cado, cadere, cecidi, ?
The other day I was looking at the statistics collected from my web server logs, and saw that easily more than 80% of people who find my website are looking for my Latin vocab learning tools. They’re pretty basic, but I found them to be somewhat helpful when I was learning Latin. I’m seriously considering expanding it a bit, adding conjugation/declension drills, making it a little prettier, etc.
Anyway, tonight, I got a nice email from a woman who uses the vocab tools, and noticed that there was a problem with fourth principal part of the Latin verb ‘cado’, and it sent me on a somewhat fruitless search for what the right word is.
(A quick primer for those not familiar with Latin verbs: most verbs have four principal parts, which can be used for conjugation. The fourth principal part is the perfect passive participle, e.g. “to have been heard”.)
So then, what is the perfect passive participle of ‘cado’, which means “to fall”?
Before I get into that, consider for a moment what the translation to English would be. “To fall” is usually used as an intransitive verb (the transitive form is mostly obsolete), so “to have been fallen” doesn’t really sound natural. But the translation can be approximated to something like “to have been dropped” or “to have been struck down”.
But what is the actual word that is used? On this there appears to be some disagreement. Wheelock’s Latin says that it’s ‘casurum‘, as does Wiktionary. However, Tyro’s Dictionary says that it’s ‘casum‘, as does All Verbs. Meanwhile, Whitaker’s Words says that ‘casurum‘ is “very rare”, from “later” Latin, and used in the Vulgate Bible, and says it should actually be ‘casusus‘.
I still don’t know which one is correct, and suspect that all three are correct depending on the text that’s used. I can somewhat see how ‘casum‘ might have been correct at some point, but changed as it overlaps with the noun ‘casus‘, which is the noun “fall”, as in “that was a nasty fall”. Or vice versa.
I tried to go searching through prose to see which was most commonly used, but most of what I found was from the Vulgate Bible and used ‘casurum‘. So, I’m still not sure which is actually the “best” word. I’ve changed the site so that it uses ‘casurum‘ to be consistent with Wheelock’s.
So, does anyone definitively know, which is actually best, and what the etymology is?