Participios de presente sustantivados en latín

Abstract

There are Latin nouns that seem to come from present participles nominalized at different moments in the history of Latin. Some of them continue to be used as participles or adjectives, while others have abandoned that possibility. Perhaps that is why dictionaries treat them in very dissimilar ways. As far as semantics is concerned, most of them are related to people and, more specifically, to a person's age, family relationships or social relationships ("adulescens", "agens", "amans", "infans", "(in)habitans", "parens", "preaesidens"), whereas only a few refer to non-human animated beings ("animans", "serpens"), and none designate abstract objects or concepts.