My dictionary lists the word graphicé as a word for a drawing in the context of art. Of course, graphicé is the adverbial form of graphicus, but it is also distinctly listed as a feminine noun.
However, it’s only present under Drawing in the English–Latin; the adverb is the only listing under Graphicé, so I have no idea where to even start declining it, since I can’t find its genitive anywhere.
It seems to me to be in the form of a Greek feminine noun of the A-Declension ending in Eta. That being the case, I’d assume it would take the 3rd Declension (like most Greek loanwords seem to), but it also appears unprecedented. I can’t find any other nouns ending purely in a long E in the nominative that I could go by.
The Latin Word Study Tool of Tufts University’s website (while apparently unable to provide the meaning) says graphice is also the ablative form, which also suggests it to be 3rd Declension. But would that mean the declension would look like this?:
Thank you. I’ve followed up by looking into the Greek declensions. Finding Penelope, it gives a long A in the ablative. But Zumpt’s Grammar gives long E in the ablative, then says: “In the dative singular and throughout the plural, Greek words in e, as, and es, do not differ from the regular declension.”
I guess I just didn’t have enough direction in how to look it up before. Problem solved. Tibi multás gratiás agó!
It’s interesting that certain words have kept their Greek declensions. I imagine that many others were simply adapted to Latin conjugation patters. It makes sense to keep the declension when you’re working with names… Does it tend to be technical vocabulary, or is possibly a feature of certain Hellenophile authors? At the same time, I don’t seem to remember Cicero using any Greek declensions in his adaptations of Greek philosophy.
I’ve heard a learner of Czech say it began to irritate him to hear people—who because of this considered themselves culturally aware—saying the Czech name for Prague when they discussed their time “in Praha,” without inflecting it, since in Czech you have to use the locative form Praze.
Maybe this was the mindset of the more learned Romans. To use the form graphicam may have been a faux pas, like using “phenomena” in the singular, the kind of thing educated people rolled their eyes at.
Or maybe the words were too uncommon for people to bother assimilating them. In the case of naïveté we eventually created the form naivety so we could pronounce it more easily, but many more remain in their original forms, maybe just because it’s not worth the fuss or ridicule of altering them. Imagine the consequences of spelling tsunami “sunamie”, even though few of us pronounce the T anyway, and English words don’t end in -i.