On Friday 8th March 2024, the Irish electorate – that includes me – will be asked to vote on two amendments to the constitution. I won’t go into the relevant issues in detail here, but the proposed changes are intended to (i) broaden the concept of the family to be more inclusive (for example, currently, there is no constitutional recognition of families in which the parents are not married); and (ii) broaden the definition of “care” in the family home beyond the current constitution which emphasizes exclusively the “duties of women” in this regard.
This post is not really about these constitutional amendments but about the much less important issue that the media are describing them as two referendums. I will explain here why I think there is a good argument for the word referenda being used for the voting on 8th March. Regular readers of this blog know that I’m never pedantic about such matters. Well, maybe a little bit, sometimes. Latin was my best subject at O-level, though, so I can’t resist making a comment.
Any dictionary will tell you that “referendum” is obtained from the Latin verb referre which is itself formed as re- (prefix meaning “back”) + ferre (to carry), thus its literal meaning is “carry back” or, more relevantly to the current discussion, “to refer”. Ferre is actually an irregular verb, which complicates the discussion a bit, so I’ll use simpler examples of regular verbs below.
Latin grammar includes two related concepts derived from a verb, the gerund and the gerundive.
The gerund is a verbal noun; such things exist in English in forms that mean `the act of something’, e.g. running, eating, loving.The word formed from a verb with the ending `ing’ can also function as a present participle in English, but we wont be going there. It may easy to muddle up gerunds with participles in English, but not in Latin as they are formed in distinctly different ways.
As an example in the case of ‘loving’ the relevant Latin verb is amare (which conjugates as amo, amas, amat, and all that); the appropriate gerund is amandus. You can this sort of Latin construction surviving in such English words as “graduand”. Note, however, that a gerund has no plural form because that would make no sense in Latin. There are plural forms in English such as `doings’ and `comings and goings’ but I don’t think these are relevant here as I interpret them as jocular, and pedantry is a very serious business.
Related to the gerund is the gerundive which, as its name suggests, is an adjectival form related to the gerund, specifically expressing necessity. Latin being an inflected language, an adjective takes the ending appropriate to the gender of the noun it describes; the gerundive also follows this pattern.
In the ‘loving’ example above, the gerundive form is amandus in a masculine case or, if referring to a female entity, amanda (hence the name Amanda, which means “deserving or requiring love”) or amandum for a neuter noun. In cases where the noun is plural the forms would be amandi, amandae, and amanda. Endings for other gerundives formed from other verbs are constructed in a similar fashion depending on their conjugation. An adjective used without a noun usually means a thing with that property, so amanda would mean a feminine entity deserving love.
From this discussion you can see that in Latin amandum could mean either “loving” (gerund) or “a thing to be loved” (gerundive). Latin grammar is sufficiently precise, however, that the actual meaning will be obvious from the context.
As an aside, based on my own experiences in mathematics and physics, the abbreviation `QED’ which is often placed at the end of a proof is short for `Quod Erat Demonstrandum’, meaning `which was required to be shown’ rather than, as I sometimes facetiously write, `Quite Easily Done’. I’m surprised how many people (especially students) use QED without knowing what it means!
Now, back to referendum. It seems clear to me that this derives from the gerundive and thus means “a thing to be referred” (the thing concerned being of no gender, as is normal in such cases in Latin). So what should be the word for more than one referendum?
I think it depends on the context. The word referenda implies “more than one thing to be referred” not “a thing to be referred multiple times” because the plural in referenda refers to the things not to the instances of referral. The familiar word agenda is formed precisely this way and it means “(a list of things) to be done”. This is not the desired meaning we want for multiple referrals of the same question, such as a second vote on the same issue, which would have to be referendums in English, as there is no Latin word that encapsulates that particular meaning. This is what I argued here. Referenda is, however, precisely the word needed for March 8th, when there will be a single act of voting on two issues.
As supporting evidence I quote this source:
…we maintain that there is value in using referendums for multiple events and referenda for multiple propositions.
I rest my case. Any questions?
P.S. I argue for consistency that, if there is only one item on the agenda, it is an agendum.
In the Dark 