Adjective
neuter (feminine neutra, neuter neutrum); first/second-declension adjective (nominative masculine singular in -er, pronominal)
- neither, neither one
- (grammar) neuter (gender)
- (grammar) neuter, intransitive (of a verb)
Usage notes
- In the grammatical senses, the declension of this adjective is not pronominal, but attributive (regular). Thus for the sense of the grammatical category of "neuter gender", the genitive is neutrī (generis), and the dative is neutrō (generī).
Declension
First/second-declension adjective (nominative masculine singular in -er, pronominal).
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References
- “neuter”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
- “neuter”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
- neuter in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
- Carl Meißner, Henry William Auden (1894) Latin Phrase-Book, London: Macmillan and Co.
- this word is neuter: hoc vocabulum generis neutri (not neutrius) est)
- to be neutral: nullius or neutrius (of two) partis esse
- to be neutral: in neutris partibus esse
- to be neutral: neutram partem sequi
Allen, S. (1965). Vox Latina, p. 63:eu is confined to the forms neu, ceu, seu, the interjections heu and heus, and Greek proper names and borrowings such as Orpheus, Europa, euge, eunuchus. [...] The sound may be produced by combining a short e with an u; what must certainly be avoided is the pronunciation [yū] as in the English neuter1 [...].
Latin neuter is normally trisyllabic, i.e. nĕŭter.
This word is used 11 times by Horace, Ovid, Statius and Lucan together, and never appears with neu- holding ictus; as such, it can always be scanned nĕ.ŭ- (e.g. ut nĕ.ŭ|ter Tā|lis..., Luc. 2.63) and provides no evidence for a diphthongal pronunciation /ne͡u̯.ter/ in these poets. Not used by Vergil or Catullus. An instance of the word in Seneca the Younger's Apocolocyntosis (§12) clearly treats nĕ- as a separate short vowel: saepĕ nĕ|ut.rā || quis nunc | iū.dex; similarly at Anthologia Latina 786, 3. The ictus, and hence the diphthong, is first attested in Terentianus Maurus, and in Late Latin poets becomes usual.
Nevertheless, it's still regularly trisyllabic for Consentius writing in the 5th century Gaul: item si dicat aliquis 'neutrum' disyllabum, quod trisyllabum fere enuntiamus, barbarismum faciet "likewise, if someone says 'neutrum' as a two-syllable when it's normally pronounced as a trisyllable, this will be a foreigner's mispronunciation."