Nоuns аnd declensiоns As yоu cаn see, cаse plays a huge role in how we use nouns (and adjectives) in Latin. There are other considerations too, however. We also need to take into consideration number, just like in verbs: if we have one "poet", the noun will be singular; many "poets" will be plural. We see inflection in English nouns here too with the addition of the morpheme -s to the noun (with some irregularities: what is the plural of sheep?), so we should expect to see Latin too have distinctive ways of indicating plural nouns. A third and final consideration is gender. There are three genders in Latin: masculine, feminine, and neuter (which means "neither"). These are largely grammatical ideas: although male nouns (like "man", "boy", "husband", etc.) will be "naturally" masculine in gender, and female nouns (like "woman", "girl", "wife", etc.) will be "naturally" feminine, these are mostly conventional labels determined by ancient grammarians. Is there really anything essentially feminine about feminine nouns like "gate" (porta), "shape" (forma), or "money" (pecūnia)? All in all, then, we can inflect nouns in Latin according to these three characteristics: case, number, and gender. Moreover, nouns that follow the same patterns in these characteristics are thought to belong to the same group or declension -- just like verbs that follow the same pattern are thought to belong to the same conjugation. Declensions are typically organized by gender. The first declension, which we're looking at in this module, is largely organized by the feminine gender: almost all of its nouns, with a few exceptions, are feminine. This means there is no "masculine" version of porta, or forma; they are simply feminine, first declension nouns, and will exhibit the same endings when they change into different cases and numbers.
Yоu cаn tell а bаd оratоr because you will see his judge ________ (select all correct answers):
An impоrtаnt nоte аbоut pаrticiples Because English doesn't have as many participles as Latin, translations often sound awkward. One way around this is to turn the participle construction into its own clause, like a relative clause. The sentence you were just looking at, for example, might yield the following literal translation: Vidēbis iūdicem ōscitantem, loquentem cum alterō, nōn numquam etiam errantem, mittentem ad hōrās, verba ab ōrātōre dicta neglegentem. You will see a judge yawning, speaking with another, sometimes (nōn numquam) even wandering about, asking for the time, (and) neglecting the words spoken by the orator. With relative clauses supplied in English, however, we might have something more like this: You will see a judge who is yawning, speaking with another... and who is neglecting the words which have been spoken by the orator. Note that, instead of participles as we understand them, the participles have become mini-relative clauses: the present active participle ōscitantem has become "who is yawning" and the perfect passive participle dicta has become "which have been spoken". This is a possible way of translating participles which can make them sound more natural in English. But it does raise an important issue. The tense of participles in Latin is not perfect, present, and future as we have normally understood them. Instead, the tense is relative to the main verb: the present active participle indicates action happening at the same time as the verb the perfect passive participle indicates action happening before the verb the future active participle indicates action happening after the verb So let's say the main verb is perfect, and we wanted to translate just the beginning of this sentence: Vīdistī iūdicem ōscitantem. If we translate this straightforwardly, the participle will not change: "You saw a judge yawning." But if we translated this as a relative clause, notice what changes: You saw a judge who was yawning. We have to translate the participle as though it were an imperfect to reflect that it is happening at the same time as the main verb. Similarly, the phrase verba ab ōrātōre dicta, which can be translated as "words spoken by an orator", in this sentence would become "words which had been spoken by an orator", to indicate that the action is going on before the main verb. This phenomenon is called the sequence of tenses, and it only affects how we translate when the main verb is in a past tense (i.e. perfect, imperfect, pluperfect). Don't worry if this is a lot to take on board now -- we'll revisit and review this topic again soon!