Wiktionary

nemo

See also: Nemo, and NEMO

English

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Adjective

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nemo (not comparable)

  1. (broadcasting, dated) Acronym of not emanating from main office, i.e. broadcast from some remote location instead.
    • 1929, Popular Science, volume 115, number 4, page 153:
      In New York City alone, there are nearly three dozen of these "nemo" points from which speeches, music, and entertainment are broadcast regularly.
    • 1935, Alison Reppy, Air Law Review, volume 6, page 86:
      All "nemo" broadcasting, except entirely musical, would be abandoned. Stations would not risk broadcasting anything arising outside the studio, as there would be no editorial or censorship power.

Anagrams

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Interlingua

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Pronoun

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nemo

  1. Not any person: nobody, no one. Synonym: necuno.

Latin

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Etymology

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Contraction of the Old Latin phrase ne hemō (“no man”) (Classical ne homō). Compare praeda for praehenda.

Pronunciation

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Pronoun

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nēmō m or f (genitive nēminis)

  1. nobody, no one, no man
    Quem nemo ferro potuit superare nec auro. ― Whom none could overcome with iron or gold.
    Amīcus omnibus, amīcus nemini. ― A friend to all, a friend to none.
    Vicinam neminem amo magis quam te. ― I love a neighbouring nobody more than you.
    Nemo, nisi sapiens, liber est. ― No one, unless he is wise, is free.
    Nemo ante mortem beatus. ― No one [can be called] happy before his death.
    Nemo non formosus filius matri. ― No one fails to be a beautiful son for his mother.
    Absque sanitate nemo felix. ― Without health, no one [is] happy.
    Nemo sine sapientia beatus est. ― No man without wisdom is happy.
    Nemo cum sarcinis enatat. ― No one swims away with his bundles/belongings.
    Nemo est supra leges. ― No one is above the law.
    Nemo ex amoris vulnere sanus abit. ― No one walks away unscathed from the wound of love.
    • c. 4 BCE – 65 CE, Seneca the Younger, De brevitate vitae 15:
      Horum te mori nemo coget, omnes docebunt; horum nemo annos tuos conteret, suos tibi contribuet; nullius ex his sermo periculosus erit, nullius amicitia capitalis, nullius sumptuosa obseruatio.
      No one of these will force you to die, but all will teach you how to die; no one of these will wear out your years, but each will add his own years to yours; conversations with no one of these will bring you peril, the friendship of none will endanger your life, the courting of none will tax your purse.

Usage notes

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  • In sentences that already have a negative word, the negative polarity item quisquam (“anyone, anybody”) is used instead of nēmō. It is preferred in Classical Latin to use "nec quisquam" instead of "et nēmō".[1]
  • Nēmō is sometimes used adjectivally or appositively with a noun that refers to a person.
  • The gender is usually masculine, since the masculine is regularly used in Latin for persons of unspecified gender. It can also be feminine: this is rare, but occurs in apposition with feminine nouns, or as a pronoun, in contexts where a qualifier clearly restricts the scope to female persons. Alternatively, nūlla (the feminine of nūllus) can be used as a pronoun or adjective/determiner.

Declension

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Negative pronoun and determiner, singular only.

singular
masculine feminine
nominative nēmō
genitive nūllī̆us
nēminis1
dative nēminī
accusative nēminem
ablative nūllō
nēmine2 		nūllā
nēmine2

1The genitive nēminis is not used in Classical Latin, and is generally also avoided by later authors.
2The ablative nēmine is not used in Classical Latin, but can be seen in authors from the Imperial period onwards.

Notes on forms:

  • Only the forms nēmō, nēminī and nēminem were used in Classical Latin.
  • The genitive nēminis is attested in some preclassical authors, and in the Christian poet Commodian (c. 3rd-century).[2] Classical Latin authors regularly used nūllī̆us (the genitive singular form of nūllus) instead, and later authors typically follow classical practice in this regard.
  • The ablative nēmine occurs a couple of times in Plautus and appears to have been used freely by prose authors from Tacitus onwards, but was not used in Classical Latin. Wackernagel explains its initial rarity as a consequence of there being few circumstances when the negative particle *ne would have originally been followed directly by an ablative noun.[2]
    • After prepositions that govern the ablative case, Classical Latin authors instead used nūllō and nūllā, the masculine and feminine ablative singular forms of nūllus. Another alternative was to use nūllō adjectivally with homine. See Citations:nullus.
    • For ablative absolute phrases, Wackernagel assumes it was originally preferred to attach the negative prefix in- to the participle or adjective, as in "omnibus inscientibus" (Cicero In Pisonem 89.10) or "inscientibus cunctis" (Livy Ab Urbe Condita 7.5.3), rather than marking negation on the pronoun.[2] Accordingly, Wackernagel regards constructions containing nūllō and a non-negated participle, such as "nullo volente intercedere" (Valerius Maximus, 1st-century), as an innovation.[2] Nevertheless, there do seem to be some examples of ablative absolutes containing nūllō already in Cicero, such as "Palam iam cum hoste nullo impediente bellum iustum geremus (In Catilinam, 2.1.12),[3] "Hoc quam habet vim nisi illam, nihil expedire quod non deceat, etiam si id possis nullo refellente optinere?" (De Officiis 3.77.20), "Ipsae enim ferae nullo insequente saepe incidunt" (De Officiis 3.68.6) and "qui in eum primus invectus est nullo adsentiente" (Epistulae ad Familiares 12.2.1.10).
    • In later authors, nēmine can be found in either of the above contexts; for example, it seems to have been used regularly by Augustine of Hippo, although his work also includes two examples of nūllō in an ablative absolute.[4] However, from at least the 19th century onwards, Latinists came to be aware of the absence of the form in classical authors and consequently eschewed it, as exemplified by the schoolboy mnemonic "From nemo let me never see, neminis and nemine".
  • No plural forms are attested in Classical Latin (compare the non-use of "*nobodies" as a plural negative indefinite pronoun in English). In postclassical Latin, there are some rare examples of plural forms (such as nominative/accusative nēminēs or dative/ablative nēminibus) in contexts where Classical Latin would have either a singular form of nēmō (as a pronoun) or a plural form of nūllus (as an adjective or pronoun).

Derived terms

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Derived terms

Descendants

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  • Italian: nimo
  • Megleno-Romanian: nimea, nimini
  • Romanian: nimeni, nime
  • Sardinian: nemos

References

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  1. ^ Harm Pinkster (2015) The Oxford Latin Syntax, volume 1. The Simple Clause, page 1168
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Wackernagel, Jacob (2009) [1920–1924] David Langslow, editor, Lectures on Syntax, Oxford University Press, translation of Vorlesungen über Syntax (in German), page 739
  3. ^ Bennett, Charles E. (1904) Cicero's selected orations, page 143
  4. ^ Parsons, Wilfrid (1923) A Study of the Vocabulary and Rhetoric of the Letters of Saint Augustine, page 132

Further reading

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  • “nemo”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
  • “nemo”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
  • nemo in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
  • nemo in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
  • nēmō in Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar. Boston & London: Ginn, 1903.
  • Carl Meißner, Henry William Auden (1894) Latin Phrase-Book‎[1], London: Macmillan and Co.
    • Pericles, the greatest man of his day: Pericles, quo nemo tum fuit clarior
    • no man of learning: nemo doctus
    • no one with any pretence to education: nemo mediocriter doctus
  • “nēmō” in volume 9, part 1, column 504, line 26 in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL Open Access), Berlin (formerly Leipzig): De Gruyter (formerly Teubner), 1900–present

Serbo-Croatian

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Alternative forms

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Pronunciation

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  • IPA(key): /nêːmo/
  • Hyphenation: ne‧mo

Adverb

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nȇmo (Cyrillic spelling не̑мо)

  1. mutely, dumbly

Adjective

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nemo

  1. neuter nominative/accusative/vocative singular of nem
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