Latin/Demonstratives Lesson 1

Salvēte omnēs! Welcome back to Latin for Wikiversity. Here you can peruse a new lesson in Latin, in a simple format. If you would like to catch up, you can find a directory of lessons, a classified vocabulary list, and Memrise courses at the links on the right.

New grammar
If you want to skip the grammar, please feel free to jump to the sentences below and try them out.

This time, we’ll cover the basics of demonstrative pronouns/adjectives. Words like “this, these, that, those” can be used either as pronouns standing alone, or as adjectives modifying a noun. This might be a good time to review the lessons on pronouns from several months ago, specifically the lesson on
 * third person pronouns singular and
 * third person pronouns plural.

Grammarians will talk about the “near demonstrative” (this/these) and the “far demonstrative” (that/those). Latin has one form for the near demonstrative, hic / haec / hoc and for the far demonstrative, either is/ea/id or ille/illa/illud is used. Since is / ea/ id is more commonly used as the plain 3rd person pronoun, ille / illa / illud is the one most commonly used to point out “that” or “those”, and is a little more emphatic.

But in practical terms, they are used interchangeably both as personal pronouns and demonstratives, and it is important to be able to recognize them. To make things easier to remember, you might say that the declension of hic / haec / hoc sounds a little like an aggressive goose, that comes near you and hisses and honks at you: this goose / these geese are a little too close for comfort. ille / illa / illud makes a sound like a shy little bird over there, trilling away in the forest: that tweeting bird/those tweeting birds are shy and don’t come too close. It’s silly but it may help. (And you’ll be used to bird analogies by the time we get to the quacking relative pronouns).

A table listing of all the pronoun forms can be found here. In this lesson, we’ll work on nominative and accusative forms, and save genitive, dative, and ablative for next lesson.

Note the forms that may be easy to confuse: hic (nom. s. m.) is the same as the adverb hic meaning “here;” haec is use for both nom. s. f. and nom./acc. pl. n.; hoc is both nom. and acc. s. n. and (to be introduced in a later lesson) abl. s. m. and n.; illa is both nom. s. f. and nom./acc. pl. n. (and in a later lesson illā is abl. s. f.); illud is both nom. and acc. s. n. Note that I have also included in parentheses some forms of is / ea / id as alternatives for ille / illa / illud – it would be tedious to do this for every sentence, but they are often used interchangeably.

Practice
Once again, I’ve enjoyed preparing this lesson for you and hope you find it helpful. Please let us know of any errors you find on the talk page. Our next lesson will cover the three other cases of demonstratives (genitive, dative, ablative) that were not used here. Until then, valēte!