Salvete,
One of the Pensum C questions in Cap XV in Lingua Latina is as follows:
Tune magister an discipulus es?
What’s “Tune” mean?
Tu + ne (interrogative particle)
“Tune” is actually the combination of the personal pronoun “tu” and the interrogative enclitic “-ne”, which signals a question.
So, “tune magister an discipulus es?” = “are you the teacher or the student?”.
It may be used in a variety of ways, with a similar meaning as “nonne”: e.g. “licetne mihi hoc dicere” = “is it permitted for me to say this?”
(Unfortunately, I’m presently “on the road” and don’t have access to my references, so I can’t list any other examples. Perhaps other members can further clarify, if this doesn’t sufficiently answer your question.)
Thanks. It’s so obvious when somebody else points it out!!
tune is surprisingly easy to miss, even though it is easy.
It is important to note that the Latin that we read is the language of a highly literate elite, and not necessarily the language as it was ever commonly spoken. Verbal markers such as a change in pitch will adequately indicate a question when speaking, but such markers cannot be recorded in writing. Latin has no punctuation system as we understand it, but uses its own system of markers to indicate senteces, questions etc. Markers such as verbs at the end of a sentence, ‘et’, ‘nec’, and a host of other words indicate breaks in thought. The enclitic -ne is the equivalent of a question mark in a writing system that has no question mark. In other questions, a question word such as cur, ubi etc will suffice.