The Latin Tamer and the companion website contain thousands of illustrations. For those new to Latin, this section explains how to understand the explanations that appear in the notes after those illustrations. It provides a quick look at how the various kinds of Latin words work. It’s cursory, and just meant to help you follow the explanations between now and when you study these topics in more detail. This material is adapted from Chapters 2 and 3 of The Latin Tamer.
Topics treated below:
There are eight main parts of speech in Latin—that is, eight main types of words. They all correspond to familiar parts of speech in English. Three of them—prepositions (to, for, by, etc.), conjunctions (but, and, or), and interjections (alas!)—are easy to learn, even if they’re sometimes complicated to use. The Latin word, at least, is always the same. Adverbs are mostly that way, too. They change a little when you go from saying quickly (celeriter) to saying more quickly (celerius) or most quickly (celerrimē), but they’re mostly simple in form.
The other four parts of speech are the ones with forms that take time to learn: verbs, nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. And it’s useful to think of those as really amounting to two categories: verbs and the other three, because the other three work in similar ways.
When a word is little, the explanations in this book will sometimes explain what part of speech it is—that it’s a preposition or conjunction, for example. But the explanations don’t identify nouns and verbs and adjectives by those names; you’ll just be able to tell from the words themselves. And sometimes the book doesn’t identify the part of speech of a small word if it’s too tedious. The word nōn, for example, means not. It’s technically an adverb; and having explained that here and now, it won’t be noted again in the hundred or so places where nōn appears ahead.
When you’re shown a Latin sentence in this book, the complete explanation of a noun will look something like this:
Elephantum is the accusative singular form of elephantus, elephantī (2m): elephant.
In case that sentence looks like gibberish now, this section explains what it means.
In English, the same noun with the same spelling can be used in lots of ways. The word elephant stays the same if an elephant tramples someone, or if you’re talking about the trunk of the elephant, or if someone buys food for the elephant, or feeds the elephant, or rides on it, or yells at it. But in Latin the word for “elephant” changes its ending in each of those situations. A noun is said to be in a different case depending on the role the noun plays in the sentence, and each case causes the noun to have a different ending. Here’s a summary of what the cases mean and how the case endings look on the end of the Latin word for elephant: elephantus.
Sometimes an ablative word just sits by itself without a preposition. This is most common when the noun describes the way you did something, or the means by which you did it. So if you rode into town by elephant, we can just say you showed up elephantō. Very elegant!
Notice that elephantō is also the form used when an elephant is in the dative case, as shown above. Sometimes that happens in Latin: the same ending belongs to more than one case. You tell them apart by the context. Dative words don’t come with prepositions; ablative words often do. And dative words usually appear with verbs that make it natural to look for someone to whom or for whom the action is done. The ablative case is a lot more common than the dative.
The case is called ablative because ablātum is a form of the Latin verb meaning to take away, and the oldest function of the ablative case is to denote an object (or place, etc.) that something is taken away from (or otherwise moves away or separates from, etc).
There’s also a locative case that was mostly absorbed into the ablative but is still used in proper names of cities and islands, and a very few other nouns. It’ll be noted in the rare places where it arises.
Those endings just shown would be different if they were plural—that is, if you were talking about multiple elephants. So the explanation of a noun in this book always tells you whether the word is singular or plural.
How nouns are shown. When a Latin noun is encountered in this book, it’ll be displayed like this in its simplest form:
Elephantus, elephantī (2m): elephant.
The first version of the word is the nominative singular form of it. The second is the genitive singular form. Why both? Because every noun has a stem to which the various endings are attached. It’s sometimes hard to see the stem by looking at the nominative singular version of a word, since that form can be irregular; it might not show how the word usually looks and works. But the genitive form is reliable. When you see the stem onto which the genitive ending is put, you know the stem onto which all endings are put for that word.
The “(2m)” means, first, that the word elephantus belongs to the second declension. A declension is a family of nouns. There are five of them. Each declension has its own set of endings for the nouns that it contains. The “m” tells you that the noun is masculine. Every noun is either masculine, feminine, or neuter. This becomes important when adjectives appear in a sentence. An adjective modifies a noun, and it matches the noun in gender. So if you were talking about a white elephant, you’d pick a version of the word white that’s masculine, because elephantus is a masculine noun. You’d refer to the elephantus albus (or albus elephantus; the word order is flexible). Note that Latin doesn’t use articles (like the or a). So the phrase just shown could mean a white elephant or the white elephant.
By the way, the genitive form of a noun also tells you the declension (or family) to which the noun belongs. If the genitive form of the word ends –ae, it belongs to the first declension. If it ends –ī, the word belongs to the second declension. And so forth, as you’ll see later. So putting the “2” after the noun is a little redundant but convenient.
Now you’ve seen what you need to know to understand the explanation of a noun. Let’s go back to the initial example:
Elephantum is the accusative singular form of elephantus, elephantī (2m): elephant.
That means: the word elephantum appears in the illustration. (That’s what the boldface tells you.) It’s the word for elephant. This is the form of the word used when there’s just one elephant and it’s the object of the action described by a verb. The nominative singular form of the word is elephantus; the genitive singular form (elephant’s or of the elephant ) is elephantī. This noun is masculine, and it belongs to the second declension (in other words, it takes its endings from that family).
Sometimes the entry in the notes will be shorter, like this:
Elephantus, elephantī (2m): elephant.
If that’s all you see, it means: the word elephantī appears in the illustration; and that’s the genitive singular form of the noun for elephant. (So it means elephant’s or of the elephant.) Notice that the words “genitive singular” don’t actually appear in the explanation, because you’re supposed to remember that when you see a noun in two forms like this, the second form is the genitive singular.
Depending on where you are in your reading and how much interest you have in a given word, you might want to think about all these details in the notes—or not. In any event, now you’ll at least understand roughly what they mean to convey.
Adjectives match the nouns that they modify. So if you’re told that a word is, say, the ablative plural form of a noun, then any adjective that applies to it will also be ablative and plural. The adjective will also match the gender of the noun. An adjective itself will usually be shown (and learned) in three forms, as in these examples:
Bonus/bona/bonum (1/2): good
Celer/celeris/celere (3): fast
The three forms shown are the masculine, feminine, and neuter versions of the adjective. They’re also the forms that the adjective takes when it’s attached to a singular noun that’s the subject of a sentence—that is, when the noun is in the nominative case. Then there are numbers in parentheses: (1/2) or (3). Those show you what families of endings are used to give the adjectives different meanings. Those endings will be explained later. The point is to know that when an explanation shows you a word in three forms like that with a number afterward, it’s showing you an adjective.
You can usually figure out the stem of an adjective with no trouble by looking at any of its forms. You just remove the case ending, and what remains is the stem. E.g., facilis (m/f nominative singular adjective meaning easy) minus the ending –is = the stem facil–. The endings are all added to that stem. But that approach doesn’t quite work for some kinds of adjectives; you need to see more to figure out their stems. The types of adjectives that present this problem also happen to have the same nominative singular form in all three genders. So for those words the nominative singular form will be shown once, followed by the genitive singular, like this:
Vēlōx, vēlōcis (3, adj.): fast
The second form lets you see the stem: vēlōc–.
Pronouns of various types appear all the time in Latin: he, she, it; this, that; who, what, which, etc.—all the different words that refer to nouns by other names. They take a surprisingly long time to master, because a pronoun (like an adjective) has to match the noun that it refers to in number and gender, and its case (like that of a noun) changes according to its role in a sentence. So there are a few dozen ways to say this, or to say that, or to say who, and so forth. The result isn’t quite as overwhelming as that sounds, because those thirty forms aren’t all different. And their endings often resemble the endings of ordinary nouns, which simplifies the learning further. But there’s a good deal to know.
This book explains pronouns in Chapters 34–37. In the meantime, you’ll see them looking like this in the notes:
Is/ea/id (pron.): he, she, it; this, that.
Quī/quae/quod (rel. pron.): who, which, that, what.
Hic/haec/hoc (pron.): this; he, she, it.
Ille/illa/illud (pron.): that; he, she, it.
These words are usually shown in threes, as adjectives are. As with an adjective, you’re seeing the nominative singular forms of the word in each of the three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. If the word in the quotation is one of those three forms, it’ll be boldfaced like this:
Quī/quae /quod (rel. pron.): who, which, that, what.
That means the word quī appears in the sentence, and is nominative and singular: it’s a word like who, and it’s performing the action described by the verb. (It might be a sentence like he who wishes for …)
Or sometimes an explanation might look like this:
Quod is the neuter accusative singular form of quī/quae/quod (rel. pron.): who, which, that, what.
That explanation, spelled out more fully, means: the word quod appears in the example you’ve just been shown. Quod is a version of the Latin word for who, or which, or that, or what. But it’s neuter, so it will mean that, what, or which, referring to a grammatically neuter thing—rather than referring to who, which is never neuter. It’s also accusative and singular. So that is receiving action from a verb. (As in: our friend brought wine, which we drank gladly; or the gift that you want is too expensive; or I did what you did.)
Latin has lots of words that can serve either as pronouns or as adjectives. So does English. If you say I committed that crime, the word that is used as an adjective; it modifies crime, and explains which one you’re talking about (there might be several). But if someone else says he committed a crime and you reply I know that, the word that is a pronoun. It doesn’t modify anything; it’s just a word that makes it easier to refer to something without naming or explaining it twice.
Here’s the point: when an illustration in this book uses a Latin word like illud that can be either an adjective or a pronoun, the notes will tell you which, like this:
Ille/illa/illud (pron.): that; he, she, it.
Ille/illa/illud (adj.): that.
This is explained here so that you won’t be confused when you see the same word described in different places as a different part of speech.
The same approach will be taken with other Latin words that can be used in more than one way. For example, et can be a conjunction meaning and or an adverb meaning also or even. It’ll be marked in the notes accordingly.
Sometimes a word will be described in the notes as a particle. This means it’s a small word that might formally be considered a conjunction or adverb. It’s instead called a particle because it doesn’t quite do what you might expect from those other parts of speech. A particle usually sits at or near the start of a sentence. Its function is to tell the reader that this is a new sentence; Latin had no punctuation with which to send such signals. And a particle tells you something about the relationship between the new sentence and whatever was said before.
A good example of a particle is the word enim, which is usually translated as for or because or indeed. It generally means that the sentence to come will have some mild explanatory force, or will qualify or elaborate a bit on what was just said. Enim is also a postpositive: a word that usually comes second (or occasionally third) in a sentence. You can think of it as bound up with the first word in the sentence and as adding those signals just mentioned. We’ll see examples soon.
Sometimes a word can reasonably be viewed more than one way—as a particle or a conjunction or an adverb, for example. You may find it labeled differently in different dictionaries. This book usually follows the Oxford Latin Dictionary in such cases.
And in English, the same form of a verb can refer to things done by different people: I hear, you hear, we hear, they hear—again, the same word every time. In Latin the ending of the verb changes for each of those meanings. I hear would be audiō; you hear would be audīs. English occasionally works the same way. If the verb is hears, you know it’s third person singular, because the word hears only gets used when he, she, or it does the hearing, not when you hear or they hear. But Latin verbs are always like that, so much so that in Latin the subject of the sentence—the doer of the action—often won’t even be mentioned separately. Audiō means I hear with no need for the equivalent of I.
The point: understanding Latin verbs—or most other Latin words—amounts to knowing what their endings mean.
A verb can be singular or plural (the action is done by one person or more than one).
A verb can be in the first person, second person, or third person.
First person singular: I see
Second person singular: you see
Third person singular: he/she/it sees
First person plural: we see
Second person plural: you (all) see
Third person plural: they see
A verb can have six possible tenses: present tense (see), perfect tense (saw), imperfect (was seeing), pluperfect (had seen), future (will see), future perfect (will have seen).
A verb can be active or passive: I see vs. I am seen (the subject receives the action instead of performing it). This is known as its voice.
A verb can be indicative, imperative, or subjunctive: I see (indicative) vs. see! (imperative) vs. I would see (subjunctive; and the subjunctive version of a verb can also have other meanings). This is known as the verb’s mood.
Each of the variables just noted is shown by an ending on the verb. And then those variables can all be combined to produce a large range of results; any given verb in Latin has more than 120 possible endings. Fortunately they follow patterns that help make them manageable, and of course some of them come up much more often than others.
To simplify, we won’t note all of those variables every time we see a verb. Instead we’ll take the most common choice about each variable and treat it as a default assumption. If this book shows you a verb and says nothing about its tense, voice, or mood, you can assume:
The verb is in the present tense.
The verb is active.
The verb is indicative.
So if you read that vidēmus is the first person plural form of the verb vidēre (to see), it might seem that you aren’t told much. But under the rules of this book, you’re being told a lot; you know that vidēmus means we see. That’s because you assume, unless told otherwise, that any given verb is in the present (see, not saw or had seen), that it’s active (see, not are seen), and that it’s indicative (see, not would see). This will save some trouble as we go along.
Amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum (1): to love.
Videō, vidēre, vīdī, vīsum (2): to see.
Dīcō, dīcere, dīxī, dictum (3): to say.
Audiō, audīre, audīvī/audiī, audītum (4): to hear; listen.
Here’s how to understand those four principal parts.
The first word in each list—that is, the first principal part—is the first person singular form of the verb in the present tense, indicative mood, and active voice: I love (amō), I see (videō), I say (dīcō), I hear (audiō). Latin doesn’t distinguish between the simple and continuous forms of the present tense; for example, I see and I am seeing are both said with the same word: videō.
The second word is the present active infinitive form of the verb: to love (amāre), to see (vidēre), to say (dīcere), to hear (audīre). Sometimes these words are better read as loving, seeing, etc.
The third word is the first person singular form in the perfect (past) tense (indicative and active): I loved (amāvī), I saw (vīdī), I said (dīxī), I heard (audīvī /audiī).
The fourth (last) principal part is a form called the supine. It has uses that will be discussed in later chapters. The fourth principal part is also identical in form to the nom./acc. neuter singular of the perfect passive participle of the verb. That’s a mouthful, but it’s just an adjective made out of the verb—something you use all the time in English. In the phrase the forgotten knowledge, the word forgotten is a perfect passive participle. If you were getting started with English and learning the verb forget, you’d also want to know how to say forgotten. That’s like knowing the fourth principal part in Latin. The fourth part won’t be important until later in this book, but then it becomes crucial.
One of the parts sometimes has variants, such as audīvī /audiī. They’re just two ways to say the same thing.
Those four ways of using each verb—the principal parts—allow you to create and understand every other form a verb can take. The chapters about verbs in this book amount, in effect, mostly to instructions: how to start with one of those four parts, add some sort of ending to it, and so turn it into a verb in the future tense, or in the passive voice, or in the imperative mood, and so forth.
Some verbs don’t have all four principal parts. Deponent verbs (see Chapter 10) typically have only three of them. This is normal and expected, so it isn’t marked in any special way; you’ll simply see three parts. When a non-deponent verb is missing one or two parts, each missing part is usually marked with a —. When only one principal part is in common use, you’ll just see that one part; we don’t bother with three dashes in a row:
Inquam (irreg. and defective): to say.