the verb darent

Here you can discuss all things Latin. Use this board to ask questions about grammar, discuss learning strategies, get help with a difficult passage of Latin, and more.
Post Reply
spqr
Textkit Fan
Posts: 240
Joined: Thu Mar 31, 2011 6:13 pm
Location: Hemet, CA, USA

the verb darent

Post by spqr »

This appears to be the imperfect subjunctive active plural of the verb infinitive dare but I have checked several conjugation tables online and this word sometimes has a macron in the first syllable and sometimes does not. Are these simply alternate forms? Thanks, Paul

mwh
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 4790
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:34 am

Re: the verb darent

Post by mwh »

The –a- is short. It’s a common mistake to think that dare has a long –a- like a regular 1st-conjugation infinitive.

anphph
Textkit Enthusiast
Posts: 593
Joined: Fri Nov 09, 2007 1:35 am

Re: the verb darent

Post by anphph »

mwh wrote:The –a- is short. It’s a common mistake to think that dare has a long –a- like a regular 1st-conjugation infinitive.
An intuitive way of remembering this is to think of the composite verbs derived from dare, such as indere or addere.

mwh
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 4790
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:34 am

Re: the verb darent

Post by mwh »

Miguel, I’m not sure how helpful that actually is, given imperative da (long a: think Catullus’ da mi basia mille …) vs. adde (short vowels) and the morphological inconsistency. The best and most natural way to learn quantities, if you’re not into morphology, is to read lots of verse—metrically, of course. (So-called “hidden” quantities, not revealed by meter, are not always known, but can often be securely inferred linguistically even where dictionaries don’t commit themselves.)

anphph
Textkit Enthusiast
Posts: 593
Joined: Fri Nov 09, 2007 1:35 am

Re: the verb darent

Post by anphph »

mwh wrote:Miguel, I’m not sure how helpful that actually is, given imperative da (long a: think Catullus’ da mi basia mille …) vs. adde (short vowels) and the morphological inconsistency. The best and most natural way to learn quantities, if you’re not into morphology, is to read lots of verse—metrically, of course. (So-called “hidden” quantities, not revealed by meter, are not always known, but can often be securely inferred linguistically even where dictionaries don’t commit themselves.)
You're right, of course. Thank you for the correction. I was relying too much on personal experience, since it was the realization that those separate verbs were just composite forms from dare that had undergone apophony that made it click for me definitely that dare had the short a.

RandyGibbons
Textkit Enthusiast
Posts: 465
Joined: Sat Mar 30, 2013 9:10 pm

Re: the verb darent

Post by RandyGibbons »

It would be nice here and in similar cases to be able to find a verse that can be used mnemonically (I happen to always remember the a in căno is short from the first line in the Aeneid). Does there happen to be a resource, presumably online, where one can look up a declined or conjugated form like darent and find most or all of its appearances in Latin literature?

mwh
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 4790
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:34 am

Re: the verb darent

Post by mwh »

Surely by now there must be such a thing (as in Greek there’s the TLG), or at least a searchable L&S or OLD. Have the PHI disks been superseded? Fifty years ago David Packard, then an Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA, produced a computer-generated concordance to Livy, and think of the progress made since then!

But really there’s no substitute for reading lots of poetry. As I quoted Catullus’ da mi basia mille (Cat.5) the continuation inevitably went through my head, … dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, …, and this triggered recollection of a line in Neptune’s great speech of reassurance to Venus in the Aeneid, (cum Troia Achilles …) |milia multa daret leto, …; which in turn …. Concordances are useful things, but they can't effect such dynamic interactions, and one the great things about poetry is that's it's memorable.

Nesrad
Textkit Fan
Posts: 315
Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2012 1:10 pm

Re: the verb darent

Post by Nesrad »

mwh wrote:Surely by now there must be such a thing (as in Greek there’s the TLG), or at least a searchable L&S or OLD. Have the PHI disks been superseded? Fifty years ago David Packard, then an Assistant Professor of Classics at UCLA, produced a computer-generated concordance to Livy, and think of the progress made since then!
http://latin.packhum.org/

mwh
Textkit Zealot
Posts: 4790
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:34 am

Re: the verb darent

Post by mwh »

Thanks Nesrad. It seems very primitive, and of very limited utility. Is there no way of sorting the data, e.g. by searching for a particular word or letter-string in a given author or in verse? Surely there must be something less antiquated than this.

Nesrad
Textkit Fan
Posts: 315
Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2012 1:10 pm

Re: the verb darent

Post by Nesrad »

The website will allow you to search using logical operators and by author and work.

Not being a classicist, I'm not aware of all the tools, but I do know that software such as Diogenes will read the PHI database, and that such software likely has more advanced tools for sorting data.

RandyGibbons
Textkit Enthusiast
Posts: 465
Joined: Sat Mar 30, 2013 9:10 pm

Re: the verb darent

Post by RandyGibbons »

Thanks, Nesrad, I think that's very helpful. I did the obvious exercise here, which was to search on #darent (the operator # blocks words that only end in ...darent; #darent# searches for the word darent but excludes, for example, darentque). I got 226 results that included the poets Vergil, Lucretius, Plautus, Terence, Manilius, Ovid, Statius, Phaedrus, Gaius Valerius Flaccus, Martial and Silius. You can filter by author, for example, if you preferred an example from Vergil or Ovid. (It would be nice if there were a NOT operator so you could exclude authors; I could have eliminated a lot of the results by excluding Cicero and Livy.)

For purposes of memorizing the short a in darentur (we all understand it wouldn't have to be third person plural in order to achieve this goal), I happen to like this one from Martial:

Cum pia reddiderent Augustum numina terris,
Et Maecenatem si tibi, Roma, darent!


Randy

Post Reply