Learning Liturgical Latin, Lesson 9

nos oportet gloriari in Cruce Domini nostri Iesu Christi

Lesson 1: pronunciation | cognate vocabulary | noun cases

Lesson 2: long and short vowels, syllable stress | the eight parts of (Latin) speech with grammar overview | comments on vocabulary and first vocab list

Lesson 3: first-declension nouns | noun exercises/examples | vocab

Lesson 4: learning a language with authentic texts | grammar in the Gloria Patri | vocab

Lesson 5: authentic text warm-up | vocabulary practice

Lesson 6: introduction to Latin verbs | verb-identification examples | vocab

Lesson 7: the verb “to be” | authentic-text grammar exercise | vocab

Lesson 8: categories of Latin verbs | first-conjugation (-are) verbs | translating a liturgical text | vocab

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Authentic Text Warm-Up

Let’s continue working through the Latin version of the Our Father. This is what we’ve discussed so far, in Lesson 5 and Lesson 7:

Pater noster, qui es in caelis,
sanctificetur nomen tuum.
Adveniat regnum tuum.
Fiat voluntas tua,
sicut in caelo et in terra.

Let’s continue with this:

Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.

The first word may look familiar if you know Spanish, French, or Italian, but what case is it in? Be careful—it’s the first word in the sentence, and an English-speaking mind expects to see the subject at or near the beginning of a sentence, but the fact that it ends in ‑m should make you think accusative, not nominative. The word panem is the accusative singular form of the noun panis (“bread, loaf, food”), and thus it’s actually the direct object (i.e., the noun that is directly receiving the action of the verb). We can’t put this word at the beginning of our English translation, so we’ll come back to it. We also have to come back to nostrum quotidianum, because these are both adjectives attached to panem.

da nobis hodie.

That first word is deceptively small—it looks like a preposition (and in fact da is a common preposition in Italian). But we’re actually dealing with a verb conjugated as a command: da is the second-person-singular active imperative form of dare, “to give.”

(There is, if you’re wondering, a passive imperative form in Latin. In this situation it would be dare, which looks the same as the infinitive but means “be given!” Often the passive imperative doesn’t make a lot of sense—in real life we don’t typically command something to be given. However, the passive imperative is important when we’re dealing with special verbs called deponent verbs. More on that later.)

The next word is a pronoun that sounds like vobis, which you hear repeatedly at Mass: Dominus vobiscum, “(may) the Lord be with y’all.” Vobis is a second-person plural pronoun, and nobis is a first-person plural pronoun. More specifically, it’s the dative and ablative form of the first-person plural pronoun, and context tells us that the intended case here is dative: da nobis, “give to us.” Hodie is an adverb meaning “today.”