Indirect Speech, Part 2

In part 1, I described what indirect speech is. After all, we do have indirect speech in English. A bit of a basic feature. Anyway, in this post we're going to focus on how Latin does it.

Here is my example of English acting like Latin, which is to say it's indirect speech without "that".

English acting like Latin: I know John to be walking.

It can be broken apart into two sentences.

Sentence 1: I know John.
Sentence 2: John is walking. 

Sentence one is the key bit. Look at the verb. Not just any verb will do the trick here. You can't say this:

Garbage: I dance that John is walking.

You need a special verb. Let's call it a head verb for our purposes. Why call it a head verb? First, it is easier to remember than verbum sentiendi for beginning Latin students. Second, the verb originates in your head: hear, see, think, feel, etc. 

Ok, so now to make our two example sentences into Latin.

Sentence 1: Scio Iohannem
       Yes, I know that scio isn't the correct verb here, bear with me for the example.
Sentence 2: Iohannes ambulat.

Again, we meet the key condition for indirect speech: a sentence with a head verb. That done we can do the grammar magic so we can combine the sentences. So you know, it's not this easy:

Latin garbage: Scio Iohannem ambulat.

What's wrong here? I dropped the second Iohannes. He only shows up once. The answer is in the verbs: how many? Two. Any way of putting them in two clauses? No. That's the problem. You only get one conjugated verb per clause. And the verb here is scio. Full stop. Ambulat needs to do something else so it can stop being a rule breaker. 

What can we do? We have two options. We can either go the participle route or the infinitive route. Since we're talking about indirect speech, we're going the infinitive route. So, let's transform sentence to to prepare it to go into sentence 1. (Because the other way just doesn't work.)

Sentence 2: Iohannes ambulat.

Two things are going to happen. I'll do them one at a time. First, the verb needs to become an infinitive.

Sentence 2: Iohannes ambulare

But now we have an ungrammatical sentence. We have an infinitive, which can't have a nominative case noun as subject. Infinitives have accusative case as their subject. Strange but true. So let's fix it.

Sentence 2: Iohannem ambulare

Ok, now we're good to go. Let's line the two sentences up now.

Sentence 1: Scio Iohannem
Sentence 2: Iohannem ambulare

Oh hey, waitaminit. I see the same word twice. Iohannem. This must be where the sentences are joined. Easy! Ok, so now try it. Make two sentences out of it.

Sentence 1 and 2 together: Scio Iohannem ambulare.

And that's the majority of the work in indirect speech in Latin. A few more details are in the next post.