Latin/Locative and Geography

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.

We will have a break from verbs this lesson as we play with geography and place names. We have learned 5 cases for Latin nouns, plus the vocative case for 2nd declension. Classical Latin also uses the remains of a locative case, an adverbial form that describes the “place where”, but only for names of cities, towns, and islands small enough for only one city/town. There is a very good video tutorial on the locative case here but I will also explain as well as I can below.

1st and 2nd declension nouns, if singular, use the same ending as the genitive case (-ae for 1st, -i for 2nd): Roma becomes Romae = at Rome; Corinthus becomes Corinthi = at Corinth. Eboracum (York) becomes Eboraci. “Large islands” for the Romans were Sicilia, Sardinia, Corsica, Cyprus, Crete, and Britannia. Certainly Hibernia (Ireland) today has many towns, but in ancient times there were some uses of Hiberniae for the locative.

1st / 2nd declension plural nouns take the same ending as the ablative (-is). Athenae = Athens becomes Athenis = in/at Athens and Cumae becomes Cumis. Pompeii becomes Pompeiis.

Nouns of declensions 3-5 also use the same ending as the ablative (or sometimes the dative). Carthago becomes Carthagine (or Carthagini) = at Carthage.

Besides the cities, towns and small islands, there are a handful of other very common words that use a special locative. Domi = at home; ruri (rure) = in the country; humi = on the ground.

Words that use a locative to express “place where” use the ablative alone, with no preposition, to express “place from which”, and they use the accusative alone to express “place to which”. But for other words (names of countries or large islands, for example) you must still use a preposition: ad Italiam = to Italy; ab Americā = from America. We’ll learn some city names today that have been around since Roman times, and are generally recognized as the official Latin names of those cities.

Practice
If you have followed all these lessons to this point, you know enough Latin to have some fun with reading some basic Latin texts. Here is the Vicipaedia entry for nationes mundi. The first sentence, “Nationes mundi, hac in commentatione descriptae, sunt liberae mundi civitates, quae suo iure imperioque reguntur,” can be translated, “The nations of the world, described in this study, are free states of the world, which are ruled by their own law and government.”

The following sentences contain vocabulary and constructions we have not learned, but we hope you enjoy puzzling out what you can. And of course, there are many links to follow to many more articles. The Latin version of Wikipedia contains a treasure trove of articles to read, and many of them are very approachable for students at this intermediate level.

Here is a fun Youtube series. It is called Nemausus which is the ancient Roman name for the French city of Nimes. It’s in French with English subtitles, but it does feature a time-traveling gladiator and some Latin. We hope you enjoy it! We will have another geography and places lesson next. As always, if you have questions or comments, please leave them on the discuss page and we will do our best to answer them.

Valēte!