What's the point of Latin participles?
Today I’m going to talk about why we use participles so much, the two most common ways to translate them, and why I really like them.
What are Participles?
They are what's called a verbal adjective. Now that can sound quite scary, but really it breaks down into two parts.
The verbal part means that it is formed from a verb, and the adjective part means that it describes a noun, just like an adjective does.
Because it's formed from a verb, participles have tenses. Because it is like an adjective, participles have case, number and gender as well.
present tense participles, portans, portantis
future participles, portaturus, portatura, portaturum
perfect passive participles, portatus, portata, portatum
Each of these also declines like an adjective (hence the multiple endings shown for each one).
Don't worry about what they look like for now. All we're really talking about today is what the point of them is. If you want to know more about any of these, you can find my posts about participles in the bambasbat archive. But for now, let's just talk about what they do.
Remember, because they describe a noun, that means that participles have to agree in case, number and gender with the noun they are describing. That means you really need to know your noun endings! To help you with that, download my free noun endings guide here. It's really going to help you out as you go through your case, number and gender endings, because present participles follow the 3-3 endings of the third declension, and the others follow 2-1-2 endings, which means using second declension endings for a masculine noun, first declension endings for a feminine noun, and second declension neuter endings for neuter nouns. So do download that, it will help you.
What are participles used for?
Well, there are two main uses.
Adjectival (or attributive)
Circumstantial.
Adjectival Participles
An adjectival participle means that it describes a noun. You would expect this from the title adjectival, I suppose, as adjectives do describe nouns. But in its most basic sense, it describes what a noun is doing, or how a noun is feeling, that sort of thing.
And you can use it to distinguish from others. So for example,
servum currentem vidi
“ I saw the running slave”
currentem is a present participle, so it follows 3-3 endings. servum is masculine accusative singular, so currentem also needs to be masculine, accusative, singular, which it is.
So current-em is adjectival because it is describing the slave at this moment in time. It could be translated “I saw the slave who was running”.
Now currentem is a present participle, which means that it's happening at the same time as the main verb. vidi is a perfect “I saw”, and therefore I have to take my present participle back a tiny little step to make it happen at the same time as “I saw the slave”. He was running when I saw him. So “I saw the slave who was running”.
This is adjectival because you can use it to distinguish him from others. So as opposed to the slave who was not running is sort of one of the meanings that you could have for this.
Circumstantial Participles
The other option is circumstantial. Now in Latin it is exactly the same, and in fact the meaning in English is also very similar.
servum currentem vidi
“I saw the slave while he was running”
This is the same sentence, currentem is still a present participle. I've just now used “while” to translate it. That's because this is describing the circumstance that this slave is in. It's what he was doing at the time of the main verb.
It's a very tiny difference in how you translate these participles, however, it can be useful to know that you can translate participles in different ways.
So this present participle currentem I could use differently depending on how I want to translate it:
Circumstantially: while he was running
Adjectivally: who was running
Adjectival and circumstantial, they basically are the same. It just is a different way to translate things.
Why are there different ways to translate participles?
The reason we have both of these is because Latin is very influenced by Ancient Greek, and in Greek, the attributive participle is shown in a slightly different way to the circumstantial participle. It uses something called the definite article (the word “the”) if it is adjectival (attributive) and it doesn’t include the definite article for circumstantial.
In Latin, it isn't, it's exactly the same, because we don’t use the definite article at all, Latin doesn’t have one, so it's not a big thing to worry about. The difference is very small.
Let's have a look at an example with a perfect passive participle.
puellam captam vidi
“I saw the having been captured girl”
captam is a perfect passive participle. It means “having been captured”. So the translation above is a very literal one, which we might not want to use in English.
Now, if I wanted to translate this sentence using the participle adjectivally, or as an attritive participle, I could say:
“I saw the captured girl”
It's attributed to her. It's telling me more information about the girl - she has been captured. It acts like an adjective.
If I wanted to do it as a circumstantial adjective, I could say:
“I saw the girl after she was captured”
Now that's because this one is a perfect passive participle, and so it happened before the main verb vidi. So I saw the girl after she was captured. That's the circumstance she is now in.
Why is this important?
This is quite a niche use of grammar in Latin. It's not a huge difference in how you actually translate them into English, but it gives you something to think about as you see participles. Do you want to translate it adjectvally or attributively, or do you want to translate it circumstantially?
If you're unsure about participles, I do have an entire set of videos on YouTube which you can find here. Or if you prefer reading the posts, you can find them in the bambasbat archive and search for “participles”.
The main thing to remember is that participles are verbal adjectives. They're formed from a verb and they describe a noun.
Don't forget that participles have to agree in case number and gender with the noun they are describing. So do make sure you've downloaded that free Noun Endings Guide to help you.
That's all there is for my participles post today. I hope it's been useful!
Let me know in the comments if you have any specific grammar topics you'd like me to cover, any of your favourite Latin authors you'd like me to analyse, or just anything you'd like me to know! It would be lovely to hear from you.
Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you next time on bambasbat.