Nouns
A noun names a person, animal, place, or thing (whether that “thing” is concrete or abstract). Our term again comes from Latin grammarians: “noun” comes from Latin nomen, which generically just means “name.”
In a clause or sentence, nouns can fulfill various functions. A noun might be the subject of the verb: the person, place, or thing doing the action the verb represents. A noun might be the object of the the verb, the recipient of the verb’s action, or the indirect (or secondary) object of that action. A noun might further describe another noun, or be paired with a preposition to act adjectivally or adverbially. It may decribe the means by which the action of the verb happens. Or it might name the addressee of the sentence.
In Latin, the function of the noun is represented by its case, and the case is indicated by the ending attached to the noun’s stem. We have already seen that endings provide a great deal of information in a verb form, and the same is true for nouns. Identifying the case of a noun is key to understanding how it is functioning in that particular sentence.
Overview of nouns
All Latin nouns have three properties: gender, case, and number.
Every noun belongs to one of three grammatical genders. Although the grammatical genders are named masculine, feminine, and neuter, these are arbitrary linguistic categories, not biological gender. (You can learn more how ancient Latin grammarians thought about biological and grammatical gender in this unit’s section on “Latin in Action.”) There is no particular reason that the noun for “river”, flumen, is neuter, but the noun for “island”, insula, is feminine.
Case indicates the function of a noun in a sentence. Cases are expressed and identified by endings. There are six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative and vocative. In this module we will look at some of the most important functions indicated by the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and ablative cases.
Noun forms have the same two numbers as verb forms: singular, and plural.
Dictionary entry of nouns
The dictionary entry of a noun concisely encodes all the information you need to know in order to produce or recognize all of its cases and numbers. The first part tells you its nominative singular form, the second part is its genitive singular form, and the third crucial detail is its gender(s), usually abbreviat m, f or n.
Examples of dictionary entries
The following vocabulary entries are included in the required vocabulary list for this module. Let’s unpack their information more fully:
- flumen, fluminis n., “river”
- insula, insulae f., “island”
The first noun has the meaning “river.” Its nominative singular form is flumen; the genitive singular form is fluminis; all of its forms are neuter.
The second noun has the meaning “island.” Its nominative singular form is insula; the genitive singular form is insulae; all of its forms are feminine.
You’ll also see this entry:
- cănis, cănis m. or f., “dog”
The listing “m. or f.” means that the noun can be either grammatically mascuine or grammatically feminine.
Declension
We use the term declension to refer to a group of nouns that share the same set of endings. In the first half of this course, we will focus on three frequent declensions of nouns that make up the overwhelming majority of noun forms you will see in reading Latin. Scholars of Latin creatively refer to as the first, second and third declensions. You can recognize the declension of a noun by looking at the ending of its genitive singular:
- -ae: first declension
- -i: second declension
- -is: third declension