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Cases and Uses

Table of contents

  1. Cases and Uses
    1. Nominative
    2. Genitive
    3. Accusative
    4. Dative
    5. Ablative

Cases and Uses

While the gender of a noun is assigned according to its dictionary entry and the number of a noun is self-evident (there’s either one of the noun [singular] or more than one [plural]), the case of a noun needs more explanation. Recall that case tells us how a noun functions within a sentence. For example, in the following sentence:

  • The boy kicks the ball.

each of the two nouns, boy and ball, fulfills a different function in the sentence. The boy performs the action of kicking; this makes the boy the subject. The ball, on the other hand, receives the action of kicking; this makes the ball the direct object.

These functions get assigned to specific cases in Latin. Each function is called a use. Each of the cases has multiple uses, and you will need to use context often to determine which use is the most appropriate for the sentence under consideration.

In this chapter, we’ll consider only the core uses of each of the cases; we’ll add more uses to each case as the semester continues.

Nominative

The primary use of the nominative is to indicate that a noun is the subject of a sentence’s verb. For an active voice verb, this means that the subject performs the verb’s action; for a passive voice verb, this means that the subject receives the verb’s action. Take a look at the following examples, with the nominative subject and its translation in bold in each:

  • The boy saw the road.
    • puer viam vīdit.
  • The road was seen by the boy.
    • via ā puerō vīsa est.*

* This sentence contains a perfect passive verb and an ablative of agent, constructions that we’ll learn about later on; this is simply here to illustrate how a nominative subject is still used with a passive verb, even if the subject receives the verb’s action.

We will encounter the other major use of the nominative case, the predicate nominative, later on.

Genitive

The genitive case at its core indicates some kind of connection between two nouns. A common way to translate the genitive is by using the preposition “of” with the genitive noun; we can supply this “of” in translation even though the genitive noun is only one word, and there will not be an explicit word in Latin to render as “of.” Also, a genitive usually appears next to or near the noun that it’s attached to.

One of the most common connections is possession; i.e., we use the genitive case to indicate that one noun possesses or has ownership of another. A genitive of possession can thus be translated with the “of” mentioned above or with an appropriate indication of possession in English, ’s at the end of a noun not ending in -s or simply at the end of a noun already ending in -s.

Take a look at the following examples, with the genitive noun and its translation in bold in each:

  • nōmen puellae
    • the name of the girl or the girl’s name
  • aurum nautārum
    • the gold of the sailors or the sailors’ gold

We will encounter other uses of the genitive later on.

Accusative

We’ll go slightly out of order of the noun ending paradigm here to discuss the accusative case first, the primary use of which is to indicate that a noun is a direct object which receives the action of an transitive active voice verb. “Active voice” means that the subject of the verb performs the verb’s action; “transitive” means that the verb’s definition leads us to expect that action to be performed upon an object. For example:

  • She sees the road.
  • They took the money.

Compare that against examples of intransitive verbs, the definitions of which do not usually lead us to expect the verb to be performed upon something:

  • He slept soundly.
  • The horse stood in the fields.

All of this to say: you cannot have an accusative direct object without a transitive active voice verb. Note the following examples, with the accusative direct object in bold in each:

  • dux nautās vīdit.
    • The leader saw the sailors.
  • pater fīliō nōmen dedit.
    • The father gave a name to his son.

Dative

Note how in that last example, two nouns get affected by the action of giving: nōmen, “name”, and fīliō, “son.” “Name” directly receives the action of giving (it is the thing that is being given), and thus, it is an accusative direct object. “Son”, however, gets indirectly affected by the verb’s action without receiving the action of giving directly. Thus, it is an indirect object, and we use the dative case to indicate that.

One verb that makes it easy to see the role of the indirect object, in both English and Latin, is the verb dō, dare, dedī, datus - to give. Latin grammarians in antiquity thought so, too: we have borrowed our term from the Latin dativus casus, “the case connected with giving.”

In English, we can express the indirect object either by word order or with a preposition such as “to” or “for”. Note the following examples with the dative indirect object highlighted in bold in each:

  • pater fīliō nōmen dedit.
    • The father gave a name to his son.
    • The father gave his son a name.
  • puellae equīs cībum dedērunt.
    • The girls gave food to the horses.
    • The girls gave the horses food.

Ablative

The ablative case is extremely versatile and capacious, with many uses that we’ll encounter throughout the course of the semester. At its core, the ablative indicates a sense of separation (the term ‘ablative’ derives from the Latin verb abferō, “to carry away”), but it can perform a variety of functions including serving as the object of prepositions and indicating the actor of a passive verb. We’ll explore these uses with examples later on.


All material developed by Daniel Libatique, Dominic Machado, and Neel Smith, and available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license CC BY-SA 4.0