impersonal verbs

Latin Learning Latin
1

My first question
What does this impersonal sentence mean? Iam vesperescat.(Taken from teach yourself latin grammer,chapter 56,impersonal verbs)It isn’t in the lewis-short online dictionary.
little flower

2

It seems to me as a derived verb, vesper=evening + inchoative suffix -sco, so it would be ‘now evening is coming’ but with some use of subjunctive.

3

Absolutely, Timeodanaos. L&S is offline at the moment but I’m surprised vesperesco isn’t in it, Little Flower (impersonally “It is growing dark” and as you say, Timeodanaos). It might be found under vesperasco, advesperesco, and advesperasco (I can’t check it because L&S is down).

But is that a subjunctive or a contracted past-perfect stem or is it being presented as a 1st conjugation verb, Timeodanaos? (I think that’s a verb that has an “avi” perfect stem, oddly enough for an “-ere” infinitive usually, and I know it’s rare for the third person to contract but still it can). Is there a context for the sentence in the book, Little Flower?

4

Vesperasco, -avi, -, -ere

says my dictionary. So it could be a contracted perfect.

5

So it could mean, then, “Let/may evening come now” (subjunctive --more likely, as you suggest, Timeodanaos) or “Now evening came” (contracted perfect – but rare and so unlikely). Or it could have been “Iam vesperascit” (present tense) for “It is already growing dark”.

6

thanks fot your help people
There is no context timeodanaos,it is on its own in the section ‘Translate into english’.
Maybe you could check l&s when it comes back online.

LITTLE FLOWER