Grammar Terms for Latin Students

Grammar Terms for Latin Students. 

Words about NOUNS

Noun (nomen):    A noun in the Latin language is defined as anything that can be thought of or conceived.  People, places, things, abstract concepts and qualities are thought to be nouns. Most nouns are said to be declinable (nihil is an exception). See Case, Declension, Parts of Speech, Sentence.

Noun stem: Formed from the genitive singular form a noun.  Remove the genitive ending and add case endings to decline a noun.

Direct Object: The noun which is the direct object of a transitive verb. See Case, Accusative.

Indirect Object:  The indirect object is said to be equivalent to the dative case. See Dative Case.

Case:  A grammatical role or function a noun, adjective, or pronoun (or any word acting as a noun, adjective or pronoun) plays in a sentence. Latin and Greek indicate such roles principally by adding endings to the word, called case endings. By contrast, English indicates different case principally by the position of a word in a sentence, though there still exist some case endings: e.g., Jerry's friend. Latin recognizes as many as seven such cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative,Vocative, Locative.

*Declension: A pattern of case endings. There are five declensions in Latin.

Nominative case: The noun which is in the nominative case is the subject of the sentence or verb. E.g. The boy runs home. 'The boy' is the subject of the sentence and therefore is in the nominative case. See Subject and Case.

Genitive case: “of” A noun in the genitive case is said to encompass the sense of origin. Thus the genitive usually can be equated to the possessive case in English, although it does occasionally take upon additional meanings. E.g. 'The book of Daniel', 'of Daniel' is said to be in the genitive case. See case.

Dative: “to/for” One of the cases in Latin. Words in the dative case can often be translated into English with the propositions to or for.

Accusative case:  The noun which is in the accusative case is the object of a sentence. E.g. 'The boy runs home.' 'home' is considered to be in the accusative case because it is direct object of the transitive verb 'run'. As well, certain prepositions take the accusative case. See Direct Object and Case.

Ablative cases:  One of the six recognized cases in Latin.  The ablative case signifies that a noun is either the object of a preposition that takes the ablative case, or is being used in one of several adverbial usages which students of Latin must simply learn.

Vocative:  One of the six cases in Latin. It's the form a word has when it's being directly addressed, as in Ave, Caesar, hail Caesar. It had nearly disappeared as an identifiable form of the noun by the classical period, being almost always the same as the nominative case of the noun. The only place it differs is in nouns of the second declension whose nominative ends in -us: Et tu, Brute, You too, Brutus?

Locative:  (Latin III) The locative case is an archaic case which remains in certain nouns (such as domus) meaning 'at'. For example, 'domi' means 'at home'. Latin I and II rarely see nouns in the locative case.

Words about verbs

VERB Word expressing action or state  e.g. run, jump, think, be

Principal Parts:  The building blocks of verbs. They are the stems or roots of all the tenses of a verb. Typically a verb will have four principal parts, unless it's a defective or deponent verb.

·         The first principal part is the stem for the present system of tenses active and passive.  It is the same as the first person singular of the present tense verb.

·         the second principal part is there to give you more information about the first principal part (namely to identify the stem vowel and hence its conjugation). It is also called the infinitive.

·          the third principal part is the stem of the perfect system active. It is the same as the first person singular of the perfect tense verb.

·         and the fourth principal part is used as the participle in the perfect system passive. Some verbs don’t have a 4^th principle part (deponents and defectives)

Verb stem: the part of the verb to which one adds the personal endings that indicate person, number (Latin III: mood and voice too).  Verbs in the present, imperfect and future tense form their stem from the infinitive (or second principle part).  Verbs in perfect tenses form their stems from the third principle part (or perfect, first person, singular).

Conjugation:  The inflection of a verb is called a conjugation. Most verb inflections in English have disappeared, although we still distinguish between I go, he goes, etc. Latin, however,

retains full inflections for most verbs, the forms of which must be mastered in order to

distinguish meaning.

Through conjugation a verb expresses: Person, Number, Tense, Mood and Voice.

Person & Number: A verb agrees with its subject in number and person. There

are Three Persons and Two Numbers, arranged thus:

1st person singular (I) 1st person plural (we)

2nd person singular (you) 2nd person plural (you)

3rd person singular (he, she it) 3rd person plural (they)

Personal endings of present tense verbs: Do you remember the personal endings in Latin in the present system:

           -o,-m     I               -mus   we

           -s        you             -tis   you

           -t        he, she, it     -nt    they

Person: A person can be said to be singular or plural in number. Each Third persons are said to have gender. The gender of the subject of a verb in the third person is determined by context if there is no noun in the nominative case present in the sentence, use a demonstrative pronoun in the nominative case in the desired gender as subject (I, you, she, we, they).   

Table of Persons
Person	Singular	Plural
1st	I, me, mine	We, us, ours
2nd	Thou, thee, thine	Ye, you, yours
3rd	(He, him, his), (She, her, hers), (It, it, its)	They, them, theirs

Tense:    The time period an action took place. Tense is determined by a suffix. Each tense is conjugated differently. There are said to be six tenses in total in the Latin language: Present Imperfect, Future Imperfect, Past Imperfect, Present Perfect, Future Perfect and Past Perfect. These may also be referred to as respectively: Present, Future, Imperfect, Perfect, Future Perfect and Pluperfect.

Perfect Active System of Tenses

Verb tenses in Latin divided into three different systems, depending on which principal part of the verb they use in their formation. The perfect system active of tenses consists of the perfect, future perfect, and pluperfect in the active voice, and they are all formed from the third principal part of the verb.

Add to the perfect stem the following endings:

-ï          -imus

-istï     -istis

-it        -ërunt

Voice:  (Latin III) A term used to describe the relationship between a subject of a verb and the action of the verb. In Latin, there are two voices that are recognized by the verb form. Either the subject is performing the action (active voice) or receiving the action (passive voice). Active: Romani Caesarem laudaverunt, the Romans praised Caesar. Passive: Caesar ab Romanis laudatus est, Caesar was praised by the Romans.

OTHER PARTS OF SPEECH and sentences

Adjective:  A word that DESCRIBES a noun or pronoun  e.g. red, clever, pretty. An adjective qualifies a noun. Its etymology--thrown (iacio) and near (ad)--isn't a particularly useful guide to its meaning, other than indicating that adjectives are typically near the nouns they qualify. Blue skies, tall building.  Adjectives can be in the positive, comparative, or superlative degrees (e.g. good, better, best).

Adverb:  "ADDS" to i.e."modifies" a VERB.  An adverb is a word that qualifies a verb or an adjective (e.g. quickly, enthusiastically). 

A common formation of adverbs in English is an -ly suffix added to an adjective. True = truly; helpful = helpfully. In Latin, adjectives become adverbs by adding suffixes to the adjective in the positive, comparative, or superlative degrees.

Preposition: A word coming before a noun/pronoun to indicate the relationship of that word to other words, e.g. into, from, by, over.    Usually a little word, its job is to link a word to the sentence often by showing how the word is physically related to what's happening.  Prepositions you have seen: a or ab, ad, cum, circum, in, e or ex, prope, sub, trans.

 Some examples in English will help: George is walking toward the city; Betty is with her friend Martha.

You may think of prepositions as duct tape. They bind things together in all kinds of different ways.

When you learn a preposition in Latin, you're going to have to take note of the case it takes its objects in. The dictionary will tell you in this way: de + abl. Do you see? This means that de is a preposition and that it takes its objects in the ablative case. Some prepositions take the ablative case, others take the accusative.

There are even some that can take either. In these instances, the meaning of the preposition changes slightly. For example in + abl. means in, as in place where. But in + acc. means into, as in motion into.

By the way, they're called prepositions because most often they're placed (positum) before (pre) the word they're governing. Though sometimes they come after.

[Latin III] One maddening thing about prepositions in general is that often Latin cases have meanings that we have to translate into English by using one of our prepositions, even though there's no preposition in the Latin. For example, the genitive of the word for girl in Latin is puellae. We'll have to translate this as of the girl.

Interrogative.  It means asking a question. You'll hear this in expressions like interrogative pronoun and interrogative adjective. The former means a pronoun that asks a question, like quid, what? or quis,who? The latter means an adjective that asks a question, like qui homines, which men? or quae femina, which woman.

Conjunction Words that link part of a sentence  e.g. when, and, but

Interjection  An exclamation  e.g. "Oh!", "Alas!", "Hurrah!"

Pronoun: A word that stands in for (pro) a noun. Like this: Everybody knows Betty. She's very popular.

Personal Pronoun

These are pronouns which also convey grammatical person: lst: ego, nos, etc.; 2nd, tu, vos, etc.; 3rd. is, ea, id, etc.

Predicate: The part of the sentence left over after you take the subject out. That is, the subject of a sentence is what you're talking about. The predicate is what you're saying about it. For example, in this sentence the subject group is underlined, and the predicate is in BOLD: The tree that's on the hill is a real monster.