“Declension” is a word that makes most Latin students cringe (including me from time to time…). All languages have a bit of declining to do, but few decline as zealously as Latin.
Now, before I get ahead of myself, I should probably explain what a declension is. A declension is pretty much a type of noun – Latin has five types, English has one. And declining a noun means to run through its various grammatical forms – so you know how in English we have singular, plural, and possessive forms of nouns? I’ll use the word “slave” as an example – to decline “slave,” I would just list:
slave
slaves
slave’s
slaves’
and that would be that. Things get a bit more complicated with words like “ox,” but on the whole, English is simple.
Unfortunately, Latin is not simple. To start off with, there are five different types of nouns – but because this is basic grammar, I’ll just begin with one declension.
The SECOND Declension – yes, I kind of messed up with the earlier lessons by introducing you to second declension words before first declension ones…. But it does NOT really matter – first declension words are feminine and end in -a (in general), and second declension words are masculine and end in -us (in general).
Declining of the second declension word servus (meaing “slave”):
hihihihihihihihihSingular: Plural:
Nominative: servus servī
Genitive: servī servorum
Dative: servō servīs
Accusative: servum servōs
Ablative: servō servīs
Memorize that well. Just so you will understand what I‘m going to talk about, the nominative form of a noun appears when the noun is the subject or predicate nominative of a sentence (I‘ll bold the subjects of the sentences in this paragraph so you can see). The genetive form is the possessive form. Most Latin words that end in -us follow that pattern (words like Julius, filius (son), and so on). However, there are some notable exceptions to that rule – the words puer (boy) and ager (field). To let you understand that, I‘ll briefly explain stems to you.
Most languages have stems, so the term is hopefully familiar to you. In Latin’s case, the stem of a noun is its genitive (possessive) singular form, minus the -ī at the end. So the stem of servus is serv-, which isn’t that surprising, huh? But the genitive of ager is agrī, so the stem is agr-. The genitive of puer is puerī, so its stem is puer-. So puer and ager are both second declension nouns, even though they don’t end in -us. I’ll decline the singular of ager just for fun:
ager
agrī
agrō
agrum
agrō
See? Just the nominative case is different. Everything else is the same. So how can you tell if a word is second declension? Well, if you just see the nominative form, you can’t, ever tell, even if it ends in -us. That’s just how Latin is. However, if you see a word and it is not in its nominative form, you can usually tell. For example, if you saw the word “ager” in a Latin sentence and you didn’t know what declension it was, you would not be able to tell. But if you saw “agrī,” then you should instantly be able to tell that it is second declension, because second declension is the only declension with a possessive form like that (though it might be something else, but more on that later… I don’t want to confuse you).
So from now on, whenever I show you a new noun, I’ll include the nominative and genitive singular form as well as the gender (as most textbooks list it) – the nominative form so that you can see what the noun looks like in that form, since it is usually the odd form that doesn’t feature the word’s stem in its spelling (like with ager). The genitive form is the most important, because in that form you can see what the stem is and what declension it is in (because each declension has a unique genitive form).
So I would list ager, puer, and servus as:
ager, agrī, m. – field
puer, puerī, m. – boy
servus, -ī, m. – slave
I didn’t put “servī” in there because it is obvious that the -us is replace by an -ī. That’s how the textbooks do it, so I’m doing it like that too.
Now you’re probably wondering what the heck those words on the side (like nominative, genitive, dative, and so on) mean. People fill books with what they mean, so I’ll let you read those books. Or, I mean, I’ll have to make a separate post for them. In the meantime, just blindly digest the conjugation of second declension words.
