Latin/1st Declension Lesson 1

Salvēte omnēs! We hope you are enjoying these lessons in basic Latin. Here are the links that will help you catch up:

This week’s lesson will formally introduce first declension nouns and a few adjectives. We have already encountered a few 1st declension nouns in our basics lessons, but I think we need to study each new class of words systematically, to be able to recognize the consistent patterns. Expect a few lessons on the first declension, then a few on the second. We will introduce verbs as we need them for now.

New Grammar
We’ll concentrate on two cases: the nominative (subject) and the accusative (direct object) in both singular and plural. Nominative singular ends in a, nominative plural in ae. Accusative singular ends in am and accusative plural ends in ās. Future lessons will introduce the other cases.

For example:

All 1st declension nouns are identified by their genitive singular ending ae, which is listed second in the vocabulary. Almost all are feminine in gender except for those such as nauta and agricola, describing a traditionally male occupation (do not expect obsession with gender equity among the ancient Romans!)

There are a few adjectives that will be used with our nouns; the rule for adjectives is that they must agree in gender, number and case with the nouns they modify. Adjectives of quantity (how large? how many?) usually precede the nouns, whereas adjectives of quality (what kind of?) usually follow them – but as usual with Latin, this is more of a guideline than an actual rule.

Practice
That’s all for this lesson; more first declension nouns and the ablative case in the next lesson. Valēte!