Nouns: An Overview

(see pages 4-7 in Collins)

Now we start to get into the good stuff.  One thing I found really rewarding about studying Latin is that I finally began to understand grammar and why it is so important.  Grammar is the structure of a language.  You need it, as well as vocabulary, in order to produce nuanced expression in words.  I still need to learn or relearn a lot of my grammar.

We have the eight basic parts of speech necessary to convey thought. (Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections)  Why eight?  That's just how many we turned out to need!  Nouns are pretty essential.  They are words that indicate a person. place or thing, act, or quality.  Nouns have certain characteristics.  These characteristics are:

1) Number - you can have one thing or you can more than one.  Singular or plural.

2) Case - in English we still have a little bit of a case ending system left over from our earlier inflected language heritage.  So we say 'they' for the subject and 'them' to indicate direct object.  That shows case.  Case really mean the job the noun is performing in the sentence.   The case is shown by the ending stuck on the end of the noun.  So nouns have a stem that doesn't change and then endings you plug on to them to show their case (job).

The noun can be the subject of the sentence - in Latin this is the nominative case.

The noun can be the object of the sentence - in Latin this is called the accusative (I think of someone hurling an accusation at someone.  That someone is receiving that accusation - so it is receiving the action of the verb accusation).  Some prepositions (usually ones that connote movement) take the accusative form.

The noun can be a possessive noun - called genitive in Latin - this is when we know to whom something belongs, as in the boy's sword.  For clarity's sake it is best to translate this always as 'of something.'  So we would say the sword of the boy.  This sounds awkward in English sometimes but it makes things much clearer when translating.

There are two other cases.  They are the indirect object (I gave the girl the gift) which in Latin is called the dative case.  To figure out if something is an indirect object see if you can insert 'to' or 'for' into the sentence.  I gave the gift to the girl.  Gift is the direct object - receiving the action; girl is the indirect object.

And the ablative case which is the object of certain prepositions and certain adverbial phrases. Ablative is probably the most complicated case for us to learn, but once you get used to it, it is a very handy case indeed!

Then there are two minor cases - vocative which in English is called direct address.  If I am talking directly to a guy named Marcus and I say his name, I say it in the vocative case - Marci.  That means I'm talking to you, Marci, and not some 3rd person Marcus guy.

Locative - I have never gotten a handle on the locative.  I just know that it makes a difference for the names of certain cities or places and for other cities or places it seems that the case is spelled exactly the same as the nominative so it doesn't matter.  It's weird.  Hopefully, I'll understand this time around.

Declining a noun.  Nouns have patterns that show what their case endings are.  There are five patterns and for organization's sake, they are called simply 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th declension.   These patterns are called declensions and when you are figuring out what the right ending is to show the noun's case - that is called declining a noun.

Here is the first declension noun pattern:

Singular
Nominative        a
Genitive             ae
Dative                ae
Accusative         am
Ablative             ã

Plural
Nominative        ae
Genitive             ārum
Dative                īs
Accusative         ãs
Ablative             īs

3)  Gender.  Before we go on to talk about this first declension, let me back up and talk about another characteristic of nouns that I haven't addressed yet.  Along with number and case (the declension) there is also gender to be considered.  Now in English we don't really emphasize gender.  Sometimes we call ships or cars 'she,' for instance, but that is an exception.  If we know something is male or female then we call it such, but usually objects or nouns are gender neutral.  Even the ones that used to have different endings like 'actor' and 'actress' or going by the wayside.  Now we tend to say 'actors' for both; we say waiter or wait person instead of waitress, etc.  So English really only has a little bit of gender that is incorporated into the language.  In Latin all nouns have a gender and it may or may not make sense why something is considered masculine, feminine or neuter.  This is something that can be difficult to grasp for English speakers.  We just have to memorize what gender each noun is.  However, the more you study and translate, the more you remember and after a while it really does get much easier.

More on First Declension nouns next time.