Latin grammar
Classified things (represented by common nouns) belong to one of three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter).
The gender of the classified thing is realized by the last syllables of the adjectives, numbers and pronouns that refer to it: e.g. male animals such as hic vir "this man" and hic gallus "this cock", female animals such as haec mulier "this woman" and haec gallīna "this chicken", and either sexually undifferentiated animals such as hoc ovum "this egg" or stuff in general such as hoc "this thing".
Most nouns have five cases: nominative (subject), accusative (object), genitive ("of"), dative ("to" or "for"), and ablative ("with" or "in").
Nouns for places have a seventh case, the locative; this is mostly found with the names of towns and cities, e.g. Rōmae "in Rome".
The difference is shown in the pronouns and adjectives that refer to them, for example: To a certain extent, the genders follow the meanings of the words (for example, winds are masculine, tree-names feminine): Neuter nouns differ from masculine and feminine in two ways: (1) the plural nominative and accusative forms end in -a, e.g. bella "wars", corpora "bodies"; (2) the subject (nominative) and object (accusative) cases are identical.
The nouns fīlia "daughter" and dea "goddess" have dative and ablative plural fīliābus, deābus.
A few 2nd declension nouns, such as vir "man" and puer "boy", lack endings in the nominative and vocative singular.
In the 2nd declension, the genitive plural in some words is optionally -um, especially in poetry:[5][6] deum or deōrum "of the gods", virum or virōrum "of men".
In neuter nouns, the vocative and accusative are always the same as the nominative; the genitive, dative, and ablative are the same as the masculine.
Some decline like the following: mīles "soldier", urbs "city", corpus "body":[7] There are some variations, however.
rēs "thing" is similar to diēs except for a short e in the genitive and dative singular reī.
In addition to the above there are some irregularly declined nouns, mostly borrowed from Greek, such as the name Aenēās "Aeneas" (1st declension masculine).
It is frequently used with verbs of saying or giving: It can also be used with certain adjectives: It is also used with certain verbs such as pāreō "I obey" or persuādeō "I persuade":[19] There are also various idiomatic uses, such as the dative of possession: The ablative case can mean "with", especially when the noun it refers to is a thing rather than a person:[21] Often a phrase consisting of a noun plus participle in the ablative can express time or circumstance.
This is known as an "ablative absolute":[22] It is also frequently used with prepositions, especially those meaning "from", "with", "in", or "by": Another use is in expressions of time and place (except those that give the length of time or distance): The ablative can also mean "from", especially with place names:[23] The locative is a rare case used only with names of cities, small islands, and one or two other words such as domus "home".
Many adjectives belong to the 1st and 2nd declensions, declining in the same way as the nouns puella, dominus, bellum.
An example is ingēns "huge" shown below: In a very few 3rd declension adjectives such as ācer, ācris, ācre "sharp, keen", the feminine is different from the masculine, but only in the nominative and vocative singular.
An example is melior "better": Participles such as dūcēns "leading" usually have -e in the ablative singular, but -ium in the genitive plural.
", aliud "another", aliquid "something") the neuter singular ends in -d. The declension of ille "that" is as follows:[31] Ipse "he himself" is very similar, except that the neuter singular ipsum ends in -m instead of -d. Other very common 3rd person pronouns are hic, haec, hoc "this" and is, ea, id "he, she, it; that".
Like other 3rd person pronouns, these can be used either independently (is "he") or adjectivally (is homō "that man"): Before a vowel, hic and hoc are pronounced as if spelled hicc and hocc.
The first three numbers have masculine, feminine and neuter forms fully declined as follows:[42] ūnus (one) can also be used in the plural, with plural-only nouns, e.g. ūna castra "one camp", ūnae litterae "one letter".
Compounds ending in 1 2 and 3 are the only ones to decline: The "hundreds" numbers are the following: However, 1000 is mille, an indeclinable adjective, but multiples such as duo mīlia (2000) have mīlia as a neuter plural substantive followed by a partitive genitive: Ordinal numbers are all adjectives with regular first- and second-declension endings.
Most are built off of the stems of cardinal numbers (for example, trīcēsimus, -a, -um (30th) from trīgintā (30), sēscentēsimus, -a, -um nōnus, -a, -um (609th) for sēscentī novem (609).
Latin verbs have two voices, active (e.g. dūcō "I lead") and passive (e.g. dūcor "I am led").
Unlike in Ancient Greek or modern English, there is no distinction between perfect (I have done) and simple past (I did).
The strongest surviving evidence suggests that the word order of colloquial Latin was mostly Subject-Object-Verb.
That can be found in some very conservative Romance languages, such as Sardinian and Sicilian in which the verb is still often placed at the end of the sentence (see Vulgar Latin).
One must bear in mind that poets in the Roman world wrote primarily for the ear, not the eye; many premiered their work in recitation for an audience.
Hence, variations in word order served a rhetorical as well as a metrical purpose; they certainly did not prevent understanding.
In Virgil's Eclogues, for example, he writes, Omnia vincit amor, et nōs cēdāmus amōrī!
The ordering in the second sentence of each pair would be correct in Latin and clearly understood, whereas in English it is awkward, at best, and meaningless, at worst:
