Week 2

Declension and Case

Latin is an inflected language, which means that we determine the role most words have in a sentence by their endings rather than their position with respect to other words. There are two main types of inflection in Latin: conjugation for verbs and declension for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. We will discuss conjugation at a later date.

Declension gives nouns, pronouns, and adjectives different endings based on the role they play in a sentence. Think back to last week when we talked about the different roles nouns and pronouns can take in a sentence: subjects, objects of possession, indirect objects, direct objects, and objects of prepositions. When we decline a noun, pronoun, or adjective, we assign it a certain ending depending on which of these roles it plays.

These classes of endings have a special name: cases. And while the cases are not completely identical to the English roles we discussed before, they are very similar and we can discuss the intricacies at a later date. The cases are as follows:

• nominative - subjects

• genitive - objects of possession

• dative - indirect objects

• accusative - direct objects

• ablative - objects of prepositions

Different nouns are assigned different endings based on which declension group (or just declension) they are in. There are five declension groups, but most nouns are in the first three. If you are interested in in seeing the full chart, click here. For now, let us focus on learning the nominative, accusative, and ablative cases for the first three declensions. See the chart below.

All the words you have learned so far are in the nominative singular. To get the other endings, just remove the nominative singular ending for whichever declension it is in and add the new one. The only exception is the third declension, where the nominative singular is unique. Every other form has the same root plus some ending though, so if you do the same process with some other form (e.g. accusative singular), you can find all the non-nominative singular forms. For this reason, most dictionary entries provide the genitive singular alongside the nominative singular for all nouns. (e.g. pater, patris m.). We will start doing that ourselves in a few weeks.

See the videos at right for a more intricate explanation of the above. If you would like examples, please see the example words on this chart and focus on the forms we are learning this week.