable constitutive part of a rite that makes this utterance potentially indirectly performative in the interaction. In other words, declaring one’s purpose makes one acquire a role. Let us keep that in mind, whatever tense we agree this verb has (past or present). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Daniel Couto Vale (talk • contribs) 13:43, 4 February 2020 (UTC)


 * There are several places where the author seems to have written things in a hurry without due thought. For example, the heading "Present state that was present at state observation" is meaningless nonsense; and the examples of the "dum-subjunctive" are all indicative.


 * Indeed, the contrast between past states that are still present (the mountain extending over the road) and past states that are claimed only for a past period of time (someone being alive only within a past period of time) is poorly described in this article. This needs to be improved. Help is definitely welcome. As for the notion of logical nexus, logical dependency, or absence thereof, I shall add references to a paper by Whorf and others who followed him in ethnography.


 * I am interested in explaining how meaning is construed by describing how this is done, but I am not interested in creating a proper name for each set of affixes. So “subjunctive” here is a descriptive term, not a proper name. I am also not interested in telling readers about the mismatches between verbal periphrases in English and Latin. We should bare in mind that not all readers of English Wikipedia are native speakers of English or care about how Latin and English verbal periphrases map to each other. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Daniel Couto Vale (talk • contribs) 14:33, 4 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I therefore suggest that, since the majority of the article is not based on any named academic sources, and all the Latin examples are simply copied from the Latin tenses article, this article be flagged as "undersourced" and moved to the Draft articles category until it is more developed.


 * At any rate, although to write the Latin tenses along these lines might be an interesting exercise, yet to combine the two would make rather a mess. 14000 readers have viewed the other article and so far only one has complained about the way it is organised. Let's leave it as it is. Kanjuzi (talk) 10:00, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

I agree with the idea of marking it with under sourced. Fixing the sources probably won't be difficult. Emicho&#39;s Avenger (talk) 17:17, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

This page is 100% WP:OR and as such actually deletable. It is not undersourced, but essentially unsourced. Halliday is presented as the theoretical background for this piece of OR, but NB: Halliday does not even mention Latin once. The remaining citations are just citations of primary data sources, and as such not encyclopedic references. Instead of WP:PROD or WP:AfD, I'll WP:BOLD-ly choose WP:CHEAP, and redirect this page to Latin tenses. If some time in the future someone else finds proper sources for a page about Grammatical tense in Latin that is not a private OR-fork of Latin tenses, they may happily turn the redirect back into an encyclopedic page. –Austronesier (talk) 19:02, 29 June 2020 (UTC)

Why the macrons?
Ecclesiastical Latin is not standard and most people will not be using its unique markers. Why is it being used? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Emicho's Avenger (talk • contribs) 17:23, 27 February 2020 (UTC)


 * @Emicho's Avenger I understand those who want to use an older version of the Latin writing system to have a more authentic reading experience. Some even reject the J and the V and use I and U instead like the Romans did. However, most people do not know every single Latin word, so they cannot tell whether vowels are long or short. As a result, they cannot pronounce words properly. So answering your question, I usually add macrons to help those who are learning the language and those who want to memorize the pronunciation. If we were truly honest about the ancient Latin script, we would use no space, no punctuation and no small case letters. This would be the difference between the original and a modern version of the same text. Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 01:05, 2 April 2020 (UTC)


 * "GALLIAESTOMNISDIVISAINPARTESTRES"


 * "Gallia est omnis dīvīsa in partēs trēs."