Latin/Personal Pronouns Lesson 2

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.

As always, if you want to skip grammar and jump to sample sentences, just skip down to the bottom section of this post.

New Grammar
Today we continue learning about personal pronouns in Latin. This time, it will be the 2nd person pronouns, expressing the person or persons spoken to. Of course in English we have lost our distinction between singular you and plural you. It used to be thou/thee/thine in the singular and ye/you/your in the plural. Of course we have various regional ways of indicating you plural in the US: y’all, y’uns, youse. And the British have the charming “you lot.” (At least, it seems charming to me when I read it in books). For Latin, you will want to learn the declension of these pronouns by their grammatical use in the sentence.

As with 1st person pronouns, the nominative forms are not strictly necessary because the person is shown by the ending of the verb; usually they are used only for emphasis or to avoid confusion when there are multiple persons. We can use the 2nd person forms reflexively (referring back to the subject) in all cases except the nominative. Genitive case is not used as much as the possessive adjectives, which will be reviewed as well. And when you see tēcum or vōbīscum, that is a kind of contraction formed by the preposition “cum” plus an ablative case pronoun, in inverted order. I don’t know for sure, but I think it probably came about because it is easier to say “tēcum” than “cum tē.”

Practice
Our next two lessons will focus on 3rd person pronouns, which have many more forms. Thanks to all who are following along.