Whilst on Chapter VI of Lingua Latina I’ve been puzzling over this word ‘timent’ and its passive counterpart timetur.
In Exercitia Latina I there is a complete-the-ending exercise which when completed correctly is:
Servi mali dominum timent neque a domino timentur.
Doesn’t this mean: ‘Bad servants are afraid of the master but they are not frightened by him.’? Which is self-contradictory!!!..
Is timent an active latin verb that only / usually translates into passive english ‘to be afraid’??? ‘Timent’ appears to be intransitive. But what’s the passive of an intransitive verb??
I think I’ve got it… Orberg uses timet to mean ‘frighten’ as a transitive verb…it seems yet William Whitakker’s Words translates it as an intransitive. to be frightened…???
Hmmm… I just think you should understand the meaning without translating it literally.
If you can’t make a passive (because the verb may be intransitive), just make an active swapping the subject and the object. I mean, the meaning indeed is:
“Bad servants are afraid of the master, but the master is not afraid of them”.
I’m not a native English speaker so I may be wrong, but if you strongly need to translate the verb so that it stays gramatically similar to ‘timere’, I’d use ‘fear’:
“Bad servants fear the master, but they are not feared by him”.
I think loqu’s got it. (I admit this did confuse me at first until I read loqu’s explanation.)
‘Timent’ appears to be intransitive.
It isn’t: Servī malī dominum timent. “-um” is the accusative of masculine nouns, so ‘timent’ is transitive. I think you’re too fixated on the translation “be afraid of”. If you think of it as “fear”, as loqu suggested, everything falls into place. “The servants are afraid of the master” and “The servants fear the master” mean the same thing, right? So if “timēre” is “to fear”, then “timērī” (passive infinitive of “timēre”) is “to be feared by”. Servī ā dominō nōn timentur: the servants are not feared by the master (= the master does not fear the servants). It makes perfect sense to me.