Institutio Oratoria

Some scholars, however, are so perverse and obstinate in their passion for analogy, that they say audaciter in preference to audacter, the form preferred by all orators, and emicavit for emicuit, and conire for coire. We may permit them to say audivisse, scivisse, tribunale and faciliter, nor will we deprive them of frugalis as an alternative for frugi:

for from what else can frugalitas be formed? They may also be allowed to point out that phrases such as centum milia nummum and fidem deum [*](i.e. nummum and deum should, strictly speaking, be accus. singular. ) involve a

Augustus again in his letters to Gaius Caesar corrects him for preferring calidus to caldus, not on the ground that the former is not Latin, but because it is unpleasing and as he himself puts it in Greek περίεργον (affected).

Some hold that this is just a question of ὀρθοέπεια or correctness of speech, a subject to which I am far from being indifferent. For what can be more necessary than that we should speak correctly? Nay, I even think that, as far as possible, we should cling to correct forms and resist all tendencies to change. But to attempt to retain forms long obsolete and extinct is sheer impertinence and ostentatious pedantry.

I would suggest that the ripe scholar, who says

ave

His way is the right way. Who doubts it? But there is an easier and more frequented path close by. There is, however, nothing which annoys me more than their habit not merely of inferring the nominative from the oblique cases, but of actually altering it. For instance in ebur and robur, the forms regularly used both in writing and speech by the best authors, these gentlemen change their second syllable to o, because their genitives are roboris and eboris, and because sulpur and guttur keep the u in the genitive. So too femur and iecur give rise to similar controversy.

Their proceedings are just as arbitrary as if they were to substitute an o in the genitives of sulpur and guttur on the analogy of eboris and roboris. Thus Antonius Gnipho while admitting robur, ebur and even marmur to be correct, would have their plurals to be ebura, robura and marnura.

If they would only pay attention to the affinities existing between letters, they would realize that robur makes its genitive roboris in precisely the same way that limes, miles, iudex and uindex make their genitives militis, limitis, iudicis and uindicis, not to mention other words to which I have already referred.