Passive future-in-the-past

[Quintilianus]

Hi,
I'm having trouble figuring out how one would express the passive future-in-the past in Latin. At least after a relative pronoun (otherwise you could use some sort of impersonal periphrastic way of saying it such as "futurum erat ut" or "in eo erat ut").
For example, "I met someone who was going/about to be married/killed/thrown into the Tiber/whatever".
How did they say this in Latin ? No way of having an exact grammatical equivalence ? They just phrased it in another manner ?
(I think the gerundive is sometimes used in this way, but quite rarely before late Latin and it's primarily got an obligation meaning anyway)

Valete

 

[Glabrigausapes]

You've essentially got it right, if I understand you.

The fact that the native grammar repurposed what was, morphologically speaking, the future passive participle in amāndus (< *amāyetnos) as the so-called 'gerundive' implies that the original use was considered useless. And so your assumption that:

They just phrased it in another manner?

Is right on the money. I mean, if we look at a construction like amatum iri, the 'future passive infinitive' (which I'm sure is relatively uncommon), it's perfectly plain that this idea was cumbersome and unattractive.

Edit: Something like in English, if we have a verb phrase like 'be a jerk' & we need it to be progressive in the hypothetical past, we might end up saying something like:
'Well, I know he lied to me, but I would have been being a jerk if I'd refused to pay.'

 

[Godmy]

If you search the Roman corpus of litterature for "-ndus erat" (or -nda, -ndum) you find some examples, also Ciceronian, and then the question comes: how much did the author wanted to express an obligation and how much past future? In Czech for example in the past tense there is no way to express past future but to express it as a past obligation. So maybe the semantic difference is null in the past? Maybe it is. In such case you could treat those cases as past future (although in the present-future or future-future this shouldn't automatically apply, as long as I'm using just this semantic argument). Some Czech textbooks of Latin or even university scripta showed the -ndus era- in the indicative consequence of tenses tables as a legit past future (some of them used that even for present future and future future), maybe using the similar reasoning, but it's a question.

 

[Godmy]

Maybe this exact phrasing is the "rephrasing" you were looking for. An added meaning to something which properly has a different meaning of its own... (past obligation given in the classical speech a meaning of past future/plan/intention, just like in Czech)

 

[Quintilianus]

Thank you both for your instructive answers which confirm what I thought.

If you search the Roman corpus of litterature

How do you do that ?
In Perseus ?

 

[Godmy]

How do you do that ?

In Perseus ?

I made a post about it (originally for you) in this section with Grammar and other tips

 

[Quintilianus]

Thank you.
I didn't know of http://latin.packhum.org. It'll be useful.

 

[Quintilianus]

Maybe this exact phrasing is the "rephrasing" you were looking for. An added meaning to something which properly has a different meaning of its own... (past obligation given in the classical speech a meaning of past future/plan/intention, just like in Czech)

To come back to this.
It isn't really what I was looking for. It is too scarce and an exception from the obligation meaning -- at least in classical Latin.
I've been trying to see how that could be expressed, to find circumlocutions but haven't come up with anything that seems to have been used by Latin writers.
Such things as : "cui futurum erat ut" "qui futurus erat ut" aren't to be found (or at least they weren't to be found by me these last hours).
This lack of a passive future-in-the-past really came upon me these last days and I can't understand why it didn't before.
I'm afraid this is the kind of tiresome things that irritates me and will haunt me for quite some days yet.

 

[Godmy]

To come back to this.
It isn't really what I was looking for. It is too scarce and an exception from the obligation meaning -- at least in classical Latin.
I've been trying to see how that could be expressed, to find circumlocutions but haven't come up with anything that seems to have been used by Latin writers.
Such things as : "cui futurum erat ut" "qui futurus erat ut" aren't to be found (or at least they weren't to be found by me these last hours).
This lack of a passive future-in-the-past really came upon me these last days and I can't understand why it didn't before.
I'm afraid this is the kind of tiresome things that irritates me and will haunt me for quite some days yet.

You see, there can be two things in play, I mentioned one:

1) the context is rare by nature: this concept is just a rare thing to encounter in any literature generally (by frequency of what concepts speakers generally -no matter of which language- want to communicate) and smaller the corpus is, rarer this is going to be. And if you compare the modern corpora of English we have on the internet (there are at least two big web-sites for them, I don't count Google now, I speak about professionally done language corpora), the Latin corpus is tiny tiny tiny. So the rarity may just be Okay.

2) As I say, my language for example can either describe this as speakers intention/intention of somebody else or indirect obligation "I met someone who was supposed to be killed" / "I met someone who they wanted to kill." / "I met someone who they were going to kill" <- my language can't do it any other way, but it's no problem, because this concept generally is simply rare, it doesn't appear as much and we don't see a problem to use these circumlocutions for this. So I wouldn't expect to find in Latin any special construction for it and in the same time I would believe the past gerundive+esse construction in the relative clauses (at least) to be tantamount in the authors mind to this past future, since the difference may be in the past circumstances near to none.

That's my take on it. If you find anything more or better, please tell us, I'm curious, but my hypothesis is this ^.

 

[Godmy]

Btw. the rarity argument can be safely applied for many other stuff in Latin, since the Roman corpus of literature is quite specific. For example, it's rare to find there dialogues towards females, or even first person female locutor (which could morphologically exhibit itself in the past tenses with the participles, more so with the deponent verbs). And many other things. In the classical literature lots of mundane and every day stuff is wanting, because, unfortunately, Cicero or Plinius never wrote about them... (but Plautus did, but there we transcend to a slightly different corpus, unfortunately).

The language context is always quite specific when it comes to classical Latin corpus.