Qui vs. Quis/, Quid vs. Quod

Latin Learning Latin
1

Salvete,

I am not quite clear about when to use the interrogative pronoun and when the interactive adjective pronount. Take the following sample sentences:

  • Qui est aspectus campi magnetici galaxiae nostri? (my own translation of an English sentence) In this case I am unsure whether it should not be Quis est aspectus….
  • Quid est nomen tibi? (taken from Traupman’s Conversational Latin). Here, I am wondering why it does not say Quod nomen est tibi?.

Are both, respectively, acceptable versions. If not, why? In my head I always seem to connect the noun with the qui….

Thank you for help,

Carolus Raeticus

2

Quis/quid are interrogative pronouns – “who” and “what” in English (animate/inanimate). The corresponding interrogative adjective is qui/quae/quod, which is also functions as a relative pronoun.

The following is based on my intuitions; I can’t point to an authoritative source.

In the first sentence, if you intend to write “What is the aspect of the magnetic field of our galaxy?”, you should use quid. In the second sentence quid is also correct. In both cases I think you need the interrogative pronoun, not the interrogative adjective. “What is . . . ?”

In the first sentence, if your intended meaning is “What aspect does the magnetic field of our galaxy have?”, you should probably write “Qui aspectus campo magnetico nostrae galaxiae est?”

Quid nomen est tibi?, I think, asks the simple question “What’s your name?”

Quod nomen est tibi? would, I think, ask the question “What name do you have?” in a situation where there is a discrete list of names, one of which would belong to the person being addressed.

3

Hello Qimmik,

I think that I understand what you mean about the first sentence, but I still do not get Traupman’s sentence:

Quid nomen est tibi?

Literally, it means “What is the name for you?” That sounds like a lot of gobbledegook to me. I can understand “Quod nomen est tibi?” or “Quid est nomen tuum?” or “Quid est nomen, quod tibi est?” But this one suggested by Traupman (and also by Adler), I simply do not get it.

Unless…perhaps it functions just like when you try to find out the name of an object you do not know at all, for example: “What is the name for this object” (pointing at some unknown kind of tree). In a similar manner one might say: “What is the name for you?”
Hmm…still not sure.

Carolus Raeticus

4

Quid nomen est tibi? > . . . That sounds like a lot of gobbledegook to me.

That’s how you ask someone what their name is in Latin. The dative is a dative of “possession.” It only sounds like gobbledegook if you try to translate it word for word into English. “What is name to you?”

Here are two examples from Plautus:

Amphitruo, 364:

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/plautus/amphitruo.shtml

quid nomen tibi est? “What’s your name?”

Mercator, 516:

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/plautus/mercator.shtml

quid nomen tibi dicam esse? “What should I say your name is?”

Update: here’s the result of a crude search–more examples from Plautus:

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?target=la&collections=Perseus%3Acollection%3AGreco-Roman&all_words=&phrase=quid+nomen&any_words=&exclude_words=&search=Search

5

I would have expected quod nomen… in other words an interrogative adjective in the nominative neuter singular case? What name is to you..?

6

I would have expected quod nomen… in other words an interrogative adjective in the nominative neuter singular case?

It’s hard to argue with the actual text of Plautus, where this expression comes up more than once. That’s how they asked the question in colloquial Latin.

7

Thanks. Seems sensible!

8

Thanks all for starting this thread because the issue of “(quod vs quid) tibi nomen est?” is something I’ve thinking about of late and I hope I’m not too late to join into the conversation.

First off, I completely agree with Carolus that the choice of “quid” makes little sense grammatically to me, yet Traupman is not the only one to make this odd choice. Wheelock uses it as well.

Qimmik was quite right too to point out that, despite any reservations we may have, Plautus seems to use quid instead of quod, with the most clear case being from the first scene of his play Amphitryon, though other plays seem to use it as well.

It would seem that that would settle the question. The problem is that it doesn’t :slight_smile:

First, there are a number of editions of Plautus, going back to at least the 1500’s, that say “Quod nomen tibi est?” instead of quid for the exact same line in Amphitryon quoted by Qimmik. The easiest way to verify this is just do a simple google book search for that phrase. You will find a number of examples and if you do a few spot checks, you can assure yourself that this is not an OCR mistake. It really does say “quod” and not “quid”.

Also, I found a similar instance of this with Plautus’s play Persa. The line “Quod nomen tibi est?” is used, though some texts use “quid” instead. Curiously, it seems quod is the more common choice for this passage, though I found both.

I don’t know what all this means. Is “quid” just a simple scribe error that was accidentally repeated? Was “quod” the error and it was done by well-meaning people who were trying to “correct” the text? Was there a difference in the use of “quid” in early Latin that at times it could mean the same thing as “quod” and that is why he used it? I don’t know the answer, but these are all interesting questions.

The next step is to ask if anyone else besides Plautus has used the phrase. The answer is yes, but we need to include some “late latin” texts to get a good picture.

  • Terrence has one instance of using something close to the phrase, and he picked “quod”. In Phormio he writes, “Tu tibi nomen dic quod est?”
  • In the book of Judges in the Vulgate, we get the question at chapter 14, verse 17: “Dixitque ad eum: Quod est tibi nomen?”
  • In Nennius’s Historia Britonnum (c800’s) we get "Rex autem adolescenti ait: “Quod nomen tibi est?” Ille respondit “Ambriosus vocor.” (Of note, Bede tells the same story about 100 years earlier but avoids the issue by using “Quo nomine vocaris?” instead.)

There may be others, but those are the three I’ve found so far. The Nennius may be a bit of a stretch, but the other two were clearly written while Latin was still a spoken language.

Further we can go through the literature of the Humanists and post-Humanist periods up to about 1900. I found a number of instance of “quod”, but I was not able to find an example of “quid” (except obviously those where Plautus is being quoted).

Some instances of note because they are teaching manuals include:

  • Hoole’s - Children’s Talk - English and Latin (1659’s) - “Quod est tibi nomen?” or “Qui vocaris?”
  • Possellius - Familiarium Colloquiorum Libellus Graece et Latine (1681)- “Quod est tibi nomen?” or “Ede nomen tuum!”
  • Adler - A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language (1858, p. 599) “Quod est tibi nomen?” or “Quinam vocaris?”

Incidentally while looking through this literature, I also noted several instances of “Qui vocaris?”, “Qui vocare?” or some equivalent also being listed. I noted this above a few times. This idiomatic phrase is attested as far back at Terrence and seems to have been commonly used. Note the analogous use of the adjectival “qui” instead of the substantive “quis,” much like the use of the adjectival “quod” instead of the substantive “quid”.

To summarize, I don’t have an easy answer. The polite thing would be to declare that either is correct, but honestly, I’m not sure that I believe that. If we look through the history of Latin, I think the overwhelming evidence is that “quod” is the word used more frequently and it has the further benefit of making sense grammatically. While we do see some evidence that Plautus used “quid”, I can not explain the deviant textual reading where some texts use “quod” and some use “quid”, nor can I say which is the earlier rendering. Further, even if we determine that “quid” was the older term, that simply makes me wonder if the difference between quid and quod was less exact during Plautus’ time and not to change my mind that “quod” is correct.

At this point, I use “quod” or I just avoid the whole business and say “Qui vocaris?” :slight_smile:

I’m open to other thoughts though…

Cura ut valeas,
D

9

quid is perfectly grammatical, as also is quod, and Qimmik made the correct distinction between them.

quid est nomen tibi? “What’s your name?” (There’s nothing at all unusual about the dative: canis erat mihi, I had a dog, nomen est mihi I have a name.) As if to say, “There’s lots of things I could ask about, but what I’m asking about is your name. What is it?” Here the question is simply Quid?, What (is X, Y, or Z)? It’s a simple “What?” question.

quod nomen est tibi? “What name do you have?”, i.e. “What’s your name?” As if to say, “Everybody has a name. What’s yours?” Here quod is adjectival with nomen, “What name?” It’s a ”What name?” question.

The order of the internal constituents can of course be shuffled.

The distinction between quid and quod doesn’t amount to much in this particular case—“What’s your name?” is the best English equivalent for each of them—but it does exist, however subtle. Looking at the context may help clarify the difference.

The two are evidently liable to get confused in manuscripts, however, and since the difference in meaning is so slight (but not null) it may not always be easy to determine which is right.
—I should add I haven’t looked up any passages, but rest assured there’s no problem about either form of question.

10

Thanks mwh for your thoughtful post.

Your explanation for “quod” is exactly what I was considering and why I said it made more sense to me grammatically. As you clearly establish, quod is an adjectival form of the interrogative pronoun and would be asking “what-name” or perhaps “which-name”. This mixes well with a dative of possession. Let’s imagine the sentence were “Nomen tibi est.” That could be translated as “You have a name”. If we made it into a simple question (perhaps by adding -ne), it might read as “Do you have a name?”. Adding quod seems easy and natural because you are modifying nomen and then simply asking “You have what-name?” or “What-name do you have?”. Admittedly this is a bit stilted in English because our idiomatic expressions are different, but the meaning is clear.

Quid makes less sense to me. Carolus touched on this in an earlier post as well. If the substantive interrogative pronoun is really intended, then the point of the dative is less clear. Remember that a dative + esse translates into something similar to the verb “to have”. This is not the same as using a possessive adjective (“canis est mihi” is not equivalent to “canis meus est” and “nomen est tibi” is not the same as “nomen tuum est”). This means that using quid would not seem to naturally translate into “What is your name?” in the way you suggested, but instead would have a different meaning. The natural tendency (since quid becomes the subject of the sentence and tibi would now be in the predicate of esse), would be to avoid the “dative of possession” entirely and translate the phrase simply as “What is the name to you?” or perhaps “What does the name mean to you?”. This is the guidance that Gildersleeve gives (#349, remark 1) when faced with such a situation. I suppose we could imagine an alternative where tibi creates the equivalent of another subject noun (i.e. You), which would itself be in apposition to Quid but this would be hard to meaningfully construct in English and I’m not aware of another example where the dative of possession is used in this way. All of this is why “quod” makes more grammatical sense to me in this case than “quid”.

Now, I don’t want to seem like I’m making the mistake in thinking that languages are always logical, because that is certainly not true. While logic helps us to some degree, I think usage and idiom can often take precedence. Despite giving good logical reasons why “Quid est nomen tibi?” shouldn’t mean “What is your name?”, that doesn’t mean that idiosyncratic colloquialisms have to follow our logic. That is why I focused less on the technicalities of the grammar in my original post and more on the evidence of usage over time.

I still hold that “quod” both makes the most sense grammatically and has most historical evidence behind it’s use and that is what makes such a strong argument in it’s favor. I think the arguments for “quid” are much more tenuous. But again, I am certainly open to hearing other perspectives though since I do not consider myself an expert and am always interested in learning :slight_smile:

11

Dear Brain Doctor,

It’s not that one is right and the other wrong, as you seem to persist in thinking. And arguments for quid are superfluous—or do you want to change all the quid’s to quod’s? (See Qimmik’s compilation—and there are more.) What was good enough for Friedrich Leo is good enough for me, and should be good enough for you. He was a real Latinist, you are not (as you acknowledge—and neither am I).

Sorry if this sounds rude, but I think your time would be better spent reading actual Latin than arguing abstruse grammatical points on an inadequate foundation. (Have you tried looking beyond nomen?) If all you’re interested in is how to say “What’s your name?” in Latin, enough already.

12

mwh,

I’m sorry to see that my posts caused you such distress. That was certainly not my intent.

Cura ut valeas,
D

13

Medicus, when you were consulting Gildersleeve, did you look at section 106, where a note says “Quid is sometimes used for quod, but usually in the phrase quid tibi nomen est, and only in early Latin”?

I’d have thought that the sheer number of instances of quid nomen etc. in Plautus
(Bennett’s Syntax of Early Latin records even more, I suspect, than those Qimmik has shown us in the link) or, more pertinently, the fact that these readings have clearly been thought fit to prevail, would convince you that in this expression quid and not quod was frequently what Plautus really did mean to say.