1. Gerunds and Gerundives AKA Verbal Nouns and Adjectives

2. The Gerundive A gerundive is a verbal adjective. It has -us/-a/-um endings. If the phrase “verbal adjective” puts you in mind of participles, good! Technically, the gerundive is the future passive participle. However, it usually has idiomatic meanings rather than just working as if it was future passive.

3. Forming Gerundives To form a gerundive from a verb, start with the present stem (i.e. take the -re off the 2nd principal part). So, from amare, start with ama- Add the ending -ndus to get the masculine nominative singular (amandus). Use normal -us/-a/-um rules to change this ending for other cases and genders.

4. Forming Gerunds If a gerundive is a verbal adjective, a gerund is a verbal noun (like in the English sentence “I lower my cholesterol by running”. The Latin gerund is formed like the gerundive, however, it only exists in neuter gender, and has no nominative forms or plurals.

5. Telling Them Apart Just remember that, even though they look the same much of the time, they are different parts of speech. Since gerundives are adjectives, you usually see them agreeing with a noun. Since gerunds are nouns, they can stand alone and have a grammatical role in a sentence.

6. What are they for?? The most common use of the gerundive is in an idiom called the gerundive of obligation (or, even worse, the “passive periphrastic”). This meaning is actually very close to the idea of future passive, but instead of, for example, amandus vir meaning “man who will be loved”, it shades over into “man who should/must be loved”.

7. English Mnemonics We actually see the gerundive of obligation in English at times: Agenda (agenda sunt would mean “The things have to be done”). Women’s names such as Amanda or Miranda (puella amanda est=the girl must be loved).

8. Construction For gerundive of obligation, the gerundive, and the noun it agrees with, are in nominative case. The verb is a form of sum. Any tense is allowable. If you want to express someone by whom the action must be done, this, uniquely, goes in DATIVE case. So, militibus castra defendenda sunt, “The camp must be defended by the soldiers”.

9. Comparisons The gerundive of obligation accomplishes something can that also be stated with: debeo+infinitive oportet+infinitive Etc.

10. ? The gerundive of obligation CANNOT be made with a gerund. If you ever see one that seems to have no noun, that’s just because you are mentally adding man/men, woman/women, or thing/things to the sentence, depending on the number and gender of the gerundive. You can do that with any Latin adjective.

11. More Idioms Either the gerund or the gerundive can also be used in a variety of idioms with prepositions, such as: ad/in + accusative gerund/gerundive=purpose. ad discendum=”in order to learn” causā + genitive gerund/gerundive=”for the sake of X”. viros interficiendi causa=”for the sake of killing men”.

12. So What’s the Gerund? In both those stock phrases you can see the gerund’s basic function as a noun made out of a verb. You could also say things like: pueri se exercuerunt natando (The boys exercised by swimming). Ablative of instrument. ars regendi periculosa est (The art of ruling is a dangerous one.) Genitive.

13. English Mnemonic Latin gerunds are less frequent than gerundives in English usage, but they sometimes appear in actual Latin phrases that we still use in formal writing, such as modus operandi (lit. “method of working”).

14. What happened to the nominative??? It would seem to stand to reason that there should be a nominative gerund, to use in the Latin equivalents of sentences like “Dancing is beautiful”. However, for these kinds of sentences, Latin instead uses the infinitive as if it was a noun. You could say saltare pulchrum est for “Dancing is beautiful”. Honors note: in a way, the gerund has to exist in Latin because there’s no way to decline an infinitive. It may be a work-around to deal with the fact that Latin has no word for “the”. Ancient Greek doesn’t have all these messy gerunds; it just sticks the word for “the” in front of its infinitive and declines the “the” however it needs to. Much more elegant.

15. You said we could use gerundives??? With all of this discussion of the difference between nouns and adjectives, you may be wondering why on Earth I said, back on slide 11, that there were constructions where you could use either a gerund or a gerundive. How can nouns and adjectives be interchangeable? If you noticed this, congratulations! It makes NO SENSE AT ALL. However, Latin writers frequently stuck gerundives, rather than gerunds, into all these kinds of phrases. There may be no better reason than that it sounded prettier.

16. Huh?? This usually happens when the gerund would have had a direct object. So, for example, you could write (using a gerund): Catullus vivit carmina scribendi causa (“Catullus lives for the sake of writing poems”. All of that makes sense. The gerund is in genitive, as it should be after causa, and the carmina are neuter plural accusative because they’re the direct object of the “writing” action. However, you would frequently also see Catullus vivit carminum scribendorum causa. This means exactly the same thing, but the whole thing has been turned into a gerundive-and-noun phrase, and it’s ALL still in genitive, but agreeing now with the neuter plural noun (because the gerundive is an adjective).

17. Why??? Honestly, answering that question will make your head spin even in graduate school. Romans did it and we have to live with it. The only really tricky matter here is that, when you translate, the gerundive comes out sounding active voice, with a direct object in some totally nonsensical case. Despite the fact that we just learned that gerundive of obligation is passive. In short, this is something you need to recognize when you see it in a reading, but since we are not doing composition in this course, you don’t need to know when it’s preferable to use gerund v. gerundive. That’s a college topic.