Latin/2nd Declension Lesson 2

Salvēte discipulī discipulaeque!

Today’s lesson continues with the 2nd declension of nouns. Please check out the links on the right and at the foot for previous lessons and vocabulary.

New Grammar
Last time we covered the nominative and accusative of nouns of the 2nd declension. These come in two varieties, masculine and neuter. It takes a while to master the different endings, so today’s sentences will continue to offer practice in nominative and accusative. But we’ll also add the ablative case. There is no difference between masculine and neuter in this case: the ablative singular ends in –o and the ablative plural ends in –is. As you may remember from the 1st declension, the ablative is used to express the object of some prepositions, but it has many other uses. It’s kind of a “junk drawer” grammar form, actually. We’ll add another two prepositions that take the ablative case for their objects.

Also, since we have learned some masculine 1st declension nouns, we use the masculine adjectives to modify them, even though the endings do not match. This is where I really look forward to using the drop-down menu to pick the right word ending, because it requires some serious thought!

Practice
We hope the pace is about right and the difficulty level is neither overwhelming nor too easy. Until next time, when we will work on the genitive case, valēte!