Latin Interjections
An interjections is a word or phrase which doesn't have much grammatical
connection to the rest of a sentence. In some cases, an interjection
may serve as an entire sentence.
Some relatively clean examples in English -- the interjection is in boldface:
- Egad! August, to think that even Brutus would join the rebels.
- The sum of these two power series yields well uh an analytic
continuation of Riemann's zeta function.
- Doh!
- Darn it!
- Oh!
Latin also has interjections. Some indicate emotion, some derive
from invocations of members of the Roman or Greek pantheon, some are
Greek borrowings, while others are taken from other parts of speech.
(Translations in italics are guesses by me.)
G-rated examples:
- age
(imperative of
ago, agere (III), egi,
actus to drive, to urge, to conduct) Come! Well!
- ecce (astonishment) behold!
- ehem (pleasant surprise) wow!
- eheu (pain) ow! oh!
- eho (rebuke) see here!
- ehodum (rebuke) now see here!
- ei, hei (fear or dismay)
- eia, heia (praise) good! (haste) quick!
- eia age (haste) quickly now! come quick!
- em, hem
(probably from imperative eme of
emo, emere (III), emi,
emptus to aquire, to buy) (1) Here you are! (2) There you are!
(followed by a dative indicating something that is being given.)
- eu (ironic) great! (Great! Now it will take a mere two hundred years
for me to finish.)
- euge (praise) terrific!
- euhoe, evoe, evae (cry of ecstasy at a Bacchanal)
eeyow!
- Hercle By Hercules!
- heu, eheu, vae (sorrow) alas!
- heus (drawing attention) hey!
- io (joy!) ho!
- Iove By Jove!
- lo (from Greek?) Lo! (as in "Lo, how a rose e'er blooming...")
- o (astonishment) oh!
- Pol Pollux! Polydeuces!
- papae (delight!) wonderful!
- pro oh!
- pro pudor fie! for shame
- pro di immortales heavens above! heavens to betsy! (literally:
for the immortal gods!)
- st shhh!
- vae woe! (with dative) woe to
(e.g. vae mihi Woe is me!)
(Sources for the initial version of this page:
Allen & Greenough New Latin Grammar
[referenced on main page], The New College Latin & English Dictionary
[also referenced on main page], and
William Whitaker's Words
Mail comments to
Eric Conrad
(econrad@math.ohio-state.edu).
Sursum adeamus! (Back to the Latin home page)
Domum Erici adeamus! (Back to Eric's home page)
Last updated:
Thu Jul 31 13:51:47 EDT 2003