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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
Traditionally the Latin second singular imperative consists of the bare stem—note Ferdinand Sommer, Handbuch der Lateinischen Laut- und Formenlehre 516 (Heidelberg, 2nd ed., 1948): “Die 2. sg. act. war endungslos und stellte den nackten Verbalstamm dar…”; Ernst Kieckers, Historische lateinische Grammatik 227 (Muenchen, 1962): “Im Imperativ ist die 2. sing. endungslos”; W. M. Lindsay, The Latin Language 516 (Oxford, 1894): “In the 2 Sg. Act. of the Present Imperative the bare stem of the Verb is used….” These conclusions are based on imperative forms such as amā “love,” monē “warn,” tege “cover,” audī “hear,” cape “take,” alongside infinitives amāre, monēre, tegere, audīre, capere.
1 eds becomes ēts with devoicing of the d under the influence of the following s (with concomitant lengthening of the preceding vowel), apparently by the same mechanism which converts *agtum to āctum (cf. agō), *tegtum to tēctum (cf. tegō), although this phenomenon is not well understood, ts then becomes ss as in 1st sg. possum < *pot-sum note 3rd sg. potest < *pot-est, etc. Geminate clusters are simplified in final position, note e.g. mel “honey” from *mell, cf. gen. sg. mellis.
2 rs becomes rr, note e.g. ferre “carry” from *fer-se, alongside esse “be” from *es-se. Final geminates are simplified, note far “spelt,” gen. sg. farris, os “bone,” gen. sg. ossis, etc.
3 Buck 302, for example, claims that the imperative fer comes from *fere with loss of the final vowel, apparently because the Greek imperative is phere. The relevance of this observation is not clear, es is traditionally considered to be the bare stem of the infinitive esse, although there are difficulties with this analysis.
4 “Prothesis in the Latin verb sum,” Language 41 (1965) pp. 59-64.
5 Since the current use of the asterisk for both reconstructed forms and incorrect forms is confusing, I have used a dagger (†) in this article to mark incorrect forms.
6 Sommer 543 claims that these forms are due to the similarity of the imperatives es and ēs with the 2nd sg. ind. forms es and ēs:
Da bei Apulejus sonst der Indicativ nicht imperativisch verwandt wird, ist anzunehmen, dass die Gleichheit der 2. sg. ind. u. imperat. bei esse and ēsse, deren bindevokallose Form mit der von ferre harmonierte, auch ein imperativisches fers hervorrief.
But this method of verbal formation is no more credible than the equally ad hoc suggestions of Kieckers and Lindsay with regard to the imperative ēs.
7 It is certainly reasonable to ask why consonant-final stems have an imperative morpheme s while vowel-final stems do not, rather than, say, vice versa. The reason is suspected, but discussion of the explanation for the observed distribution is beyond the scope of this article.