After Verbs to Remember

DESCRIPTION: Grammatical mnemonic: "After verbs to remember, to pity, forget, The genitive case must be properly set." "Add to these, Females, cities, countries, trees."
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1983 (Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood)
KEYWORDS: nonballad | Latin grammar
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Kane-SongsAndSayingsOfAnUlsterChildhood, p. 66, "After verbs to remember, to pity, forget" (1 text)
Roud #25499
NOTES [242 words]: For those who are not familiar with Latin grammar, the normal structure of a sentence is to have a subject, a verb, and an object, e.g. "I remember him" ("I" being the subject, "remember" the verb, and "him" the object). The subject is in the nominative case, the object normally in the accusative. (In English, nouns generally don't have cases, but pronouns do -- for instance, "I" is nominative, "me" is accusative and dative, "my" is genitive; similarly, "he" and "she" are nominative; "him" and "her" accusative/dative; "his" and "hers" genitive).
However, in Latin, a verb can sometimes take an irregular object. That is the case in this rhyme. In Latin, instead of "I remember him," with "him" being accusative, it takes a genitive object -- which, if translated literally, would be "I remember his."
The second part of the rhyme concerns prepositions -- always a problem when translating between languages, because they almost always have different domains. The closest Latin preposition to the English preposition "to" (in the sense of "toward" or "into") is "ad," but the equivalence is imperfect. In the specific cases cited, Latin uses "in" instead of "ad" (in English, this is sort of like using "in" instead of "into"). The rhymes are simply helps to remember ways in which Latin seems unnatural to English speakers. Wish we'd had those when I was having to learn Latin in middle school -- maybe I would actually have learned something! - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: KSUC066A

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