An English Comparison of Latin Interrogative Adjectives

One of the reasons Latin is so difficult to learn by native English speakers is that Latin is a very precise language. This preciseness comes with a price in the form of more complicated and numerous inflected forms. As a largely uninflected language, English must be more verbose to express the intricacies of proper grammar. As an inflected language, Latin simply changes the form of its verbiage rather than adding additional words to reflect the same grammatical usage.

Interrogative adjectives express questions to the reader or listener by asking questions about a noun. Whereas English simply uses a different word to express different types of questions, Latin additionally divides its interrogative adjectives into four distinct categories. These categories, like many constructions in Latin, make the use of interrogative adjectives more precise but inevitably more complicated.

To indicate the type of question being asked with an interrogative adjective, English uses words such as “what”, “whose”, and “which.” When preceded by a noun and used to ask a question about that noun, these words are known as interrogative adjectives. For example:

What fruit grows in the field?

Which book is on the table?

Whose sword is in the road?

In English, “what” and “which” are used to ask a variety of questions. For example:

Which man dropped his sword in the road?

What kind of man dropped his sword in the road?

How much anger does the man feel?

Notice that through the addition of other words such as “kind” and “much”, English is able to ask slightly different types of questions about the nouns in the sentences above. Latin does this with a very different method.

Latin has four distinct kinds of interrogative adjectives each with its own separate function in asking questions about a noun in a sentence. Just like any type of adjective, Latin interrogative adjectives must agree with the nouns they modify in case, number, and gender. Recall that the noun and the adjective that modifies it may not necessarily have the same form.

The simplest employment of interrogative adjectives in Latin occurs when the question about the noun asks “what.” For this type of question, “qui, quae, quod” (literally “what”) is used. For example:

Quam bacam in agro agricola crescit?

What fruit is the farmer growing in the field?

Latin students often wonder why “quam bacam” is in the accusative case. It is because “bacam” is a direct object in the sentence and “quam” is simply agreeing with the noun it modifies in case, number, and gender. By rearranging the translation of the sentence from Latin to English, its function as a direct object becomes easier to see. For example:

The farmer is growing what fruit in the field?

Although this is a non-standard form of a question in English, this arrangement clearly shows that “farmer” is the subject to the verb phrase “is growing” with “what fruit” acting as the direct object, hence the accusative case.

Latin can also ask “what kind of” questions using interrogative adjectives. There are two ways to express this type of question. One is with the use of “qui, quae, quod” again. For example:

Quae baca in agro crescit?

What kind of fruit is growing in the field?

Notice that “quae baca” is the subject of the sentence and is, therefore, in the nominative case. Also, notice that the interrogative adjective “quae” agrees with the noun it modifies “baca” in case, number, and gender but not form.