Indirect Speech, Part 3

Last time we covered the basics of indirect speech. Here's a sample to refresh your memory before we head to the details.

Latin: Puto Iohannem ambulare
English: I think that John is walking.

But what if we think John was walking earlier? Or that he will be walking later? Right now, all we say is that we think that he is walking right now. How do we deal with tense? All we have is an infinitive. Well, infinitives have tense. So let's stack them up.

Future: Puto Iohannem ambulaturum esse.
Present: Puto Iohannem ambulare.
Past: Puto Iohanem ambulavisse.

The key thing to remember is that the time of the infinitive is relative to the time of the main verb. So the future sentence in English is "I think that John will walk." He hasn't yet, but I think he will. The past in English is "I think John has walked." There's still some tweak left to tense. Check this:

Main verb Imperfect: Putabam Iohannem ambulaturum esse.

See what I did? I changed the main verb, but left the indirect speech as future. This might be said in English as, "I was thinking that John would walk." Of course "would" isn't the only word I could have used. We've got a lot of will/would/may/might flexibility in English, depending on our level of certainty. It's almost baroque really. But I digress. Latin keeps it clean and simple. The infinitive is time relative to the conjugated verb.

What if we want to go passive? I'm going to ignore the possibility of future passive in the indirect speech (I've got a reason). Let's look at an example first.

Latin: Audio meum cattum ratum cepisse.
English: I hear that my cat caught a rat.

Or does it mean this:

English: I hear that a rat caught my cat.

Um. Uh-oh. We've just uncovered the problem with indirect speech in Latin. Both the subject and direct object are in the accusative case in Latin. Never fear! There is a way out. Here's what I want to say in Latin:

I want to say: Meus cattus ratum cepit.

But to say this leads to the trap above. Never fear. Turn the sentence into a passive version of itself.

Now it's passive: Ratus a meo catto captus est.

See how I got rid of the direct object? Good. But we're still missing our indirect speech magic. I'll perform the magic, and you see if you can explain what I did. Again with audio.

Magic: Audio ratum a meo catto captum esse.

And of course if I'm hearing the rat in the act of being caught, I'd say this:

Caught red-handed: Audio ratum a meo catto capi.

Isn't that an odd passive infinitive? I've pretty much shown you the basics and the details of indirect speech. Ready for a quiz?