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One can certainly use volo with an infinitive to express a wish:

Volo amari!
I want to be loved!

A future sense is often implied, as one would probably interpret that I'm not loved now if I wish that. Are there any examples of similar wishes with a future infinitive? I mean something along the lines of:

Volo amatum iri!
I want to be loved [in the future]!

On its own it strikes me as unidiomatic, but I can imagine use cases. Perhaps something like:

Volo amari hodie, cras auditum iri!
I want to be loved today and be heard tomorrow!

Of course, I could be completely off the mark, but I would be glad to see my intuition proved wrong. The infinitives can be active or passive; volo amaturus esse would be an equally interesting find. Has anybody come across a wish with a future infinitive or something comparable? (I will let you judge what counts as comparable.)

Joonas Ilmavirta
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    The same question could be asked of active infinitives, e.g. Volo amaturus esse. (These all sound weird to me, but who knows...) – TKR Dec 27 '19 at 20:50
  • @TKR Indeed! I had no specific reason to pick passive examples. – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 27 '19 at 21:03
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    Your examples Volo amatum iri and Volo amaturus esse are ungrammatical in Latin (at least, in Early & Classical Latin). But note that this is not an idiosyncratic property of the verb volo: i.e., future infinitives are not possible in so-called "control structures" (e.g. Spero amatum iri. // Spero amaturus esse are also ungrammatical). In contrast, note that verbs like sperare, censere, credere, etc. do take future infinitives in so-called "AcI" structures: e.g., Speravi ego istam tibi parituram filium (Pl. Amp. 718); Censet eo venturum obviam Poenum (Naev. Bell. 40). – Mitomino Dec 28 '19 at 05:49
  • @Mitomino You could argue against such usage in an answer! If the question was "Is volo ever used like this?" then "No, and here's why..." makes a good answer. Insights like that don't need to be hidden in a comment. – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 28 '19 at 20:50
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    Joonas, my comment was not intended as an answer. I thought it can just help you to (re)frame your interesting question: note that all of your examples above involve "control structures". Perhaps you omitted examples involving "AcI structures" because they sound better to you... In my opinion, we should distinguish two questions: (1) whether velle can take a future infinitive in an AcI structure like sperare, censere, etc. (cf. the two examples above) and (2) why all these verbs (velle included) can take present but not future infinitives in "control structures". – Mitomino Dec 29 '19 at 00:50
  • @Joonas llmavirta: Welcome back. Why are you using indirect-speech constructions, after "volo"? In your example why not: "volo amari hodie, cras audiri!"? Why invoke "iri", passive infinitive of "eo", being used impersonally, giving "it is gone" or "there is a going". The supine of a verb (which after a verb-of-motion has the meaning "in order to...") e.g. "auditum", with "iri" = "there is a going in order to be heard"; this rendered in translation to: "it is going to be heard". Isn't "audiri" better? – tony Dec 30 '19 at 12:31
  • @tony If that construction puzzles you, I recommend asking a separate question about it. There is a reason to pick iri, but I agree it's not an obvious choice at all. The whole thing is worth exploring in a question. – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 30 '19 at 12:40
  • @Joonas llmavirta: Knew that I had met this phenomenon before; Q: https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/5230/1982; Lucretius uses indirect speech (creatam esse); though, he is speaking in the first-person. The expression of the speaker's attitude towards a concept. Lucretius and yourself were expressing epistemic modality towards your desires; not facts (expressed by direct speech. [Thanks to Cerberus.]) Little wonder that yourself did not wish to explain it all. Given this, does yourself understand exactly why Mitomino states that your examples "are ungrammatical"? – tony Dec 31 '19 at 10:33
  • @Mitomino: Hello. Me again, please. Given Joonas's experimentation with epistemic modality; why does yourself state that his examples "are ungrammatical"? (What is a "control structure"?) Certain verbs take future infinitives in accusative-infinitive constructions and yourself has given examples. Joonas has used AcI constructions (amatum iri; auditum iri) and "volo" is not irregular. – tony Dec 31 '19 at 10:43
  • @tony The verb velle often takes plain infinitives (as in volo amari), not really ACIs as far as I can tell. (You could read an implicit me but I don't find that necessary and there might be good reasons against it.) The future passive infinitive is amatum iri, so by that rule volo amaturum iri should be grammatical. Mitomino argues that there is another rule: structures like this do not permit future infinitives at all. My question can be then seen as: Is this really the case? Also bear in mind that "ungrammatical" is not far from "not found in classical authors". – Joonas Ilmavirta Dec 31 '19 at 11:15
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    Joonas, the first line of your last comment, as it stands, is not correct since the verb velle does take AcIs: e.g., apud me te esse volo (Pl. Bacch. 58), hoc volo scire te (Pl. Cur. 133), i.a. As pointed out above, one of the problems/questions at issue here is whether velle can behave like sperare: the latter often takes AcIs with future infinitive (e.g., Speravi ego istam tibi parituram filium (Pl. Amp. 718)). – Mitomino Dec 31 '19 at 18:12
  • @tony Simply put, "control structures" are the ones where the subject of the infinitive is not an accusative nominal (unlike in AcI structures, where there is an accusative subject) but it coincides with an element of the main clause: e.g., in Volo vivere the subject of the infinitive is said to be obligatorily "controlled" by the subject of the main verb. Please take a look at the English examples of the following link to understand what "control" means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_(linguistics). – Mitomino Dec 31 '19 at 18:47

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Has anybody come across a wish with a future infinitive or something comparable?

It is certainly not easy to come across an example of a future infinitive with the verb volo, since there are other and more common ways to express a desire for the future in Latin. Nevertheless, the construction you propose is correct, at least in Medieval latin, and here is an example:

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The example comes from the Remigii Autissiodorensis In Artem Donati minorem commentum ad fidem codicum manu scriptorum, a work by Remigius (Remi) of Auxerre, who lived in the 9th century (841 – 908).

As @Mitomino suggested, here is the source for the document: warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/nah173b2327146.pdf (the quote is taken from page 56, 72 of the pdf).

Edit: there are actually many other examples of this (Medieval) construction that can be found in more or less recent documents, here I add some of them from Google Books...

enter image description here You can find this here (p.59)

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(Here)

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(Here)

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(here)

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(yes, another grammar >:)

As far as now, examples in Early & Classical Latin miss.

Shootforthemoon
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  • Any idea what the .i. means in the quote? – TKR Dec 28 '19 at 04:39
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    Your claim "the construction you propose is perfectly correct" does not apply to Early & Classical Latin (e.g., see my comment above). In any case, for relevant searches, it could be useful for you to add the following link of this Medieval document: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/nah173b2327146.pdf (e.g., see page 59). – Mitomino Dec 28 '19 at 06:12
  • @TKR, ".i." appears to mean something like "i.e.". – Mitomino Dec 28 '19 at 06:13
  • @Mitomino True, I should have specified – Shootforthemoon Dec 28 '19 at 08:23
  • The text in the version Mitomino linked to is a bit different, and makes more grammatical sense: Futuro: lectum iri a me volo vel lectum esse a me volo crastino die .i. ego legam cras. Anyway, this is a made-up example in a grammar, so it doesn't necessarily mean this usage ever existed in real Latin. – TKR Dec 30 '19 at 23:37
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    Oh, it looks like there are two relevant passages; the one you quote is on p. 56 in the section on active forms, the one in my comment is on p. 59 in the section of passive forms. But the "active" examples are puzzling. He's calling lectum ire a future active infinitive, which I've never seen before; and what is a me doing in lecturum esse a me volo, which isn't passive? – TKR Dec 30 '19 at 23:45
  • @TKR That's true, thanks for your precious comments! I completely overlooked that there are two identical examples nearby. Well, I can say both sentences make grammatical sense, though probably as you notice, crastino die is more common. He's saying that lectum ire a me, although passive, has an active meaning with respect to a me, that is the logic subject of the active form of 'reading'. Thanks again, I'll edit the answer and correct the quote! – Shootforthemoon Dec 31 '19 at 07:39