by adz000 » Fri Jul 25, 2003 1:07 pm
It is an inspiration to see you apply your questing intelligence to Latin so wholeheartedly and I'm going to disappoint you by not answering the question to your satisfaction.<br /><br />I've been told that the use of "O" with the vocative always indicates a pitch of intense emotion, unlike the Greek where the "O" is merely a marker for the vocative. In Rome one would not walk down the street, according to this theory, and address a friend with "O" -- unless there were some sort of hatred or grief or intense joy involved.<br /><br />BUT as with most things you've been told there may be reason to doubt this (you should inject some skepticism whenever terms like "always" and "never" are applied to something as mutable as a language), especially when a grammar as comprehensive as Gildersleeve's is of two minds on the subject. <br />(What's that, you haven't heard of Gildersleeve? It's an indispensible reference for questions of the sort you've been asking and I urge you to buy a copy if you plan to continue asking the hard-hitting questions usually reserved for well-trained teams of investigative journalists. Just look up something like "o" in the index and you'll find a number of comments. Gildersleeve's numerical system of organization is initially off-putting, as is the typography, but so too the rose has its thorns.)<br /><br />Anyways, one note in Gildersleeve corroborates what I've been told, that "O" shows intense emotion, and another seems to say that it merely anticipates the vocative. So I'm not sure what to tell you other than that I'll continue looking up information about this question and report back to you. I suspect only close reading of texts will tell you whether or not the "O" is emotional or not, and it's possible that the Romans had several different uses for it.<br /><br />As for distinctions between using "O" with animate and inanimate objects, I'm uncertain. It seems like it's not the case, but perhaps it is. It is far easier to tell when someone is addressing a person than an inanimate object, and the "O" might be used to relieve some of the ambiguity (Cicero's "O tempora, O mores" would be harder to read as "tempora, mores"). <br /><br />You'll recall, however, that the accusative case is also used in moments of intense emotion (one of the many facts Gildersleeve will delight you with). Even if "O" alone is ambiguous, use of the accusative with "O" would clearly indicate such emotion: "O miseras hominum mentes, O pectora caeca!" (Lucretius, II. 14). Entertain your Latin teacher with counterintuitive uses of the accusative.<br /><br />Me miserum,<br />Adam
phpbb