Nominative latin endings how to#

Julia has a stem of Juli- and in the nominative singular (nominative because Julia's the subject, singular because there's only one Julia) the ending is -a. Luckily for us, many women's names were treated as first declension nouns in Latin, so:

Nominative latin endings how to#

First, we need to know how to say Julia in Latin. But, we know most of what we need to know to translate the first one. Now, we're not even going to try translating that second sentence into Latin quite yet. Even in a more complex sentence such as 'Julia hesitantly decided that it would be a wonderful idea to destroy the table by repeatedly kicking it', we can still find the subject fairly easily. So, if the sentence were in Latin, Julia would have to be in the nominative case. For instance, in the sentence 'Julia gives' the subject is Julia (what she gives and to whom she's giving it, we don't know). The nominative, or 'name' from the Latin nomen, case is almost always used for the subject of a sentence. If you see the -ae notation in an entry, it is clear that the word is a first declension noun.

Often, dictionaries will shorten the entry by just printing the genitive singular ending instead of the entire genitive singular. So, if you want an ablative plural (case ending -is), you would just add that ending to mens- to get mensis.ĭictionary Convention

You can add the necessary ending for whatever case and number is needed to that stem. That is what is known as the stem of the word. So, mensae loses the -ae and becomes mens. Knowing that -ae is the ending for the genitive singular, all we need to do is delete that ending from the word. Note how both of those words have the endings that we just said were marks of the first declension nouns. If the nominative singular ends in -a and the genitive singular ends in -ae, we have a first declension noun. First, we need to check to see if we have a first declension noun. How do we determine what the stem (i.e., the part before the ending that remains the same in each case) is and what the ending is? Well, we go back to the dictionary entry that we learn for each word. Memorize all twelve endings even though this lesson will only use four (nominative singular, nominative plural, accusative singular, accusative plural). You will have to memorize these endings you should do this now. We've already seen the first declension in the charts in the introduction to nouns, but let's take a closer look now.

Most first declension nouns are feminine, though a few notable exceptions are masculine. It is the most regular of the five declensions, in that the twelve endings (6 cases X 2 numbers) are always exactly the same. In the dictionary, these ones will list the nominative and genitive, just like a noun: felix, felicis.The first declension is a group of Latin nouns with the same endings. These ones are also fairly rare, but all present participles fall into this category: vir amans, mulier amans, ferrum amans. These ones usually end in -x, like felix (m/f/n): vir felix, mulier felix, ferrum felix. One-termination adjectives, finally, look the same in all three genders. These ones will have two forms listed in the dictionary ( omnis, omne). So while you have ursa major and canis major, it's pirum maj us. Comparatives fall into this category they have -or in the masculine and feminine and -us in the neuter. The vast majority of third-declension adjectives fall into this category, and most of them will have -is in the masculine and feminine and -e in the neuter ( omnis, gravis, similis…).

Two-termination adjectives look the same in the masculine and feminine, but different in the neuter, like omnis (m/f), omne (n). These ones almost exclusively have an -r in the masculine, and they'll have three forms listed in the dictionary ( acer, acris, acre). Three-termination adjectives look different in all three genders, like acer (m), acris (f), acre (n). There are three types of third-declension (genitive in -is) adjectives in Latin, with nicely descriptive names.