Re: IE finite verb forms as non-finite ones

At 1:43:53 PM on Monday, March 28, 2011, Rick McCallister wrote:

> ***R And you're letting the lack of a clause marker throw
> a wrench into your interpretation. Latin seems to drop
> markers right and left --go look at a collection of Latin
> mottoes, until you figure out that clause markers are
> missing many of them don't make sense. It's part and
> parcel of the literary style. Where is the "must" in
> Carthago delenda est? Latin is not Spanish nor Vulgar
> Latin and it seems as if you're trying to read it as such.
> So much for my year of Latin in one semester of summer
> school 25 years ago. BTW: you'll notice that the motto
> style even carries over into English and Scots if you look
> at family mottoes --one of the my favorites "Touch not the
> Cat but a glove" from one of the Clan Chattan branches.

I don't see that anything has been dropped from that one:
'Don't <verb> the <noun_1> without a <noun_2>' is an
inherently ambiguous construction. Whether the
prepositional phrase refers to <noun_1> or to the potential
<verb>-er is normally determined by context and semantics,
neither of which helps greatly in this case.

Brian