Category talk:Latin first declension adjectives

RFV discussion: October 2019–October 2023

This entry has survived Wiktionary's verification process (permalink).

Please do not re-nominate for verification without comprehensive reasons for doing so.

---

All terms in Category:Latin first declension adjectives

RFV for any neuter form. Instead of "masculine and neuter forms identical to feminine forms" it might be "masculine forms identical to feminine forms; neuter forms not attested". --Marontyan (talk) 18:44, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

There are certainly attested uses of some such adjectives with neuter nouns in some case/number combinations, although it's not commonly seen. I discussed this type of adjective on Benwing's talk page, where Benwing brought up the application of the adjective to the neuter noun vinum (Benwing gave the form vīnum aliēnigena, while Lewis & Short gives a quote for the same phrase in the ablative: "“vino alienigenā utere,” Gell. 2, 24"). Similarly, the L&S entry for indigena gives a citation for its use with the form vinum. I said on the other page that I don't know of any examples of a first-declension form being used for a neuter in the plural, and I am quite suspicious of the neuter plural nominative/accusative forms in "-ae" that we currently display. Many such adjectives seem to have had collateral second-declension forms.--Urszag (talk) 18:54, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

There is also vinus m - might that occur in "vino alienigenā"? --Marontyan (talk) 19:08, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

I just checked the Pliny citation that I mentioned in my last post, and it looks like it is actually ablative as well: "de indigena vino". So you're correct that these forms are not distinctively neuter as opposed to masculine, although I don't believe either of these authors ever uses the masculine nominative form "vinus". I will look for examples of the nominative singular in Classical sources (it's fairly easy to find a few post-Classical examples just by Googling the phrases mentioned above).--Urszag (talk) 19:40, 7 October 2019 (UTC)

A much-mentioned example seems to be the use of ruricola to modify aratrum, in Ovid, but in this case as well the actual attested form doesn't seem to be nominative or accusative: the verse is given as "Tempore ruricolae patiens fit taurus aratri", with the genitive singular.--Urszag (talk) 02:14, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

Another update. The post-classical examples that I mentioned seem to mostly be dictionaries, which are not so great I think as examples of usage. But in any case, here is one concrete example of "indigena" used with an unambiguously neuter noun: "Landwein: vinum indigena, vinum in ipsa terra natum: vinum vernaculum", page 1402 in Ausführliches und möglichst vollständiges deutsch-lateinisches Lexicon oder Worterbuch zur Übung in der lateinischen Sprache, by Immanuel Johann Gerhard Scheller, 1789. Because of the pedagogical tradition of classifying such adjectives as common gender, there seems to be a fairly firmly established idea in taxonomic circles that forms ending in -cola can be used in the nominative as neuter adjectives (these two blog posts reference that idea: https://diaphanus.livejournal.com/1658229.html, https://interretialia.tumblr.com/post/120246141998/atmidolum) so I'd imagine taxonomic examples can be found, but that runs into the issue that you've talked about in your other RFVs.--Urszag (talk) 03:40, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

Are these even really adjectives, and not simply attributive nouns? --Lvovmauro (talk) 07:37, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

Is "attributive" the term you're looking for, or did you mean to say "appositive" instead? Adjectives and appositive nouns are formally distinguished in Latin in certain contexts by the fact that appositive nouns could be of a different gender from the head noun; e.g. "flumen Tiberim". But aside from that, adjectives and appositive nouns tend to behave similarly. So despite the existence of this distinction, there were some doubtful or variable cases. Madvig, transl. Woods 1870 mentions the case of adjectival neuter plural forms victricia and ultricia derived from originally appositive victor/victrix and ultor/ultrix. It seems that compilers of other Latin dictionaries have generally been of the opinion that the use of indigena and alienigena in the quotations above was adjectival.--Urszag (talk) 08:48, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

I've (finally) added a citation of a neuter adjectival use that appears to be fairly unambiguous: "animal cornupeta vel calcitrosum", used in 1644. I'm thus marking this as RFV passed unless anyone wants to further dispute the existence of this category of adjectives.--Urszag (talk) 20:50, 21 October 2023 (UTC)