Two small questions

Latin Learning Latin
1

  1. “He was confirmed to have been seen”. Is that Confirmatus est visus esse or Confirmatus est visum esse? Using the nominative for visus make the most sense to me.

  2. I don’t really understand the difference between aliquis and aliqui. I guess aliquis should be used as quis, used by itself; and aliqui like qui, used together with nouns. But I see sentences like Volo aliquam amare all the time. This seems weird. Might it be that aliquam is actually the feminine accusative of both aliquis and aliqui? According to what I have read, aliquis should be both the masculine and feminine, so the feminine accusative should be aliquem.
    I’m confused.

2

I’ll have a go at these, but I may well be wrong. A more experienced user will no doubt point out the mistakes in my answer… but it’ll help me too, so what the hey :slight_smile:

  1. “He was confirmed to have been seen”. Is that Confirmatus est visus esse or Confirmatus est visum esse? Using the nominative for visus make the most sense to me.

You’re correct to use confirmatus est for ‘he was confirmed’. I believe that visus is the correct case to use, as opposed to visum as it is describing the subject of the statement. However, ‘to have been seen’ is a perfect passive participle which is formed from the fourth principle part. The ‘esse’ is superfluous to requirements, and so confirmatus est visus would be the correct form.

  1. I don’t really understand the difference between aliquis and aliqui. I guess aliquis should be used as quis, used by itself; and aliqui like qui, used together with nouns. But I see sentences like Volo aliquam amare all the time. This seems weird. Might it be that aliquam is actually the feminine accusative of both aliquis and aliqui? According to what I have read, aliquis should be both the masculine and feminine, so the feminine accusative should be aliquem.

I’ve never thought about this in any great detail, but from your specific examples aliquam is the acc. feminine form of aliqua alone, and aliqui(s) is always the masculine form. Hence the masculine acc. is aliquem. Your sentence would translate as ‘I want to love someone [who is female]’. But as I’ve said I’ve never looked into this into any great detail, and I’m sure that as with all latin there are 1001 exceptions to this rule that somebody else might be able to point out.

3

aliquis, aliquid is the pronoun. aliqui qua[e] quod are adjectives.

eum esse visum - for him to have been seen, that he was seen always has accusative as you can see the equivalent of dicit eum esse bonum etc. So you add to confirm say know or whatever and you’ll be fine. To confirm a fact is a(d/f)firmare and an impersonal would be apt hence affirmatum est eum esse conspectum/visum (or even something more imaginitive like in conspectum venisse/ingressum [esse]).

[edit] you are still confused with aliquem, well it can be both masculine and feminine latin is very flexible of course. When you say aliquam, feminam/femellam/puellam is implied, so you are using an adjective substantively i.e. as a noun here.

4

Thanks! :slight_smile:
I still need some more help on the second question, though…

Edit: Oops, Episcopus was too fast, didn’t see his post. Thanks!

5

Er… I guess I should thank you episcopus for pointing out how wrong I was :blush: . I think I need to work harder…