Latin/Personal Pronouns Lesson 1

Salvēte omnēs!

Welcome to all Latin learners! If you’re just joining us and want to catch up, the links you’ll need are on the right.

New grammar
This lesson, we will begin the complex process of learning Latin pronouns (Latin prōnōmina, literally, “in the place of nouns”). Now, we actually learned the nominatives of the personal pronouns, way back in the Basics lessons. To review:

We did not learn the three forms of they: eī (they masculine), eae (they feminine), ea (they neuter). But we’ll put them off for a few more lessons.

These forms are used as subject pronouns, but are not required in Latin, unlike most modern European languages, even if there is no expressed subject. This is because the verb contains a personal ending, making a subject pronoun unnecessary. Thus you can say Ego videō or just Videō, and both expressions mean “I see.” In Latin a subject pronoun is rarely expressed except for emphasis or to avoid confusion.

This lesson, we’ll learn the 4 other cases besides the nominative, but just for the first person pronouns ego and nōs. First person is the grammatical term for the person(s) speaking. Pronouns may not be used consistently in the nominative case, but they are used quite a bit in the various objective cases, particularly in conversational Latin. It’s a little like learning a unique declension of a noun, and for the overview on the case uses, I refer you back to the lessons on the 1st 3 declensions of nouns.

Although there is a genitive form for 1st person pronouns, more commonly the possessive adjective
 * meus, mea, meum (my/mine) or
 * noster, nostra, nostrum (our/ours) is used.

We’ve already used these forms quite a bit, and they follow the rules for 1st/2nd declension adjectives.

Any of the objective cases of the 1st person pronouns can be used reflexively, that is, referring to the subject. In this usage, it will be translated “myself” or “ourselves.” And when the preposition “cum” is used with a personal pronoun, the usual order is reversed and it is contracted into one word, e.g., “mēcum” (not cum mē) = with me.

Practice
Next time we’ll look at 2nd person pronouns. Until then, valēte!