SECTION ONE: NOUNS

Nouns are persons, places, things, or ideas. Brisbane and John Howard are nouns, just as a river and philosophy are nouns.

In Latin, nouns have certain characteristics that should be learned. These three things are:

1. Gender: All nouns are either masculine, feminine, or neuter. In Latin dictionaries, this will be indicated by m, f, or n. EVERYTHING has a gender- an island is feminine, for example, while a poet is masculine (even with a poet such as Sappho!).

2. Case: This will be defined in Topic One below, but depending on the use in the sentence, a noun will have different endings, which correspond to cases. These relate to English grammatical terms.

3. Number: A noun may be singular (an island) or plural (islands). Endings again will indicate this.

FROM THE DICTIONARY: A Latin dictionary will give this sort of entry for nouns:

insula, -ae, f, island

This gives you the nominative singular (subject), genitive singular (possessive form), gender, and meaning. It is best when learning nouns that these four items are learned, as all are crucial for recognising and understanding the uses of a word in a sentence.

CASES AND USES

There are five cases and uses for nouns.

CASE USE

Nominative Subject

Accusative Direct Object (Also object of some prepositions)*

Genitive Possession/Ownership

Dative Indirect Object

Ablative Object of Preposition*

* Dictionaries will indicate which cases are used with specific prepositions.

Let’s look at an English example:

The girl’s mother baked me a cake with chocolate icing.

Mother is the subject, the person who did the baking. Mother would be in the nominative case.

The cake is the direct object, what was baked. Cake would be the accusative case.

Me is the indirect object: for whom was the cake baked? Me would be dative case.

Girl’s indicates possession or ownership: whose mother was it? Girl’s would be in the genitive case.

Icing is the object of the preposition with. It adds description to the sentence. Icing would be in the ablative case. ("With" takes the ablative in Latin)

If you have difficulty with these concepts, practice on some English sentences which are provided at the back of this grammar. You need to be comfortable with the cases and uses for a smooth start to the study of Latin.

DECLENSIONS

In an ideal world, all Latin nouns would have the same endings, but there are several different sets of endings that are found. This is why learning the dictionary entry is crucial, as the forms given indicate the declension used. You will be asked to decline nouns: this means to give all forms of the noun, in singular and plural.