On the Origin of Gerund and Gerundive in Latin: A New Reassessment

This short paper addresses a very vexed issue, to which a huge literature has been dedicated so far: the origin of the so-called gerunds and gerundives in Latin. Any previous attempt has proved unconclusive, mainly because of the proliferation of ad hoc rules assumed to account for the nd-forms and even more because of the plethora of solutions. Instead of assuming another etymon for the sake of antagonism, this paper intends to reassess the whole issue within Latin itself: as shown by non-standard syntactical features of Plautinian and Late Latin, there is a morphological relationship between the present participle and the ndō-gerund, used to express simultaneity. Whereas the previous scholarship has taken for granted the assumption that thematic verbs used to have a *-odno- suffix (cf. OLat. -und-), which led to tautological reconstructions totally unparalleled outside Italic, I would tentatively explain the unexpected o-grade of such forms by a crossing with the old o-grade participles (cf. OLat. *uoluns ‘willing’ reflected by uoluntās). Such an approach vindicates the ancient theory according to which -andus reflects *-ātan-ó-(< PIE *-eh2-tn̥n-ó-), provided one assumes that a reana-lysis of *-ātan-ó- was made as a “suffix” *-tanos following the thematic vowel of the first conjugation, which produced *fer-e-tnó- ‘ferendus’ from thematic *fer-e- ‘to bear’