Salvete,
in Exercise 168 Adler seems to make a mistake when translating “to purchase some books”:
Shouldn’t it be rather librorum coemendorum causâ? It seems to be an obvious mistake, but I am never quite sure whether there might not exist some arcane exception to the general rule. And as I want the transcription of Adler’s Exercises to be reliable…
Valete,
Carolus Raeticus
It’s quite illogical, but it does happen. There are examples in Cicero as well as earlier. I take it as an unthinking conflation of libros coemendi and librorum coemendorum. It can be rationalized by taking coemendi as a regular substantive (as in “the buying of books”), but to me it just shows that not even native speakers could keep these dastardly gerunds and gerundives straight!
Yes, and this sort of contamination apparently occurs with other cases besides the genitive.
Assuming you’re OK with German, a good monograph on gerunds and gerundives that touches on the present topic in greater depth is Risch, E. - Gerundivum und Gerundium - Gebrauch im klassischen und älteren Latein. There’s also the older Untersuchungen über das lateinische Gerundium und Gerundivum (Helsinki 1949), by Aalto, which contains even more exhaustive lists of examples than Risch gives showing gerunds and gerundives being used in all their variety.
I see nothing odd with this construction, it’s simply the supine expressing purpose after a verb of motion: libros comparatum eo. The supine can take a direct object in the accusative.
EDIT Disregard. I misread the post. It’s a hybrid: half gerund, half gerundive construction. As mwh pointed out this does happen. It’s almost as if the speaker was only half committed to the gerundive attraction. In any case, the gerundive would be avoided here because of the cumbersome double -orum ending.
Salvete,
oh my goodness! I definitely need to sort out my gerunds and gerundives. I was almost sure the example to be wrong. But following your answers, I had another and closer look at Adler’s Practical Grammar. In Lesson 25 F this is actually addressed and similar cases presented. Adler does not give any reasons for this construction. He only says:
From the above examples, it will be peceived that the gerundive agrees with its substantive in gender, number, and case. Violations of this general rule, however, both with respect to gender and to number, are not unfrequent in the genitive of substantives, and especially of pronouns.
The examples for such violations:
Thank yo for your help.
Carolus Raeticus
That’s not a particularly safe assumption to make. Some authors (including Caesar and Cicero) show little evidence of avoiding the homoioteleuton, and if they do I imagine they tend to do so by using a gerund with accusative object.