Latin/1st Declension Lesson 3

Salvēte omnēs!

Welcome back to the weekly installment of Latin. Many people keep expressing a desire to learn Latin; here is a series of lessons we hope you will find helpful – see these links for previous information:

New Grammar
This week, we continue with 1st declension nouns, and we will add the genitive case. You may already have noticed that nouns are listed with the genitive singular (or at least its ending) given as the second part of the listing: terra, ae. All 5 declensions are listed in this way, and the genitive singular form is the marker to help you classify which declension it belongs to. Thus, if you see a noun and its genitive singular ends in “ae,” you know it is in the 1st declension. (There are a few 1st declension nouns that are only used in the plural, so their marker is the genitive plural ending, ārum: litterae, litterārum).

Genitive is used to show possession, and in general for modifying uses that would take an “of” phrase in English. In effect, it turns the noun into a possessive noun/adjective. Note that sometimes there is already a possessive adjective that will be used in the same case as its noun, e.g., pecūnia mea, my money. But for expressions that would either require an apostrophe or an of, we use the genitive, e.g., pecūnia puellae, the girl’s money. As always in Latin, the word order is flexible, but the genitive usually comes after the noun it modifies. We will now add it to the case table:

One other thing to note: the gen. s. of the 1st declension is the same as the nom. pl., and their meanings have to be determined by context. I have tried to give some sentences that will give practice to sort out this potential confusion. (It will get worse for a while before it gets better, as we add case endings for different declensions… fair warning!)

Practice
Until next time, then, we hope this last sentence is not true... Utinam bonās memoriās linguae Latinae habeātis! May you all have good memories of Latin!