# Personet or Personent



## panjandrum

Greetings, Latin forum.
Christmas is approaching, and once again we are going to sing "Personet hodie voces puerulae", or as it more generally appears "Personent hodie voces puerulae".

My Latin knowledge is very limited, and very ancient, but I understand that this is present subjunctive, and the -et version is singular, the -ent version plural.
And that the general sense of personet/personent is an instruction or command to shout out, to ring, to resound, to make a loud noise.

Should it be personet or personent?
If it should be one or the other, why?


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## Agró

Greetings, panjandrum.

Personent hodie - Wikipedia

Plural agreement with the subject _voces puerulae._


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## panjandrum

Thank you *Agró*

It is Personent on any score that I have used, but the question was asked.
When I searched I have seen at least one example of a published score with Personet.
Now, can I find it again ... Yes *HERE, and HERE another one.  *These are very much a small minority.  If it had only been -et in the web listing, I would have ignored it, but there are at least two commercially published versions as "Personet hodie", so I was prompted to put the question here.


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## panjandrum

Agró said:


> ... Plural agreement with the subject _voces puerulae._


I wondered about that.
I was not sure if the subject of the subjunctive verb should be the person giving the instruction/direction, or the person to whom the instruction/direction was addressed.


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## Agró

_Voces puerulae_ is the subject, nominative case, just as _child voices_ is the subject of the infinitive _resound_, only the English structure with _let sb/so do_ is a bit different from the Latin one:

_Let the child voices resound..._

Or if you read Spanish,

_Que *las voces de los niños* (_subject_) *resuenen *(_subjunctive, too, like in Latin_)..._


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## bearded

panjandrum said:


> I was not sure if the subject of the subjunctive verb should be the person giving the instruction/direction, or the person to whom the instruction/direction was addressed.


Hello
Actually neither nor.. The subject of that verb are the ''voices''.  The sentence means ''children's voices (should) resound today!''  I know that in English you might say ''let voices resound..'', so that would perhaps explain your doubt. But in Latin there is no 'let'.

--cross-posted with Agró --


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## Scholiast

Greetings, panjandrum and others

Agró and bearded are of course quite right. An enthusiastic choral singer myself, I quite frequently find fairly basic grammatical or printing-errors in the Latin (or German) texts of otherwise well-edited scores, which I gleefully point out to Musical Directors. panjandrum was therefore very wise to come here for guidance.

Σ


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## panjandrum

Thank you SO much, Agró, bearded, & Scholiast!
This information is exactly what I was hoping for, and will set so many minds at rest as we happily sing the plural form.
Well, I should confess to overstating that a little, but for those of us who care about things, it is important.


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## effeundici

Wow ... just discovered that person comes from personare. The evolution of Latin is just amazing


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## bearded

effeundici said:


> person comes from personare


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## Agró

*Persona *(_mask_) was the name of the device actors used to be heard.
I wouldn't rule out a connection between *persona *and the verb *persono* (_resound_).


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## bearded

Oh sure, but actually effeundici wrote 'person' - an English word which implausibly derives from 'personare': at least not so directly   .  And (if ever) it would rather be 'personare' that comes from 'persona' and not viceversa, methinks.


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## Scholiast

Sirs, ladies

To this further development of the discussion I come late, for which apologies. And this may call for a new thread, for we risk straying off-topic.

_persōna_, the actor's mask, whence English 'person' and similar nouns in related tongues, is of wholly different origin, possibly Etruscan, from that of [_per_]_sŏnare_, 'to [re]sound', as the discrepant quantities of the principal vowel show.

A good weekend to all.

Σ


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## Agró

Pity. That would have been a beautiful explanation.


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## effeundici

For those who can read Italian

Etimologia : persona;

Basically it says that the mask used to resound the voice of the actors (ut personaret) has then taken the meaning of "personaggio (character)" and finally the meaning of "persona (person)".


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## Scholiast

saluete omnes!


effeundici said:


> Basically it says that the mask used to resound the voice of the actors (ut personaret) has then taken the meaning of "personaggio (character)" and finally the meaning of "persona (person)".


I am afraid effeundici has rather missed the point of my post # 13. The etymology of the noun _persona_ and the verb [_per_]_sonare _are completely independent. The stems are irreducibly different.

Sorry, but as Agró stated (# 14) it would have been a neat explanation.

Σ


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## bearded

effeundici said:


> Etimologia : persona


persona>personare:  That might be a folk etymology. The Italian 'Dizionario etimologico' is a bit outdated.
Cf.





> Il termine "persona" deriva dal latino _persōna_ _persōnam_ derivato probabilmente dall'etrusco[4] _φersu_[5], indi _φersuna_[6], che nelle iscrizioni tombali riportate in questa lingua indica "personaggi mascherati''[/QUOTE
> Persona  Wikipedia


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## Scholiast

@bearded (# 17)

'Folk-etymology' appears to be (understandably as erroneously) right. _OLD_ confirms my belief that _persōna_ is of Etruscan origin, and the stem looks to me as if it is related to Greek πρόσωπον (the -ωπ- bit meaning 'face').

Σ


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