I’m working through N&H’s composition book and I have a question about exercise 24, #5.
The soldiers having been captured gave up their arms.
N&H give the solution:
Capti milites arma > tradidere.
Is this a typo or an alternate form for “tradiderunt”?
-Yvonne R.
Yes, it’s an alternative form. Wheelock says that the alternative ending is fairly common in poetry.
Watch out for syncopated and contracted forms. They occur a lot in meter and very often in genuine prose too. These are the most likely examples:
-erunt (perfect tense third person plural) can be shortened to -ere.
e.g. dederunt often becomes dedere
cupiverunt → cupivere
ierunt → iere
note: this is not really syncopation but a coexisting form.
-eris and -aris (passive voice second person singular, all tenses and moods!) can be shortened to -ere and -are, respectively.
e.g. amaris can become amare (easily confused with infinitive)
audieris → audiere
arbitrareris → arbitrarere
putabaris → putabare
monearis → moneare
note: also (probably) just a coexisting form.
-vi- and -ve- (in the perfect tenses) is often dropped.
e.g. laudavisse often becomes laudasse
amaverim → amarim
paravissent → parassent
note: this usually only happens when the contracted vowel is short: thus it never occurs in 1st pers sing perf indic and rarely in 3rd pers plur indic. The contracted syllable obviously cannot be the last one.
verbs with perfect in -ivi (most 4th conjugation verbs) often drop the v, leaving a perfect stem in -i- (instead of -iv-), like the verb eo, ire, ii, itum
e.g. audivi very often appears as audii
muniverunt → munierunt
cupiverit → cupierit
rare form ivi (of eo) → typical form ii
note: before -st- and -ss- the two i’s (one of the stem and one of the ending) contract into a long i: perisset for peri-isset for periv-isset (pereo, -ire, -i(v)i, -itum). Again, this is the regular formation for eo, ire.
There are a couple other rare contractions like ausim for ausus sim, dixti for dixisti, but the above are the only ones really worthy of mention (unless I have overlooked something). You may want to take a closer look at this in a grammar such as Allen & Greenough’s. You definitely need a resource like that since you are at an advanced enough level for prose composition. You can always use Textkit’s free edition.
I hadn’t seen the alternative for the “-erunt” ending. 
Boy, those pesky Romans are always throwing something new at you, aren’t they? No wonder they held their orators in such high esteem.
I’m off to download A&G to go with all the other texts I have now. Thanks for the tip.
-Yvonne
My favourite is amavisse - amasse.
My favourite is amavisse - amasse.
So?