After a lot of hemming and hawing, I’m finally preparing myself to reapply to grad school — something I’ve been thinking about for years, but still felt cautious about. As preparation before I actually pull the trigger, however, I’m brushing up on my languages. In this particular case, I’m starting with the set of three ancient languages any historian has at least a modest acquaintance with – Latin, Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon/Old English.

I’ve taken classes on all three of these before, but never gotten to what I’d call a reading knowledge. Many people, however, never get the opportunity. Which is a shame, because it’s not as hard as you think! For the time being, I’m going to set aside the questions of ‘why bother’ and suchlike; there’s lots of reasons, but many people have also previously answered them. And besides… why not? So as I refamiliarize myself with Latin, Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon/OE, I’ll be posting about it and giving the basics to anybody else who’s curious to know, and never had the benefit of exposure.

So, where do we start?

Nominative, Genitive, Dative…What?

Chances are if you’ve ever tried to look up Latin before, you’ve been assailed by all sorts of words you don’t understand. One attempt at understanding a Latin verb throttles you with all sorts of three and four syllable words like ‘nominative’ and ‘declension’… and they’re supposed to be English. It’s not a great way to start, is the point.

Unfortunately, in learning any ancient language, you do have to know the terms. But the good news is, they’re less hard than you imagine. So here’s some of the basic grammar terms, followed by some historical ones useful for context.

• Cases

In an English sentence, the order you put things in matters. The subject comes first; then the verb; then the object. I make dinner, I eat dinner. If you were to put dinner first, you would have to change the words you used. Dinner make(s) me has a different meaning — you have to say ‘dinner is made by me’ to confer the same basic meaning and intent. But in Latin (and many, many other languages) the word itself changes depending on whether it’s the subject or object. English only does this a little bit; it’s grammatically incorrect to say ‘Me make dinner’ or ‘Dinner is made by I’. We intuitively know as fluent English speakers [n.b. I’m certainly making an assumption about my readers, but work with me] that ‘I’ is used for the subject, and ‘me’ is used for the object. When providing pronouns in bios or supplying them when requested, it’s habit for those of us who do so to go “she/her/hers” or “he/him” or “they/them” as necessary; those are cases.

• Nominative (nom like name in French, or nomina like in nominate; looking for roots will come in handy in Latin, so look for connections between words!)

The nominative case is the subject case – the ‘I’, the ‘she’, the ‘he’, the ‘they’, etc. It’s the basic form of all nouns when provided in Latin, so you’ll almost always know the nominative form of anything. I’m using Wheelock’s Latin, so let’s use ‘porta’ (gate) as our example word. ‘Porta’ is a first declension noun, and feminine in gender; I’ll explain those after our cases, but for now all you need to know is that those are further ways of categorizing.

• Accusative (related, yes, to the word ‘accuse’, ‘accusatory’, etc.; maybe I’m the only one who finds this funny, but comes from a mistranslation of a Greek word – αἰτιᾱτική (aitiātikḗ), or ‘expressing an effect’.)

Despite the well, accusatory tone, the accusative is a very normal case. It’s the direct object! If you’re acting directly upon or towards an object — grammatically, to be clear — then it’s a direct object. Consider ‘I make dinner’ — dinner is a direct object. But ‘I take you to dinner’ is a sentence where ‘you’ is the direct object, and ‘dinner’ is indirect. For our Latin example, ‘porta’ becomes ‘portam’. ‘I close the gate’, for example, would use ‘portam’.

• Genitive (a little harder to break down, but think of the root ‘gen’ and where you see it — genital, progeny, generation, etc. In this case, it’s a bit of an oblique relationship.)

The genitive case is how Latin shows ownership. In English, the possessive apostrophe (Elliott’s blog) stands in for the longer term “the blog of Elliott”. That phrase, “of Elliott”, is instead captured in Latin by this case. In our example word, ‘porta’, it becomes ‘portae’; or literally, “of (a/the) gate”.

• Dative (one where roots won’t actually help you; related to the Latin word for ‘giving’!)

The dative case is the indirect object! (See the definition of the accusative’. For our Latin example, it’s ‘portae’ again — an exact double of the genitive, so context matters. The dative is also sometimes used with certain prepositions, which you’ll learn as you go.

• Ablative

(I’ve got nothing for the roots of this one.) Ablative case is probably the most complicated. The cases above all have direct English translations; they’re easy enough to mark out as English concepts. Ablative case, on the other hand, is finicky, and best described as the ‘adverbial case’. Wheelock describes it as a case used to modify or limit the verb of a sentence by means (by/with what), agent (by/with whom?), accompaniment, (with whom?), manner (how?), place (where?/from which?), and time (when?). If you’re someone for whom adverbs are familiar, this may come more easily. If this is making your head hurt, don’t worry. Learn the cases as you learn the grammar, and the full understanding will come in time. The most important thing to know is that the ablative case is another form of indirect object. In our Latin example, the ablative is portā — the macron (line) over the a is important as a manner of distinguishing it.

• Vocative (as in vocal, voice, etc.)

Vocative case is something you learn with your grammar for the purposes of recognizing it when you see it — but you’re rarely going to use it, and it’s not difficult or particularly common outside of specific contexts like prayer, poetry or direct address. That’s exactly what it is — it’s a way of addressing or calling on a person or thing directly. The vocative is usually identical to the nominative, and generally preceded with ‘O’. In our Latin example, it’s ‘porta’ again – so ‘O, porta!’ would be ‘Oh, gate!’ A little silly, but sometimes that’s the point of it. (Ancient Roman comedy is very silly sometimes.)

• Declension

When you’re given the cases for a noun, it’s called declining a noun. It has nothing to do with the rise or fall of something — it’s just a term for breaking down every grammatical form of a noun specifically. (The verb version is conjugation.) A declension is a category of forms — for example, ‘porta’ is from what we call the ‘first declension’, because every word in that group follows a certain formula. Memorize it, and you’ll know how every first declension noun is declined.

However, important proviso: Every grammar book and every resource has a specific order that they provide the cases to you in. Every one of them is slightly different. Here, I’ve given the cases to you in the order they make the most sense, but when memorizing cases, this is the most common and the version found in Wheelock’s Latin textbook.

Nominative: porta
Genitive: portae
Dative: portae
Accusative: portam
Ablative: portā
Vocative: porta

And the plurals (you need the plurals as well!)

Nominative: portae
Genitive: portarum
Dative: portis
Accusative: portas
Ablative: portis
Vocative: portae

If you’ve ever read an older book or seen something where kids were “reciting” forms of words in Latin, now you have the context!

• Root

So you have the ‘first declension’, but how do you take it from ‘porta’ to some other word? Easier than you think. First declension nouns will all have nominatives ending in a, as seen above. Everything that isn’t that is the root. Let’s take another noun — puella, or girl. You have the root, ‘puell-‘ and the stem ‘-a’. Once you do that, you can see that the case endings are actually just the stem.

Nominative: -a
Genitive: -ae
Dative: -ae
Accusative: -am
Ablative: -ā
Vocative: -a

And so on, so forth. It doesn’t matter how long the word is. If it ends in -a and it’s a first declension noun, it will decline like this. And the reverse: if you see a noun that ends in -am and the context supports you, chances are it’s the direct object and you can translate it as such.

So that’s a whole bunch of grammar concepts. To make your brain hurt a little less, here’s some historical concepts instead — instead of how Latin works, here’s some context for what we mean when we talk about Latin and different kinds of Latin.

• Latin

A broad term for the language spoken by the Romans (inhabitants of the province of Latium in Italy, capital of which was Rome itself), spread across the entire Roman empire, and adopted by the Catholic church. Latin is descended from Proto-Indo-European, a massive umbrella language we’ve only got reconstructed parts of and that also serves as ancestor to Ancient Greek, Old English, and languages as far off as Sanskrit. So here and there, there are passing resemblances to very, very strange things. Latin has also left its mark all over the world, leaving loanwords everywhere like a bad tourist.

• Classical Latin

What most people probably think of when they say Latin! Classical Latin is the Latin used by Ancient Roman scholars like Cicero, poets like Catullus, and other academics. The inscriptions on old sculpture are Classical Latin, as are the dedications of monuments. Classical Latin has certain rules of pronunciation and spelling that aren’t necessarily true of other forms — for example, ‘v’ doesn’t make a ‘v’ sound but generally stands in for a ‘u’. Many textbooks will already have substituted in a ‘u’, but if you see an errant V, it doesn’t belong there except to mean 5. J and W don’t exist as letters, and K, Y and Z were only rarely used, usually in Greek loanwords. (C is always hard; never soft. It’s Kikero, not Sisero, for example.)

• Ecclesiastical Latin

The Latin you’ll have encountered if you’re a Catholic (or, sometimes, Anglican). Ecclesiastical Latin is the language used for high prayer and Catholic services, and reflects changes in the language’s use — for example, Ecclesiastical Latin will use the ‘v’ sound more, reflecting how the languages around it took on those sounds.

• Vulgar Latin

The Latin of the common people! While we don’t have that many examples of Vulgar Latin, it doesn’t mean rude Latin — it’s just a funny coincidence that many of our examples are actually rude and naughty graffiti from the walls of places like Pompeii, because that’s where it was preserved. Vulgar Latin is also what actually evolved into the Romance languages — Spanish, French, Romanian and Italian — and provides the ‘missing link’ between Latin and those. It likely had simpler grammar, and definitely used slang that isn’t preserved in the highly formalized texts that have been passed down.

• Pig Latin

Not related to other forms of Latin. Can be considered a false cognate.

Thanks for checking in, and next entry will be about verb conjugations! If you want to support me, check out my SubscribeStar in the wake of the death of my Patreon.