Learning Liturgical Latin, Lesson 3

First-declension nouns!

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

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First-Declension Nouns (Maria, cena, gloria, etc.)

We’re ready to study our first noun declension. What you see below is called a paradigm, that is, a table of inflected forms that serves as a model for other words in the same grammatical category. We’ll use the word cena (“supper”) for this paradigm.

                                  Singular            Plural
Nominative             cena                     cenae
Genitive                   cenae                   cenarum
Dative                      cenae                    cenis
Accusative              cenam                   cenas 
Ablative                  cena                      cenis

This is a paradigm for first-declension nouns. These nouns have the ending -a in the nominative singular, and almost all of them are feminine (if you’re not familiar with the concept of grammatical gender, this overview might be helpful). A notable exception is papa (“pope”), which is a first-declension masculine noun.

If you prefer a table with only the endings, here it is:

                                  Singular            Plural
Nominative             -a                         -ae
Genitive                   -ae                       -arum
Dative                      -ae                        -is
Accusative              -am                       -as
Ablative                  -a                          -is

There are some points we need to discuss here:

Noun Cases

Remember that different noun cases correspond to different ways of using a noun. The basic meaning stays the same, but the “contextualized meaning” changes—for example, cena Domini means “the supper of the Lord” (as the subject of a sentence) but cenae Domini means (among other possibilities) “for the supper of the Lord.”

Committing Case Endings to Memory

My preferred method of memorizing case endings is to recite all of them in a singsongy way, and always in the same order. I go through all the singulars from nominative to ablative, then through all the plurals from nominative to ablative, thus: “a, ae, ae, am, a [pause] ae, arum, is, as, is.” (Just to make sure we’re all on the same pronunciation page, this sounds like “ah eh eh ahm ah [pause] eh AH-room ees ahs ees.”) If you do this always in the same order, you can instinctually match the endings with the cases without the trouble of saying the case name each time.

Context!

As you can see, some of the “different” case endings look the same. The ending -ae, for example, could be genitive singular, dative singular, or nominative plural. You use context to decide what the intended meaning is.

The endings for nominative singular and ablative singular look the same in the table above, but that’s because I usually omit macrons in these lessons. If I included macrons, they would look different, because the nominative singular ending is a short a (cena) and the ablative singular is a long a (cenā). But the Latin texts that most of us will be reading—in a missal, a hymnal, a Bible—won’t have macrons, so the same rule applies: you use context to distinguish nominative singular from ablative singular.

Recognition vs. Full Grammatical Comprehension

Here’s something that Latin instructors might not like, but I’m going to say it anyway, because this is Via Mediaevalis, and we’re taking a more medieval-villager approach to learning the language of western Christendom. The memorization technique I mentioned above is especially appropriate because the most important thing in the early stages is to recognize all the different forms. What I mean is that you should be able to quickly identify something like aquis as an inflected form of aqua (“water”), even if you can’t remember exactly what aquis means when you incorporate the grammatical details. Why? Because with easier texts such as psalm verses and Gospel readings, context and familiarity often clarify the meaning. Let’s consider an example from Psalm 64: