Nouns Overview

Table of contents

1. Nouns
2. Dictionary Entry
3. Declensions

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Nouns

Nouns are words that indicate people, places, things, or ideas. For example, the bolded words in the following sentences are all nouns:

• The teacher gave the students an exam.
• We ate lunch in the Tully.
• Happiness is a good night’s sleep.

Latin nouns have three characteristics or aspects: gender, number, and case.

• Gender is not related to biological gender (though at times they can align), but it is a classification system that allows us to determine what form an adjective modifying the noun or a pronoun replacing the noun should take (more on this later). Nouns can be one of three of genders: masculine, feminine, or neuter. A noun’s gender cannot be changed, and you can learn a noun’s gender from its dictionary entry (on which see below).

• Number tells us whether the noun in question is singular or plural. When nouns function as the subject of the sentence, number also helps us to determine the proper verb form to use because of a concept called subject-verb agreement, which means that a subject and a verb in a sentence must have the same number. This works exactly as in English. For example, you wouldn’t say “the boys walks to school”; rather, the plural subject “boys” must have a plural verb to agree with it: “the boys walk to school.”

• Case indicates the function of a noun in the sentence. Because Latin is an inflected language, it does not rely on word order to indicate how a word functions in a sentence. Rather, the endings of the noun will change to reflect what it is doing in the sentence - whether it is a subject, direct object, the object of preposition, etc. It will also provide information about the form that a modifying adjective or a replacing pronoun must take (more on this later). Nouns can be one of six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, or vocative.

To summarize, nouns have:

• (Grammatical) Gender
  • Feminine
  • Masculine
  • Neuter
• Number
  • Singular
  • Plural
• Case
  • Nominative
  • Genitive
  • Dative
  • Accusative
  • Ablative
  • Vocative

We’ll learn much more about how each of the cases indicates certain noun functions as the semester goes on; it is enough to know the six possibilities for now.

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Dictionary Entry

How can we determine what aspects a noun “in the wild” has? We need to consult what we call the dictionary entry (that is, how the noun will appear in a dictionary like our Complete Vocabulary). Below we have the dictionary entry for a sample noun, mater:

• mater, matris, f. - mother

Working from left to right:

mater indicates what the nominative singular form of the word is.

matris indicates the genitive singular form of the word. This form tells us two important pieces of information. First, it provides the stem (matr-) that is used to create all cases and numbers of the noun in question except for the nominative singular. Second, the ending, in this example -is, tells us the pattern (often referred to as a declension) that the noun will follow in creating different cases and numbers (more below).

Next, we have grammatical gender, signified here by the “f”, that tells us that mater is feminine. As mentioned above, this is an immutable characteristic.

The last part of the dictionary entry is simply the definition.

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Declensions

As alluded to above, Latin is an inflected language and relies on word endings to reveal how a word functions within the sentence. The process of changing the endings of Latin nouns, adjectives, or pronouns to reflect their function in a sentence is called declension.

There is, however, a second definition of declension – the term can also be used to describe a grouping of nouns that share the same set of endings to reflect different case-number combinations. That means that while two nouns can both be, e.g., accusative singular, if one belongs to one declension but the other belongs to another, the endings on each noun will differ from each other, even though they indicate the same case and number.

There are five major declensions that we will become familiar with, and the declension to which a noun belongs can be easily determined by consulting the genitive singular form in the dictionary entry:

• If the genitive singular entry ends in -ae, then the noun belongs to what we call the first declension (e.g., fīlia, fīliae, f. - daughter).

• If the genitive singular entry ends in -ī, then the noun belongs to what we call the second declension (e.g., fīlius, fīliī, m. - son). NOTE: The nominative singular forms of second declension masculine nouns can end either in -us (e.g., fīlius) or -r (e.g., puer, ager), while the nominative singular forms of second declension neuter nouns usually end in -um. Nevertheless, the genitive singulars of all of these nouns ends in -ī, so they all belong to the second declension!

• If the genitive singular entry ends in -is, then the noun belongs to what we call the third declension (e.g pater, patris, m. - father).

• There are also fourth declension nouns (with a genitive singular in -ūs) and fifth declension nouns (with a genitive singular in -eī or -ēī) that we will discuss later this semester.

You can see a full listing of the possibilities of noun endings on the nouns paradigm page; we’ll go through each of these case-number endings and the uses of each case in the coming classes.

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