What are PPPs Used For?
How Perfect Passive Participles are used in Latin
You've heard of the perfect passive participle in Latin, but what is it actually for? Today we're going to look at what you can use PPPs to do, and why we learn them at all.
What are PPPs in Latin?
The Perfect Passive Participles are the fourth principle part that comes up in your Latin dictionaries. If you look at a verb, you should see this:
porto, portare, portavi, portatus
portatus is your fourth principle part, the perfect passive participle.
How are Perfect Passive Participles used?
PPPs can be used in 3 main ways:
As verbal adjectives in their own right.
Part of ablative absolutes
Forming passive verbs
So let's start with verbal adjectives.
This is just a fancy word for a normal participle. A participle is formed from a verb and it declines like an adjective. Hence the fancy term verbal adjective.
This means portatus at, um is formed from the verb porto. That's where the “verbal” bit comes from, and it also declines like an adjective, which is where the -us, -a, -um endings come from.
Why do we have several different endings?
Why is it not just portatus? That’s because it declines like an adjective. Adjectives (and participles) have to agree with the noun that they’re describing in case number and gender.
Case changes depending on the role the noun is playing. If it is in charge, the noun will be nominative and so will the participle. If it’s an indirect object, the noun would be dative, and so the participle would also have to be in the dative case.
Number is whether the noun is singular or plural. If it is plural, the participle also has to use a plural ending to match it.
Gender is why we have -us -a -um, relating to masculine, feminine and neuter nouns respectively.
In a dictionary, you will only see the nominative singular endings as with portatus, a, um. However, remember these 3 options can also be every case, and singular or plural.
Here's an example:
feminae auditae discesserunt
“The women who had been listened to left”
auditae is the verbal adjective. It describes the women. It's verbal because it comes from the verb audio “I hear”, but it changes just like a normal adjective. It's describing these women.
Because it's a PPP, the mood is passive and it's in the perfect tense, so these women are not in charge of the action. You have to keep the passive sense when translating. So “the women who had been listened to [implied “by other people”] they then left”. It's describing the women, it's just giving us more information.
That's quite a clunky translation of the perfect passive participle, so I could instead say “the women having been heard left” or “the women after they were heard left” or even “the listened to women left”.
Pick whichever translation you like the most, they’re all correct and give a little more fluency to your sentence. You've got the passive sense in all of them. The women are not doing anything actively.
That’s how PPPs are used as verbal adjectives on their own.
Ablative Absolutes
Another use of a PPP is an ablative absolute. I did a whole post on ablative absolutes which you can read here. Basically an ablative absolute is a noun plus a participle, where both the noun and the participle are ablative and they're grammatically separate from the whole of the rest of the sentence. The ablative absolute doesn't affect anything else, you can take it out and the rest of the sentence makes sense.
You translate ablative absolutes as with “X having been Y-ed”. This is a super clunky translation, but it helps to keep the perfect passive sense of the ablative absolute. Let me show you what I mean.
urbe deleta milites dormiverunt
“With the city having been destroyed, the soldiers slept”
urbe deleta is the ablative absolute. On its own, milites dormiverunt is a complete sentence, “the soldiers slept”. Grammatically that is a full sentence. urbe deleta can be taken out of that. That's what I mean when I say the ablative absolute is grammatically separate.
“With the city having been destroyed” is quite a clunky translation. It gets the traditional “with X having been Y-ed” translation down, which is really good. But once you understand the literal translation of “with the city having been destroyed”, we can be a bit more fluent. Here are some more options for translating this ablative absolute:
urbe deleta
“When the city had been destroyed”
“After the city was destroyed”
“With the city destroyed”
All of those are perfect translations, and you'd get the marks for all. I personally like to start with the clunky translation, to make sure I remember it’s a passive, and then if I feel like it could do with a more fluency it can be changed to whichever of the above I prefer.
Passive Verbs
There are three tenses of passive verbs that use a PPP in their formation.
perfect passives
pluperfect passives
future perfect passives.
NB: If you need any help with passive verbs, read my previous post about passive verbs.
The three tenses above are all formed from the fourth principle part, the PPP followed by esse in various tenses.
The perfect passive of porto is portatus sum: “I have been carried”.
That is the fourth principle part (portatus), plus the present tense of the verb “to be”. In this example it’s sum, showing its a 1st person singular “I”, but it could be es, est, sumus etc depending on who is doing the verb.
The pluperfect passive - portatus eram: “I had been carried”.
This tense uses the PPP portatus again, plus the imperfect tense of the verb “to be”. Again, the eram shows its a 1st person singular and could change to eras, or erat etc to change the person.
The future perfect passive - portatus ero: “I will have been carried”.
It uses the fourth principle part portatus plus the future tense of the verb “to be”.
Of course, as mentioned above, the PPP portatus will change based on the number and gender of the thing being described. So if it was me speaking, they would be portata sum, portata eram, portata ero because I am a woman. I need the feminine ending. If the sentence was “we have been carried”, it would have to use portati sumus if it was a group with males and females, or portatae sumus, if it was just females.
So these 3 passive tenses all use the fourth principle part, the PPP, plus a variation of tense on the verb “to be”.
Have I convinced you?
Perfect passive participles are so interesting, and are very useful. It's the fourth principle part in your dictionary, and it can be used for various things. I think they're super cool, and they make your translation so much more interesting! Clearly I'm a huge fan of the PPP.
Verbal adjectives, ablative absolutes and passive verbs. All are very important in more advanced Latin passages. The ablative absolutes do have a special place in my heart because I think they're excellent and the literal translation is nonsense. “With X, having been Y-ed”, absolutely fantastic. Peak Latin.
Let me know what you think in the comments. If you think I'm crazy for loving PPPs or if you agree that these are an excellent piece of Latin grammar!
If you're struggling with learning any of the Latin verbs endings, do download my complete reference guide to Latin verbs. When you do that, you'll also get my nouns reference guide, which will help with the verbal adjectives, and remembering the 2-1-2 endings of the PPP.
Let me know your opinions on PPPs in the comments. I hope this has been useful. Thanks so much for joining me, and I'll see you next time on bambasbat!