CHAPTER 13

Correlative Adjectives and Adverbs, Irregular Adjectives

Exclamations are often distinguished from questions by punctuation alone. Since punctuation was sporadic and inconsistent till well after the invention of printing encouraged uniformity, and since our information about classical texts is in any case derived almost entirely from manuscripts written many centuries after the autograph, printing an exclamation (quam ferox est aper!) or a question (quam ferox est aper?) is often entirely a matter of modern editorial choice. Especially in the short exchanges in lively dialogue form in Roman comedy, punctuation (to say nothing of the attribution of the dialogue to speakers) can be very doubtful.

etiam is a compound of et and iam (jam), but the i is a short vowel, not a consonant. et can also be used alone in the sense “even”: et piratae liberos amant.

In the expressions discussed in this chapter, be careful to distinguish the specific sense of the words used: