Passionate about Plurals

January Latin Challenge: Day 5 of 31

Welcome back to bambasbat for day 5 of the January Latin Challenge! Today we will be learning how to recognise and translate nouns in the singular and plural, both as the subject and the object of sentences. 

This post builds on the concepts from the January Latin Challenge: Day 4 Starting Simple with Singulars, and adding to our knowledge of Latin nouns. I am going to briefly recap what we did yesterday, but if you want the whole thing for extra practice, then you can find it here on the bambasbat page. 

What are nominatives and accusatives?

In Latin we have fancy names for everything because we like to sound clever, but just remember that the nominative case is when a noun is the subject of the sentence, and the accusative case is the object of the sentence. The nominative is in charge and does the action. The accusative is never in charge of the verb and you can think of it as “receiving the action”.

Latin has several types of nouns, which we of course have a fancy name for. We call them “declensions”, and they are 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and so on. While starting, it can help to think of 1^st declension as “feminine”, and 2^nd as “masculine”, like in Romance languages such as French, but its important to remember Latin doesn’t quite have the same grouping of nouns.

We are only going to focus on the first 3 declensions today, but in other posts I will cover the 4^th and 5^th declensions. Subscribe to be notified when they are published!

Why do cases matter?

Latin is very good at signposting it’s grammar, far better than English is. There are specific endings for each role a noun plays, and for each declension there are some similar themes. This table is really important for understanding how to translate sentences, and we will be adding extra rows as we improve our understanding of Latin grammar. It is a good idea to try to learn these singular nominative and accusative endings for the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd declensions.

The defining features of 1^st declension is the -a, or the -am ending. The -a ending is when the noun is in charge, for example femina, and in the accusative, when the noun is the object of the sentence, this becomes feminam. 

In the second declension, on the whole nouns end in -us in the nominative, and when the noun is the object they end -um. For example, with amicus, the friend is in charge, and with amicum, the friend is now the object of the sentence. 

The 3^rd declension is the weird one, this is the “anything else” ending for the nominative singular. So nouns like rex, mercator, and navis all end up here. However, none of them end with -a, and none end with -us, so that is a helpful hint that they are 3^rd declension. In the accusative it is easier, they all end -em: mercator becomes mercatorem, navis becomes navem, and rex becomes regem. rex is odd, as you can see the root of the word needs a little change. -x becomes -g-, because the Romans preferred the sound of regem to rexem. 

Now we have singular nouns all figured out!

Hurray! But what if we want more than one friend, or we have 30 ships? What do we do then? 

Luckily, Latin again signposts this really well. Again, we remember the 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd declension, and we look back at the table. Here is the same table from before, with the plural endings added in.

Now this may look a bit stressful, but bear with me and we will have a look at some sentences using this table to help. You can still see the -a vowel that runs through the 1^st declension, and the -e- that runs through much of the 3^rd declension, so that should be one indicator. See that 2^nd doesn’t keep the -u- vowel all the way through, but has -i ending for nominative plural, and -os for accusative plural. 

Lets look at some sentences. We are keeping it simple, just 3 nouns and 3 verbs. The eagle eyed will spot that I have picked one 1^st declension noun, one 2^nd and one 3^rd, so we can practice using all the endings. First of all, spend a minute or two going through these sentences, and see if you can put any of it together.

1. femina amicum salutat. 

2. navis feminam portat.

3. amicus navem videt.

4. feminae amicos salutant. 

5. naves feminas portant.

6. amici navem vident. 

The explanations are below, so only read on when ready!

For each one, check the table above so you can match up the endings with the case and number.

1. femina is nominative singular so she is in charge, and amicum is the accusative singular, so he is receiving the action. The woman greets the friend.

2. navis is nominative singular, and feminam is accusative singular. The ship carries the woman.

3. amicus is the nominative singular this time, and navem is the accusative singular. the friend sees the ship.

4. I have two nouns, feminae and amicos. Using my table at the top, I know that feminae matches the nominative plural for the 1^st declension, and amicos matches the accusative plural for the 2^nd declension. So I have “women” in charge and “friends” as the object. This means: the women greet the friends.

5. naves could be either nominative or accusative plural, but feminas has to be accusative plural. I can safely assume, since there is no word for “and” in this sentence, that naves is my nominative plural, so this means the ships carry the women.

6. amici is 2^nd declension nominative plural (remember it is amicus in the singular, so I know it is in this column), and navem is accusative singular – did you spot that? The friends see the ship. 

How did you do with those? Let me know in the comments!

One last thing just to be aware of, you may notice that our verbs have changed slightly. That is just because Latin is very meticulous, and a plural nominative needs to have a plural verb.

They’re usually easy to spot, and I will go into this in more depth on Day 10 of the January Latin Challenge when we delve into the Present Tense of verbs. For now, an easy rule of thumb for third person verbs (which are he/she/it and they) is that if one person is doing them it will end in -t, like videt, salutat, and portat. If more than one person is doing it (a plural nominative) it will end in -nt. This is just for if you have plural nominatives. Accusatives don’t affect the verb!

And that’s really all there is to recognising and translating plural nominatives and accusatives! It seems stressful but it isn’t! Keep that table close by while you’re starting out and it will become second nature to you to check the endings. Soon enough you won’t need it at all, but while you are starting it is always good to have helpful tables close at hand! If you want the full table of noun endings we will be using for the next few days of the January Latin Challenge, you can find it here.

See you tomorrow for Day 6!