The goal of this short grammar lesson is to
| Latin | English |
|---|---|
| puella | girl |
| puellae | girls |
| villa | house |
| villae | houses |
| amat | (he/she) loves |
First, we have to understand what a declension is. A declension is a way of changing a word to show its grammatical role in a sentence, such as its case, number, or gender. In Latin, words change to show their role in the sentence. For now, I want to focus on nouns and two of their roles.
Latin has 5 Declensions. For now, I want to focus on The First Declension, which includes (almost) all feminine nouns. You can recognize something belonging to The 1st Declension if the ending of the stem ends with an '-a'. To create the stem, simply take a word, say, puella (meaning girl), and remove the '-a' at the end to get the stem: 'puell-'. From this stem, you can add (or recognize) the various case endings of the First Declension to form the full declension of the noun.
| Case | Singular Ending | Plural Ending | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominative | -a | -ae | rosa (rose) / rosae (roses) |
| Accusative | -am | -as | rosam (rose) / rosas (roses) |
Unlike English, Latin doesn't use articles like "the" or "a." Instead, Latin uses word endings to show if something is specific or general, so articles aren't needed. Also, Latin sentences don’t follow the same word order as English. This is because in Latin, word endings show how words are related, so the order of the words can be more flexible.
* When plural, 'amat' changes to 'amant' because the verb must agree with a plural subject in both number and person, and in Latin, the ending '-ant' is used for third-person plural in the present tense.