Starting Simple with Singulars

January Latin Challenge: Day 4 of 31

Today we will start looking at simple sentences in Latin, and getting to grips with nouns in the nominative and accusative cases. I’ll give you the tools to be able to recognise them in Latin.

We will focus on singular sentences, and by that I mean all the nouns will be singular, with just one person in the examples. In tomorrow’s post, snappily called January Latin Challenge: Day 5 Passionate about Plurals, we will move on to slightly more complex sentences.

What are nominatives and accusatives?

The nominative is a fancy word for the subject of the sentence, or the noun in charge of the verb. The accusative is what we call the object of the sentence. It can help to think of this as the “noun receiving the action”, but if you are comfortable with object, stick with that.

In English it is easy to tell which is which. The man greets the girl. Our word order tells us that the man is doing the verb, and the girl is the object of the verb.

In Latin, this is more complex, as word order can be (and often is) all over the place. Instead, the word will change slightly based on the role it is in.

Look at the word “girl”. When the girl is in charge, the word we use is puella. This is our nominative. When she is receiving the action, she is in the accusative, and so we use puellam. This is nice and easy to spot, as we just look for the -m on the end of the noun.

Here are 2 Latin sentences.

1. puella dominum salutat. 

2. puellam dominus salutat.

Can you see which one the girl is in charge of, which one is the nominative form? It’s the first example.

For the second sentence, the girl is not in charge of the sentence, so she is in the accusative case: puellam. The -m is there.

This is a good example of 1st declension nouns.

Declension is another fancy Latin term, this one just means “type”. It can help to think of this as the “feminine” like in French, but we call it the 1st declension. All words in the 1st declension will follow this pattern, with -a/-am endings.

Not all words are in the 1st declension however!

Let’s take a look at the second declension.

dominus means master. This noun is 2nd declension. In the accusative this becomes dominum. Again, we have an -m we can look out for.

Here are our 2 sentences again.

1. puella dominum salutat. 

2. puellam dominus salutat.

Which one has the master in charge, in the nominative case?

It’s the second one this time! Can you see that word order doesn’t matter? The ending of -m tells us who is receiving the action of the verb.

Almost all words in the 2nd declension follow the -us to -um rule.

The third declension

This declension is weird. This one is one of those times where the Romans threw a bunch of rules out the window. Loads of words with all sorts of endings are in the 3rd declension, so I like to call it the “anything else” declension.

For example, mercator (merchant), navis (ship), and rex (king), are all 3rd declension nominatives.

Don’t panic though! You will see that none of them end in -a or -us, which are our 1st and 2nd declension endings, so I can confidently assume nominative nouns with other endings will be 3rd declension.

However, in the accusative all 3rd declension nouns do the same thing: -em, which is helpful.

Here are all the endings we have met today:

If you want to have a go at learning this table, it is a very good idea, as these are essential for your Latin journey.

I hope you have found the explanations useful. Subscribe below for more Latin lessons, and I’ll see you tomorrow on bambasbat for day 5 of the January Latin Challenge!