Latin/Questions

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

For the next few lessions we'd like to cover some basic concepts. Today’s lesson: direct questions.

New Grammar
We’ve had some basic questions mixed in with previous lessons already. The key thing to remember is that in direct questions, the first word of the sentence will be some sort of a question-mark equivalent. It might be a particle/ enclitic e.g. –ne. It might be an adverb, e.g. cūr, ubī. It might be an interrogative pronoun, such as quis, quid. It might be an interrogative adjective such as quī / quae / quod, or quot or quantus. You should be aware that the pronouns and adjectives have unique inflections, which I won’t introduce formally here. A good site to study the interrogative pronouns and adjectives is at the Latin Library. The relative pronouns mentioned at that link are the same forms as the interrogative adjectives but will be introduced later on.

New Vocabulary
(on this list we have 3 nouns, 3 verbs, 3 particles/ adverbs that will caucus with the 4 additional adverbs, 1 pronoun, and 3 adjectives)

Practice
This post contains several lessons’ worth of material, so don’t be worried if it takes longer to master the different question words and their usage. And there is a lot of higher-level grammar that will have to wait, too. For now, it’s good to have a general familiarity with questions, because they are used in so many ways in conversational Latin. Let us know if you spot anything we’ve missed.

In the next lesson we will try to present the “household” vocabulary in Latin. Grātiās vōbīs agō, et habeātis bonam fortūnam!