A sentence in Corderii Colloquia 24,
ille spiritus bonus faxit.
is translated as:
May that good spirit grant it.
How does the pf ind come to have an optative sense here?
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3Hi, Toothrot. Can you explain the reasoning behind the edit reversals? I'm not quite sure why they seemed controversial to you. Cheers.– cmw ♦Commented May 17, 2017 at 16:41
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@C.M.Weimer, rolling back your edit was unintended, sorry.– ToothrotCommented May 17, 2017 at 17:02
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2Can you please explain why you are using the abbreviation? It is less clear and I'm genuinely confused why you are making an issue of it.– brianpckCommented May 17, 2017 at 17:05
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2 Answers
It's actually not indicative, but subjunctive. I know Perseus' morph tool parses it as both indicative and subjunctive, but both Gildersleeve and the OLD say it's subjunctive and do not mention anything about it being indicative:
faxo, faxim (where later writers use fecero, fecerim)
The normal perfect indicative of facio was feci, fecisti, fecit (etc.).
faxim is (according to one theory) the subjunctive (historically: optative) of the old s-aorist; note that Old Latin also had an s-future faxō. There is a rather convoluted discussion of this in Sihler §502.
