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The gerund and the gerundive look similar and have similar meanings, but they are still distinct as any Latin grammar will tell us. But how did classical Latin come to have these two close but distinct (sets of) forms? Did the gerund split off as a substantivized gerundive, or did the two end up being similar despite very different origins, or something different?

Assuming the two developed from a common origin, when did the distinction emerge? I have no idea how well we might know this kind of thing, so any justified estimate (such as "some time between PIE and Plautus because…") is great. And if there are trustworthy scholarly sources stating that we simply don't know, that's a good answer, too.

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    The gerundive grew out of the gerund. The passive periphrastic (gerundive + esse) used to have a gerund governing the accusative instead, e.g. agitandum est vigilias instead of agitandae sunt vigiliae. EDIT: A similar thing happened with the future active participle, which was often used like a future active infinitive, e.g. Cas. 693 te occisurum ait 'she says she will kill you'.
    – Anonym
    Commented Jul 11, 2017 at 23:36
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    @Anonym That's really an answer, so can you post it as one? It would benefit from some references (or corpus excerpts showing the development), but it's interesting already.
    – Joonas Ilmavirta ♦
    Commented Jul 12, 2017 at 9:33

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The gerundive grew out of the gerund. The passive periphrastic (gerundive + esse) used to have a gerund governing the accusative instead, e.g. agitandum est vigilias instead of agitandae sunt vigiliae. EDIT: A similar thing happened with the future active participle, which was often used like a future active infinitive, e.g. Cas. 693 te occisurum ait 'she says she will kill you'.

– From Anonym Jul 11, 2017 at 23:36 in the comments

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    As far as I know, there is no consensus on this topic in the specialized literature. For example, as you can see in the abstract of this paper, Miller (2000) claims that “The oldest documents in Italic and Latin support the hypothesis that the gerundive is older than the gerund + ACC object”. I think that Joonas's intuition that the gerund split off as a substantivized gerundive" is plausible. See ingentaconnect.com/content/jbp/dia/2000/00000017/00000002/…
    – Mitomino
    Commented May 30 at 16:51
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    Unfortunately, this important paper by Miller (2000) is not mentioned in Pinkster's (2015) Oxford Latin Syntax. Anyway, I recommend the interested readers to take a look at Pinkster's (2015: pages 301-305) section whose title is "5.42 Excursus: The relationship between the gerund and the gerundive (or: Are there a nominative and a non-prepositional accusative of the gerund?)".
    – Mitomino
    Commented May 30 at 17:02

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