Early difficulties in writing Latin Author:George Perkins Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APPENDIX. Or.—There are five Latin particles by which this word may under various circumstances be translated : aut, vel, ve, sive (sett), an. But it is by no... more » means a matter of indifference which we shall use in any particular case, and we must especially avoid mixing them up merely by way of variety. I have little doubt that Key is right in connecting aut with alter. It offers one of two things, either this or that, but not both: if the one, not the other; if not the one, then the other. So that its natural and probably original employment was in pairs. By leaving out the first of the pair we get the single aut; and by that gradual relaxation of strict usage which almost all words undergo—just as we talk of three alternatives—we may employ several aufs in succession, wherever the notions thus separated are regarded as mutually exclusive, or even, as, for our immediate purpose, essentially distinct. Whenever any one of the things enumerated will serve our turn, aut is not the word. Vel, on the other hand, formed from volo, andmeaning ' if you like,' precisely expresses this state of indifference, where one thing, for our present purpose, is as good as another. Caesar has : ' Allobrogibus sese vel persuasuros existi- mabant, vel vi coacturos, ut per suos fines eos ire paterentur.' If he had used aut...aut, he would have implied that they limited their view to one of the two courses exclusively, but by vel...vel he makes us understand that they contemplated the employment of both. They expected to succeed partly by persuasion, partly by compulsion. Indeed partly...partly is often the best translation of vel...vel. With regard to the single vel (or) it may be remarked that Cicero only uses it in general to correct a previous expression, and introduce one which he thinks p...« less