Enclitics

I’ve got a list of enclitics from a book available here (bennett’s “a latin grammar”) and this is it:

-que, -ne, -ue, -ce, -met, -dum, -cum

I’ve searched these fora and the web, and got no explanations except for the -que and -ne particles, and loosely for the -ue. could someone show me examples using each one of those enclitics, and explain their functions to me?

-que stuck to the end of a word means “and”: vir feminaque = a man and a woman.

-ue stuck to the end of word means “or”: vir feminaue = a man or a woman

-ne means “and not / nor /neither”

-ce (sorry I’ve never seen this one)

  • met emphasizes the word, I think this only goes with pronouns: “egomet” = I myself

  • dum means “while” and often is attached to a word like “nec” - necdum = and not yet/while

  • cum means “with” and can be enclitic “mecum” = with me, “tecum” = with you.

Hope that was some help - wait for the experts for more grammatical explanation!! :laughing:

-ne does not mean this, it simply makes the statement interrogative.

-ce is an emphatic used with the demonstratives ille, iste, and hic, but the final E is often dropped. In the case of hic, it has become inseparable from many of the forms. It was originally found with other words, such as tunc (tum+ce) and nunc (*nun+ce), in which case the original unemphasized form vanished.

-met is used with certain forms of the personal pronouns and less often to the possessive adjectives.

-cum is often suffixed to the ablative singular and plural of the personal and relative pronouns.

-dum seems to me a stretch to call enclitic, but whatever.

Hmm, true… I was thinking about “necne”.

-ce, later -c, only becomes ‘emphatic’ by dint of its origin as a deictic marker. as well as being enclitic there are relics of its being proclitic, e.g. cette, cedo. it is very productive in terms of its use with demonstratives.

-met can also be used with ipse.

-whatever one’s view on the u/v controversy, i.e. whether one is correct or wrong, writing ‘vir feminaeue’ is impossible.

-cum originates from an anastrophic use and can also be used with relative pronouns.

-right, -dum is not an enclitic at all.


~D

thanks for the explanations.

so I can use -que and -ue with any word I like, -met with only the cited personal pronouns, possessive adjectives and ipse, and -cum with only personal and relative pronouns?

and -ce seems to me like there’s not enough freedom to use it. It seems it already attached itself to the allowed words… is it so?

so the “free for use” enclitics are, really:
-que, -ue, -ne?
I wish I could include -cum here… it seems like a very useful enclitic. oh well. :slight_smile:

Did you lads know that whiteoctave uses cum postpositionally 2.55% of the time?

:laughing: I’m used to writing v but then took ue from Cyborg’s initial post!

yes

no!