Latin/Animals Lesson 1

Salvēte omnēs! Thanks to all of you who are following along with these lessons. If you are just joining us, check out the lessons you’ve missed in the directory, and feel free to use the other resources to the right.

We start some basic lessons on animals today. You may notice that we are not giving a “plurals” lesson. This is because plurals were covered in our separate lessons on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd declensions. Those lessons not only covered singular and plural forms for each of those declensions, but also the five case endings in singular and the 5 case endings in plural for each of the declensions. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s important to review those lessons on the declensions until they are mastered, because there is so much complexity in the Latin declension and case systems compared to English or most of the modern European languages.

New Vocabulary
Note on gender: animals come in either gender, so it’s probably safe to assume “common” gender (whichever is applicable in a given situation) for all third declension nouns; but if we can’t find a specific listing for common gender, we list what is given in my resources. 1st and 2nd declension nouns are the dominant gender of their declension (usually), and most large animals (where ancient Romans would be able to tell the difference) could have the appropriate ending for their gender; eg,
 * ursa = she-bear, ursus = he-bear.

Most insects are considered feminine. To make it more confusing, there are words like cattus (m.) and fēlēs (f.) that we just have no explanation for. We don’t want to insult male cats by referring to them with the wrong gender noun, but it may not have been very important to the ancient Romans! We’ll just do my best to get the vocabulary across, but realize that there may be some rules about animal gender that we don’t know, or that are taught differently in different texts.

We have samples of nouns from the first three declensions, even including a few of those 3rd-declension i-stems that can be so pesky. And we can’t believe we haven’t introduced the verb amō (love) yet. It’s one of the most common verbs in beginning Latin texts, so it's probably time!