I have a feeling I’ve read somewhere that Past Participles can be used as nouns or adjectives with their masculine -us ending forms being treated as nouns of the Fourth Declension.
Am I misremembering?
Some for sure.
pōtus from pōtō
volātus from volō
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Wiktionary has some information on this: -tus - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
These are different PIE suffixes that happened to have merged in Latin.
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The majority (70%?) of type 4 nouns are “nouns of the verb”, formed from the perfect participle of a verb but active in meaning. So rogo “I ask for” generates the type 4 noun rogatus “an asking for”. So Caesar B G 1.11.2 legatos ad Caesarem mittunt rogatum auxilium is translated in the grammars as “They send envoys to Caesar to ask for help” and rogatum is called “a supine”. But it is far simpler to forget terms like “supine” and just to say that rogatum is simply a type 4 “noun of the verb” and that this is best translated as “they sent envoys to Caesar asking for help”. Hope this makes sense.
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