Hi everyone,
How is the present participle “cogitanti” used in the following sentence? And what is the case use of Corneliae?
Corneliae haec cogitanti, “Heus tu, Cornelia!” clamavit Marcus…
These things were thinking to Cornelia, “Hey there, Cornelia” shouted Marcus…
Is Corneliae dative of reference, and is “cogitanti” dative or ablative?
Thanks
It cannot be “these things were thinking to Cornelia” because the subject of a participle is always in the same case, number & gender as the participle. This makes logical sense - a participle is just an adjective modifying a noun by telling what that noun is doing. And then, just like any other verbal form, a participle can have a direct object in the accusative case.
In fact, a participle MUST have some subject that it agrees with - just as an adjective must have some noun that it agrees with. (Sometimes this subject is unexpressed, and must be added into our English translation, but there is always someone or something performing the action of the verb.)
So, to go back to the sentence in question, the subject of the participle “cogitanti” must be some word in the sentence in either the dative or ablative case. There is only one possiblity: ‘Corneliae’, which, from the form, must be the dative case. If we take ‘haec’ as accusative neuter plural, direct object of the participle, we can translate the whole phrase as:
“to Cornelia (who was) thinking these things”
How does this fit into the rest of the sentence? Well, ‘Marcus clamavit’ seems to invite a dative; people generally shout TO someone. So the dative plays its basic role of indirect object, and we get the translation:
‘Marcus shouted “Hey you, Cornelia,” to Cornelia as she was thinking these things.’