Latin in Layman’s - A Rhetoric Revolution

The Regular Comparison of Adjectives


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There are four important rules to remember in this chapter:

  • (1) The affix used in Latin to create comparative adjectives is -ior-, meaning “more, -er (the ending which is added to many English adjectives to make them comparative).” All Latin comparatives employ third-declension endings.
  • (2) The affix used in Latin to create superlative adjectives is -issim-, meaning “most,” or the equivalent of adding “-est” to the end of an adjective in English. All Latin superlatives employ first/second-declension endings.
  • (3) Latin has two ways to say “than” after a comparative form: a construction we’ll call “quam + same case;” and the ablative of comparison.
  • (4) In Latin, quam with a superlative means “as (whatever the adjective is) as possible.”
  • Finally, let’s talk about that word I mention a lot: expectation. When an adjective is comparative, and has its basic sense, “more,” what do you expect to hear after a comparative adjective, e.g. “This is bigger …”? ...than! Than what?!? When comparatives convey an aspect of “more,” they expect a way of articulating the thing which is not “more,” what the bigger thing is bigger than. Latin has two ways of saying “than.” One is to use quam — that’s right, quam again, but not in the sense of “whom” or “how” -- ugh — this time as a conjunction meaning “than.”

    So what case should the word that follows quam be? That is, the thing being compared? Quam’s not a preposition. This is a universal law to abide by.  What’s the grammatical relationship between the two things being compared, e.g. “This is bigger than that.” Grammatically, comparison manages the same way as apposition because two nouns are equated, or in this case not equated… but grammatically that’s the same thing or maybe it’s reciprocal? Don’t quote me on that one but also don’t at (@) me cause we all know how objective language is now. So how do appositives work? They take the same case as the noun to which they’re being equated to.

    So as long as there’s a quam serving as the equivalent of “than,” there’s not much to learn here, but that’s not the only option. Latin has another way of saying “than” and gues what? It’s another use of the ablative case: the ablative of comparison in which the equivalent of the word following “than” in English is put in the ablative case — no quam, no preposition — just the word in the ablative. Of course, there has to be a comparative form to trip off the ablative of comparison, but again it’s very simple, so simple it can be confusing. After all, the solo ablative has a number of other applications in Latin: means, time, separation, even manner.

    For that justification, the Romans used the ablative of comparison less often than “quam + same case,” in fact, only when the thing being compared to was in the nominative or accusative case. How confusing it would be if it were ablative, for instance! A Roman could have put in quam + same case ─ in this case, ablative ─ or not (using the ablative of comparison which all by itself implies “than”), and both would mean “than whatever-the-noun” either way. So using quam just makes everything simpler, clearer. And the Romans liked simple and clear. It was simple, and clear.

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    Latin in Layman’s - A Rhetoric RevolutionBy Liam Connerly

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