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Chapter 34: Deponent Verbs Like "Casinus," a male slave dressed up as a bride for a wedding night in Plautus' comedy Casina, or like the men who broke into the all-female Bona Dea festival, deponent verbs are not what they seem. To give another analogy, Latin deponents in some ways resemble the Sony Aibo, the robotic dog. When it is turned off, the Aibo is completely passive. Turn it on, however, and it is almost completely active, fetching bones and answering commands (the one I saw 'understood' Japanese, but I believe that they are now available with different language chips). Here is the Latin deponent, the verb with passive verb forms which generally functions as an active verb. Very often, the deponent takes a direct object Iste canis leporem sequitur that dog of yours is following/pursuing a hare just like an ordinary active verb Non omnes canes eadem amant et admirantur Not all dogs love and admire the same things. Deponent infinitives work like active infinitives, either transitive or intransitive (but note that the present infinitives of third conjugation deponents end in –i, like passive infinitives of that type) Vicinus meus dicit canem tuum in viam profectum esse et carrum sequi My neighbour says that your dog has set out into the road and is chasing a cart. But just as an Aibo doesn't completely function like a living dog (it doesn't chew electrical cords or damage carpets, for example), Latin deponent verbs have some peculiarities which set them off from ordinary active verbs. The big differences come in the participles, of which deponents have four: 1. present participle: active forms with active meanings e.g., hortans, urging sequens, following 2. future participle: active forms with active meanings e.g., hortaturus, -a, um, about to urge secuturus, -a, -um, about to follow 3. gerundive (=future passive participle): passive form with passive meaning e.g., hortandus, -a, um, to be urged sequendus, -a, um, to be followed 4. perfect participle: passive form but active meaning e.g., hortatus, -a, um, having urged secutus, -a, -um, having followed 1 2 Locutus ("Having spoken"—hence the name of Patrick Stewart when taken over by the Borg in Star Trek) Some deponents also have peculiarities with objects. Utor (along with fruor, to enjoy, fungor, to perform, potior, to possess, and vescor, to eat) is followed by a noun in the ablative, when we might otherwise expect a direct object. The technical explanation for this is that utor is a reflexive verb and means 'benefit oneself by means of something,' with the 'something' in the ablative, as one would expect for an ablative of means. e.g., Utor stilo (I use a pencil) Non debemus uti navibus (we shouldn't use the ships). In addition to true deponents, there is a category of verbs known as semi-deponents. For an analogy, I suppose one could think of the cat example of the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, which was sometimes alive and sometimes dead, depending on the circumstances involved. Semi-deponent verbs have active meanings. They have active forms in the present system but deponents in the perfect system. For example: audeo (I dare) audere (to dare) gaudeo (I rejoice) gaudere (to rejoice) ausus sum (I dared) gavisus sum ( I rejoiced) Beware: do not confuse audeo, audere, ausus sum (dare) with audio, audire, audivi, auditum (hear). Finally, some observations about deponent imperatives: • Deponent imperatives look just like passive imperatives, which do exist but are infrequent and thus are not handled in many elementary textbooks. • The second person singular has the same spelling as that of the alternate second person singular of the present indicative (e.g., sequere). • Do not mistake the second person singular imperative for the non-existent active infinitive form.