Latin grammar

• 1. Introduction

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  Latin grammar presents a puzzle that has fascinated students for centuries: a language where you can move the words around in almost any order and still be perfectly understood. The secret lies in the endings. Latin verbs alone can take more than a hundred different forms to express different meanings. The word regō means "I rule"; shift a single letter and you get regor, meaning "I am ruled". Add an ending and you have regere, "to rule". Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and participles all carry their own sets of endings that announce their role in a sentence. This system of variable endings is called inflection, and Latin is one of history's most heavily inflected languages. What does it feel like when the word itself tells you who is doing what to whom? And what happens to word order, to meaning, to poetry, when grammar lives in the ending rather than the position? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Case System

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  Rex means "the king" when he is doing something. Regem means "the king" when something is being done to him. That single difference in ending is the Latin case system at work. Most Latin nouns have five cases: the nominative for subjects, the accusative for objects, the genitive meaning "of", the dative meaning "to" or "for", and the ablative covering "with", "in", "by", and "from". Nouns for people add a sixth case, the vocative, used only for addressing someone directly. The sentence iubesne me, Romule Rex, foedus ferire? translates roughly as "do you order me, King Romulus, to strike a treaty?" and shows the vocative in action. A seventh case, the locative, survives only in a handful of words, chiefly names of towns and the word domus meaning "home". Romae means "in Rome"; domi means "at home". Grammar books in different countries actually list these cases in different orders. British tradition puts nominative, vocative, accusative first. Gildersleeve and Lodge's Latin Grammar, published in 1895 in the United States, places the genitive second and the ablative last. The widely used Wheelock's Latin, which first appeared in 1956 and reached a seventh edition in 2011, puts the vocative at the very end. The same declension table, arranged three different ways depending on where you learned the language.

• 3. Nouns and Declensions

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  Puella means "girl" and it belongs to the first declension. Dominus means "lord" or "master" and it belongs to the second. These groupings are called declensions, and Latin nouns fall into five of them, each with its own pattern of endings for each case and number. Gender intersects with declension in ways that can surprise a learner: most first-declension nouns are feminine, but words like agricola ("farmer") and poeta ("poet") are masculine even though they end in -a, the classic feminine marker. Second-declension nouns ending in -us are usually masculine, but tree names such as pinus ("pine tree") and the place name Aegyptus are feminine. Third-declension nouns can be any gender, and their nominative forms give little clue to the genitive. Dux, meaning "leader", has genitive ducis; rex, meaning "king", has genitive regis; pater, meaning "father", has genitive patris; but iter, meaning "journey", has the very different genitive itineris. This unpredictability is why Latin dictionaries always list the genitive alongside the nominative. There are even nouns called pluralia tantum, meaning "plural only", which are grammatically plural but refer to a single thing: castra means "a camp", litterae means "a letter", nuptiae means "a wedding".

• 4. The Verb Engine

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  A single Latin verb can carry the work of several English words. Ductus sum means "I was led", formed by combining a participle with the verb sum, meaning "I am". Ducturust est means "he is going to lead", using a different participle with the same auxiliary. The six basic tenses of the indicative mood divide into two families: three built on the present stem, and three built on the perfect stem. For the verb duco, that means a present stem of duc- and a perfect stem of dux-. A third stem, duct-, supplies the perfect participle and the supine. The problem is that these stems cannot always be predicted. Latin has both regular and irregular verbs; the regular ones follow four conjugation patterns named for their infinitive endings. Verbs like amo follow the first conjugation, video the second, duco the third, and audio the fourth. Then come the irregulars: sum ("I am"), possum ("I am able"), fero ("I bring"), volo ("I want"), and eo ("I go"), each with its own pattern. A further category called deponent verbs looks passive in form but carries an active meaning. Sequor means "I follow" but has the endings of a passive verb, a relic of an older mediopassive voice that Latin once possessed. The language also draws a mood distinction between the indicative, used for plain statements, the subjunctive, used for potential or hypothetical ideas and in reported speech, and the imperative, used for commands.

• 5. Freedom of Word Order

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  Virgil wrote Omnia vincit amor, et nos cedamus amori, which translates as "Love conquers all, let us too yield to love." The words omnia ("all"), amor ("love"), and amori ("to love") are placed in unusual positions within their phrases, and Virgil's readers understood him perfectly because the endings, not the positions, carry the grammar. In ordinary prose, Latin tended to follow a subject-object-verb pattern, with the verb at the end. Adjectives and participles generally followed their nouns, unless they described beauty, size, quantity, goodness, or truth, in which case they usually came before. But these were tendencies, not laws. The name Marcus illustrates how radically order could shift without confusion. Marcus ferit Corneliam means "Marcus hits Cornelia". Marcus Corneliam ferit means exactly the same thing, just with different emphasis. In English the second version sounds almost meaningless; in Latin it is clear. Evidence from the most conservative surviving Romance languages, including Sardinian and Sicilian, suggests that colloquial Latin often kept the verb at the end of the sentence, pointing back to the spoken habits of ordinary Romans. Poets in the Roman world, who wrote primarily for the ear and often premiered their work in public recitation, exploited this flexibility for both rhetorical and metrical effect.

• 6. Numbers, Adverbs, and Agreement

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  The first three Latin numbers, unus, duo, and tres, are fully declined across all cases and genders, changing form just as nouns and adjectives do. The numbers quattuor through decem are not declined at all. The number 1,000 is the indeclinable adjective mille, but multiples work differently: duo milia (2,000) treats milia as a neuter plural noun followed by a partitive genitive, so "three thousand lions" becomes tria milia leonum, literally "three thousands of lions". Latin also had a set of distributive numerals for use with plural-only nouns: bina castra means "two camps" where bina substitutes for duo, because castra by itself already means "a camp" in the singular. Adverbs in Latin are indeclinable, meaning they never change their form regardless of what they modify. They do have positive, comparative, and superlative degrees, formed in systematic ways. The adjective clarus means "bright"; the adverb is clare, meaning "brightly"; the comparative adverb is clarius, "more brightly"; and the superlative is clarissime, "very brightly" or "most brightly". Adjectives, by contrast, must agree fully with the noun they describe, matching in gender, case, and number. The phrase o bone rex, "o good king", requires bone in the vocative singular masculine to match rex in the same case. When Virgil places amor and amori in unusual positions in the same sentence, both must still wear the correct endings for their grammatical roles, no matter where they appear.