Anyone want to learn some Latin?

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Here's what I'm thinking of doing: each week I'm going to go through a step of Latin grammar to study for myself and anyone who wants can go along with me - even if you hate me, just so long as you don't act disruptively. The essence of a language is its grammar, so that is what I will be studying here. I'm going to go through the declension of nouns/adjectives, the conjugation of verbs, the meanings of the linguistic terms involved, the usage of pronouns, etc. Sound good to anyone?

Sounds good to me since I'm a Latin major, but take a look at this forum as well:

http://latindiscussion.com/forum/

They're great for any issue that might arise and have always proved helpful.

It is very cool, very demanding and very interesting! Most of the candidates give up though, since it's studying all day long.

Here where I live there's little future for Latin except in translating. There are many renaissance books still waiting to be translated, apart from that some might fight job in education but that is unfortunately almost dieing out. No rosy future for classical philology unfortunately, especially for the study of ancient Greek.

I've kind of been waiting for exactly this opportunity. I took Latin but forgot it all and I keep seeing job openings for Latin tutors and wanting to apply which I obviously can't do cause I don't know Latin.

Okay, well, my basic idea is to start with the grammatical terminology and explain what that means. Does that sound like a good plan? Purchase, you know what the terms nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, locative mean already? That they're cases of nouns and adjectives?

Nominative case nouns/adjectives are the subject or modifiers to the subject of the sentence;
Genitive nouns basically are like nouns being used as adjectives;
Dative nouns are indirect objects (such as an object of a preposition);
Accusative nouns are the direct objects.
The ablative is a bit more nuanced case, but basically denotes what is causing something or proximity.
Locative case is rare, but for the few nouns with a locative case it denotes location, either figuratively or literally.

Sounds good to me!

Here's some more about declensions&cases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension

Yes. I don't know if my teacher skipped over locative or what but I don't know it. Would that be used for words like casa? Kind of like chez Amanda or whatnot?

I'll try to keep quiet as much as possible by the way and not ask stupid questions.

EDIT: oh okay the Wikipedia article said it's used with domus. Okey dokey. End of that interruption.

No, please, ask away!

Some more about the Latin locative:

Also, there's Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar available on-line:

http://www.archive.org/stream/allenandg ... 3/mode/2up

and Gildersleeve's as well:

http://www.archive.org/stream/gildersle ... 2/mode/2up

Neat, neat! I'm looking at those. Now. Two problems.

Is there ANY logic to the gender of nouns, cause I always forget them if there's no logic

And is there any reason for the multiple declensions. I know Latin was partially constructed and partially came from some proto-language and it seems like no one would deliberately make up something so complicated... why not have it all be one declension.

In addition to the cases listed above, nouns and adjectives also have properties of number (singular or plural) and gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter). Singular means one item/person is being referred to, plural means multiple are. The linguistic gender of nouns and adjectives has nothing to do with biology, so if ye of I2 care to make jokes about it such will only display your ignorance.

Here an example of the declension nouns, changing from one case to another, I'll start with a first declension noun:


The nominative (subject) form of the word for mathematics is mathematica, the -a at the end indicating that it is either nominative or ablative (they're the same, as is the vocative which is the form use in calling out a name). The genitive (possessive or adjectival) form of mathematica is mathematic-ae (of the math, is one way it could be translated). Dative in the singular case is the same as the genitive and locative, which means if you see it in the form mathematicae, there is a 1/5th chance of it being either genitive, dative, or locative in the singular or possibly nominative or vocative in the plural (the precise case needs to be determined by context since the forms are the same). In dative case, mathematicae would be "to the math" and in locative "in math". The accusative form of nominative mathematica is mathematic-am which would be the direct object of a verb such as discis (you are learning). So in the sentence "Tu mathematicam discis", tu is the nominative form of "you", and mathematicam is the direct object of discis, meaning "you are learning mathematics".

Listed, the singular and plural forms are these:

Singular
Nominative: mathematic-a
Genitive: mathematic-ae
Dative: mathematic-ae
Accusative: mathematic-am
Ablative: mathematic-a
Vocative: mathematic-a
Locative: mathematic-ae

Plural
Nominative: mathematic-ae
Genitive: mathematic-arum
Dative: mathematic-is
Accusative: mathematic-as
Ablative: mathematic-is
Vocative: mathematic-ae
Locative: mathematic-is

Here are some other first declension nouns if you want to inflect them:

Fenestra, "window".
Barba, "beard".
Nauta, "salior".
Ira, "anger".
Gloria, "glory".

And if you want to practice that, here's a form you can use, otherwise do what format or order makes sense to you but just be consistent.

Singular
Nominative:
Genitive:
Dative:
Accusative:
Ablative:
Vocative:
Locative:

Plural
Nominative:
Genitive:
Dative:
Accusative:
Ablative:
Vocative:
Locative:

I really can't tell why 5 and not 10 or 17 declensions. For instance, my language has about 20 of them. Why? Beats me.

it always used to puzzle me how come most of the European languages lost their declensions, apart from Slavic languages (and some rare ones like Hungarian or Finnish). We have it the almost the same as it was 1000 years ago! But if you compare old English with its declension system and today's English it's like two different languages.