Latin mecum, tecum, etc.

[Douglas G Kilday]

Lionel Bonnetier (5 Jul 2001) wrote:

>But the trickiest question was: Why did "cum" remain
>a postposition while all other adpositions became
>prepositions in Latin? (And why only with pronouns?)

Well, this is a real head-scratcher. All I can suggest is that <mecum>,
<tecum>, and <secum> were broadly similar in phonetic shape to other words
used adverbially in similar contexts, and continued to sound right despite
the general shift of adpositions to prepositions. I am thinking particularly
of accusative supines used with verbs of motion: "vadunt sessum" 'they go to
sit'; "vadunt mecum" 'they go with me'. Parallels like *mepro and *meab were
not close enough phonetically to adverbs which might fill similar syntactic
slots. If this is right, <nobiscum> and <vobiscum> were preserved by analogy
with the shorter forms. Neither analogy nor common phonetic shape could
preserve expressions like *"exercitu cum", however. We can of course say
"magno cum exercitu", emphasizing the adjective, but the noun must follow
<cum>.

>Thanks for this survey. The same question comes here
>with Attic "peri": Why did it keep the possibility of
>being a postposition while no other adpositions did?

I don't have a clue, since there is no phonetic argument: <amphi> and <anti>
can't follow their objects, even in poetry. It should be noted that
postpositional <peri> in Attic prose is somewhat archaizing. When Thucydides
says "seismon peri" he refers to the time of an earthquake which few of his
readers could have remembered, but most of them as children had likely heard
the graybeards talking about it. Thucydides achieves a similar effect with
the obsolescent dual number, so it is likely that postpositional <peri> was
nearly extinct in normal speech by his time.

DGK