In many cases, the gerund and infinitive are equivalent in English, as in "Seeing is believing" and "To see is to believe." But the phrasal nature of English grammar creates strange complexities, which is why "Being is being perceived" and "Being is to be perceived" don't work.Ī role of English gerunds comparable to their role in Latin is to serve as nouns in prepositional or adverbial phrases, e.g. There's nothing comparable to those rules in Latin. For example, stop can only chain to a gerund, but hope can only chain to a to-infinitive, as in the last example. In the previous example, precando isn't part of the chain of verbs: it functions as an adverbial phrase modifying the compound action.Įnglish gerunds work differently: they somewhat blurrily overlap with infinitives and participles, participating in ad hoc rules about how each specific verb can chain with others. Gerunds provide the function of the infinitive in oblique cases, but they lack the infinitive's ability to take another verb's object as their subject.
( Stop hoping to bend the will of the gods by praying.) Discrimina a gerundiis Thus the infinitive enables verbs to chain together to form compound verbs without subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns, like this:ĭesine fata deum flecti sperare precando. Lors de sa descente aux Enfers, Énée rencontre Palinure, son pilote mort noyé sur les côtes d’Italie. The act of Marcus leaving is named rather than asserted directly as it would be in Marcus discedit, which has a tense. The object of vidit is Marcum, but the infinitive extends it so the sentence claims that Julia saw the act of Marcus leaving. Taking an accusative noun as a subject enables the infinitive to operate on the object of another verb, like this: What good will the piety of Eurybates (392-96) do His interminable speech46 describing. The claiming is done by the real verb of the sentence, in this case est. Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando (Verg. When an infinitive has a subject, it's just abstractly denoting "the subject doing that action" without claiming anything about it. Since an infinitive doesn't make a claim about its subject, it doesn't agree in number with its subject. (Today it is necessary that you walk alone.) Infinitives are different from ordinary nouns in that they can take objects and adverbs just like verbs, and they can take an accusative noun as their subject, like this: (To err is human.) Objectum est subjectum It's neuter and singular, which an adjective must agree with: Just like any other noun, an infinitive even has gender and number. (It's one thing to wish, another to be able.) Genus et numerus It's a name for that meaning-in other words, a nomen, a noun. Instead, the infinitive carries the meaning of a verb abstractly. tied to, a time-hence it doesn't make a claim, which is what verbs do. It's called an infinitive because it's not "bound", i.e. I started to "get" infinitives when I understood that they're nouns.
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