Latin for Beginners

1. Sounds, letters and where the stress falls

Learning goal: Read a Latin word aloud in the reconstructed Classical pronunciation and say which syllable carries the stress.

This course has no audio. Pronunciation is described in words and in IPA symbols, which is a guide and not a substitute for hearing a teacher or a recording from another source. The pronunciation taught here is the reconstructed Classical one, the way scholars think educated Romans spoke around the first century BC. Wiktionary also lists an Ecclesiastical pronunciation based on Italian, in which, for example, c before e or i is /t͡ʃ/ (S1). Both are legitimate; pick one and keep to it.

Most letters sound as in English. The exceptions that matter at the start: c is always a hard k, as in "sky", and g is always hard, as in "good" (S2). The letter v is pronounced like English w, and consonant i is like English y (S1). The pair qu is /kʷ/, as in "quick", and x is /ks/ (S2). The digraphs ch, ph and th are aspirated stops found in Greek loanwords and some other words (S2).

Vowels come long or short, and length can change meaning. Dictionaries and textbooks mark long vowels with a macron (S2), and this course does the same: ā ē ī ō ū. Ordinary printed texts usually leave the macrons out, so you must learn the length with the word. Six diphthongs exist; the two you will meet most are ae and au (S1).

The stress rule

Stress falls on one of the last three syllables, and the weight of the second-to-last syllable (the penult) decides which (S2). A syllable is heavy if it has a long vowel, a diphthong, or ends in a consonant. If the penult is heavy it takes the stress. If it is light and the word has more than two syllables, the stress moves back to the syllable before it. A two-syllable word is stressed on the first syllable.

The IPA that Wiktionary gives for these three words matches the rule: [aˈmiː.kʊs], [ˈdɔ.mɪ.nʊs] and [puˈɛl.la], where ˈ marks the stressed syllable (S12, S10, S4).

Source basis: S1, S2, S12, S10, S4. No audio exists in this course. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Find the stress in nōminis ("of the name"). Check your answer against the IPA /ˈnoː.mi.nis/ that Wiktionary uses as its example.

1. Split it into syllables: nō-mi-nis.
2. The penult is mi. Its vowel is short and nothing closes the syllable, so it is light.
3. A light penult in a word of three syllables sends the stress back to the first syllable: NŌ-mi-nis.
4. This agrees with /ˈnoː.mi.nis/, where ˈ stands before nō (S1).

Mental model: Say c and g hard, v as w, and use the penult to find the stress: heavy penult stressed, light penult sends it back one syllable.

Common trap: Pronouncing c as s before e or i, which is a later and Italianate habit, and ignoring vowel length when placing the stress.

2. Endings do the work: cases and the verb "to be"

Learning goal: Explain what a case ending does and say who does what in a simple sentence without relying on word order.

English shows who does what mostly by word order: "the girl sees the sailor" differs from "the sailor sees the girl". Latin mostly shows it with the ending of each word. Latin is heavily inflected and has largely free word order, and it has no word for "the" or "a": rēx can mean "king", "a king" or "the king" depending on context (S3).

The ending of a noun marks its case. The six cases you will use, with their most common jobs, are below. A seventh, the locative, survives in a few words such as Rōmae "in Rome" (S3), and this course does not teach it.

Latin word order tends to be subject, object, verb, but other orders are common and shift the emphasis (S3). So Puella nautam videt and Nautam puella videt both mean "the girl sees the sailor". Only the ending -am on nautam marks the sailor as the object.

Nouns also have gender: masculine, feminine or neuter (S3). The gender decides which endings an adjective needs, which lesson 6 covers.

The verb sum

The verb sum "I am" links two nominatives, one on each side: Rōma urbs est "Rome is a city". It is irregular. Its present forms are in the table, and since the ending shows the person, the pronoun is usually left out (S31).

Source basis: S3, S31, S20. Rōma is used as a first-declension nominative; this course does not decline it. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

A student reads Nautam puella videt as "the sailor sees the girl" because nautam comes first. Check the reading.

1. Find the verb: videt, "he, she or it sees".
2. Find the nominative, the subject: puella (no -m). So the girl sees.
3. Find the accusative, the object: nautam, ending in -am. So the sailor is seen.
4. The sentence means "the girl sees the sailor". First position is not the subject marker in Latin.

Mental model: Read the ending first. The case tells you the job of the word, and the order of words only adds emphasis.

Common trap: Treating the first noun as the subject, as English word order would.

3. First declension: puella and its relatives

Learning goal: Decline a first-declension noun in all six cases and name the possible cases for an ending such as -ae.

The first declension is the pattern of puella "girl". Take the genitive singular puellae and remove -ae to get the stem puell-, then add the endings (S4).

The nominative singular and the ablative singular differ only by a macron. Because ordinary texts often leave out macrons, puella may be nominative, vocative or ablative, and context decides. The ending -ae is more crowded: it is the genitive singular, the dative singular and the nominative plural of the same noun. This is why you must read each word with its sentence.

First-declension nouns are usually feminine, except a few that name men, such as agricola "farmer" and poēta "poet" (S3). Wiktionary lists nauta "sailor" as masculine or feminine; in this course it names a man, so it takes masculine adjectives in lesson 6 (S5).

Vocabulary

Source basis: S4, S5, S3, S6, S7, S8, S9, S27. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Read Nauta puellae aquam dat. Is puellae genitive, dative or a nominative plural?

1. Find the verb: dat, "he, she or it gives". It is singular.
2. Find the subject: nauta, nominative singular. The subject is already filled.
3. Find the object: aquam, accusative singular. It is the thing given.
4. puellae must be the person it is given to, the dative: "The sailor gives water to the girl." A nominative plural would need a plural verb, and a genitive would need a noun to belong to.

Mental model: Stem from the genitive, endings -a -ae -ae -am -ā in the singular and -ae -ārum -īs -ās -īs in the plural; -ae has three jobs, so test each against the sentence.

Common trap: Reading -ae as one case only. Check the verb and the other nouns before you decide.

4. Second declension: dominus, puer, ager and bellum

Learning goal: Decline masculine and neuter second-declension nouns and say how neuters differ.

The second declension holds masculine nouns in -us and neuter nouns in -um, with a few masculines that lose the -us (S3). The model for -us nouns is dominus "master", genitive dominī (S10).

Two masculine nouns lose the ending in the nominative singular: puer "boy" (genitive puerī) and ager "field" (genitive agrī). They share endings with dominus, but puer keeps the e in its stem and ager drops it (S13, S14). The dictionary genitive tells you which.

Neuter: bellum

In neuter nouns the nominative, vocative and accusative are always the same, and the plural of these cases ends in -a (S3, S15). So a neuter noun in the nominative or accusative must be read from the sentence: it is the subject if the verb has no other candidate, and the object if another noun already fills the subject.

Vocabulary

Source basis: S10, S13, S14, S15, S3, S11, S12, S16. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Decide the genitive plural of ager from the dictionary entry ager, agrī.

1. The entry gives agrī, so the stem is agr-, without the e.
2. Second-declension genitive plural ends in -ōrum, as in dominōrum.
3. Join them: agrōrum.
4. Check against puer, puerī: that noun keeps the e, so its genitive plural is puerōrum. The entry decides, not the nominative.

Mental model: Second declension: -us, -ī, -ō, -um, -ō in the singular; neuters repeat the nominative in the accusative and use -a in the plural.

Common trap: Assuming every -er noun behaves alike. puer keeps its e and ager loses it, and only the dictionary genitive tells you.

5. Verbs: the present tense of the first and second conjugations

Learning goal: Form and read the present tense of amō and moneō, including who is acting.

A Latin verb ending tells you the person and number of the subject. The present tense of regular first-conjugation verbs, such as amō "I love", and second-conjugation verbs, such as moneō "I warn", uses the same six endings (S23, S25).

The infinitive shows the conjugation: amāre for the first, monēre for the second. The endings -ō, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt mean "I", "you", "he, she or it", "we", "you (plural)" and "they". Because the ending carries the subject, the pronoun is usually left out. Latin also does not separate "loves", "is loving" and "does love": the present covers all of them (S3).

A short authentic line shows the endings at work. Plautus wrote Tū mē amās, egō tē amō, "You love me, I love you" (S23). Here tū is "you", mē is "me", egō is "I" and tē is "you" as object; pronouns are outside this course and are glossed when they appear. The line is from Plautus, Mostellaria 305, a work in the public domain; the translation is ours.

Vocabulary

Source basis: S23, S25, S24, S26, S27, S3. The Plautus line is quoted as the Wiktionary entry cites it, with macrons added by the entry. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Read the verb monētis and say who is acting and what the person does.

1. The infinitive monēre shows the second conjugation, so the stem is monē-.
2. Split off the ending: monē-tis.
3. -tis is second person plural.
4. monētis means "you (more than one person) warn".

Mental model: One set of six endings, -ō -s -t -mus -tis -nt, carries the person and number; the stem vowel names the conjugation.

Common trap: Looking for a subject pronoun. Usually there is none, and the ending is the subject.

6. Adjectives that agree: bonus, bona, bonum

Learning goal: Choose the correct form of a first and second declension adjective to agree with a noun in gender, number and case.

An adjective agrees with its noun in gender, number and case. Adjectives like bonus "good" use second-declension endings for masculine and neuter and first-declension endings for feminine (S21). The three nominative singular forms are bonus, bona and bonum.

Singular. The vocative masculine is bone and is left out here.

Plural.

Agreement does not mean identical letters. nauta is a first-declension noun with masculine meaning, so "the good sailor" is nauta bonus with a masculine ending, not nauta bona (S3, S5). magnus, magna, magnum "big" follows the same pattern (S22).

The adjective may come before or after its noun. Choose its ending by the noun it describes, not by the word next to it: Puella bona nautam bonum videt "the good girl sees the good sailor".

Source basis: S21, S22, S3, S5. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Write "the good sailor" as the object of the sentence: Puella ... videt.

1. The object takes the accusative singular: nautam.
2. nauta names a man, so the adjective is masculine.
3. Masculine accusative singular is bonum.
4. Puella nautam bonum videt: "The girl sees the good sailor."

Mental model: Match the adjective to the noun in gender, number and case. Look up all three before you choose the ending.

Common trap: Copying the noun's ending letters onto the adjective, as in nauta bona.

7. Third declension: rex, nomen and civis

Learning goal: Find the stem of a third-declension noun from its genitive and form the main cases.

The third declension is the largest and the least regular. Its nominative singular can look like almost anything, so a dictionary gives the genitive singular as well, which ends in -is. Remove -is and you have the stem: rēx, genitive rēgis, stem rēg- (S17).

Neuter nouns of this declension, such as nōmen "name", genitive nōminis, keep nominative and accusative identical, and the plural ends in -a (S18).

A group called i-stems differs a little. cīvis "citizen" has genitive plural cīvium, and its ablative singular can end in -e or -ī (S19).

Honest limit: the third declension has several sub-patterns, and these three nouns do not cover them all. Learn each new noun as a pair, nominative and genitive.

Vocabulary

Source basis: S17, S18, S19, S20. The accusative urbem, used in lesson 10, follows the -em pattern of rēgem. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Read Cīvēs rēgem laudant. Who praises whom?

1. laudant is third person plural: the subject is "they", plural.
2. cīvēs could be nominative or accusative plural. rēgem is accusative singular, so it is the object.
3. That leaves cīvēs as the subject, in the nominative plural.
4. The citizens praise the king.

Mental model: Learn third-declension nouns with their genitive. The genitive gives the stem, and most endings follow.

Common trap: Building forms from the nominative. rēx has no g to show, so rēgem comes only from rēgis.

8. Third and fourth conjugation, and the whole of sum

Learning goal: Form the present tense of regō and audiō and tell the four conjugations apart by their infinitives.

The four conjugations are told apart by the vowel before -re in the infinitive: amāre (first), monēre (second), regere with a short e (third) and audīre (fourth) (S23, S25, S28, S29).

The third conjugation inserts a short vowel between the stem and the endings, giving regis, regit and regimus, and the third person plural is regunt. The fourth shows an -i- throughout and audiunt in the third person plural.

Honest limit: a further group of verbs, such as capiō, mixes the third and fourth patterns. This course does not teach it (see S32).

The verb sum, completed

The present of sum was in lesson 2. The imperfect, which lesson 9 uses, is eram, erās, erat, erāmus, erātis, erant (S31). The infinitive is esse.

Vocabulary

Source basis: S23, S25, S28, S29, S31, S30, S32. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Read Servī dominum audiunt. Who does what?

1. audiunt: -unt ending, third person plural. The infinitive audīre shows a fourth-conjugation verb. "They hear."
2. servī: -ī here is nominative plural of servus. These are the hearers.
3. dominum: -um, accusative singular. This is what they hear.
4. The slaves hear the master.

Mental model: The infinitive vowel names the conjugation: ā, ē, short e, ī. Present endings are the same set of six, with a linking vowel in the third and fourth.

Common trap: Mixing up the third and fourth conjugations. Compare regunt with audiunt: the fourth keeps its i before the ending.

9. Past tenses: imperfect and perfect

Learning goal: Form the imperfect and perfect active of the four conjugations and choose between them for background and event.

Latin separates two kinds of past. The imperfect describes a past action in progress, repeated or in the background: "was loving", "used to love". The perfect reports a completed event: "loved" or "has loved". Latin has no separate form for "has loved" and "loved"; the perfect covers both (S3).

The imperfect adds -bam to the present stem, with a long vowel before it: amābam, amābās, amābat, amābāmus, amābātis, amābant (S23). The other conjugations follow, with monēbam, regēbam and audiēbam (S25, S28, S29).

The perfect uses a different stem, the third principal part, and one set of endings for all conjugations.

The endings are -ī, -istī, -it, -imus, -istis, -ērunt. The perfect stem is not predictable from the present, so each verb is learned as four principal parts (S23, S25, S28, S29).

A sentence often uses both: Nauta in viā erat "the sailor was on the road" sets the scene (imperfect of sum), and Puella nautam vīdit "the girl saw the sailor" reports the event (S26).

The phrase in viā uses the ablative of via with the preposition in, which lesson 10 explains. vīdit is the third person singular perfect of videō (vīdī). The supine column is listed for completeness; its use is outside this course.

Source basis: S3, S23, S25, S28, S29, S31, S26. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Choose the tense for "The king was ruling the citizens" (ongoing) and for "The king ruled the citizens" as one completed event. Form the verb in each case.

1. The first is an ongoing state in the past: imperfect.
2. regō imperfect, 3rd singular: regēbat.
3. The second reports a completed event: perfect.
4. regō perfect, 3rd singular: rēxit. Both are third person singular, but the stems differ.

Mental model: Imperfect is stem plus -bam, -bās and so on. Perfect uses a learned stem and one set of endings. Learn all four principal parts.

Common trap: Building the perfect from the present stem by rule. rēxī and monuī do not follow the first-conjugation -āvī pattern.

10. Reading a real sentence: prepositions and a line of Caesar

Learning goal: Use prepositions with the right case and parse a short glossed Latin line from the verb out.

Prepositions in Latin take one of two cases. in takes the accusative when it means "into" and the ablative when it means "in" or "on" (S33). Wiktionary lists the others as in the table.

Examples: Dominus servum in urbem mittit "the master sends the slave into the city" (accusative, motion), and Nauta in viā est "the sailor is on the road" (ablative, place) (S30, S20, S8).

A reading routine

Do not read left to right as in English. Find the verb first, then the nominative that matches it, then the accusative object, then the phrases with prepositions, then adjectives that agree. Check each guess against the endings you know.

Caesar, Commentarii de bello Gallico 1.1

The first sentence of Caesar's account of the Gallic War begins Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. The work is in the public domain; the Latin below follows the Latin Wikisource text of Book I, chapter 1, with macrons removed (S34).

Together: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts." From this course you can read Gallia, est, in and partes. The word omnis and the participle divisa need a gloss, and the rest of Caesar's sentence needs relative pronouns and more, so it is outside this course (S35).

What this course did not cover

Fourth and fifth declensions, the passive, the future and pluperfect, the subjunctive, participles, infinitive constructions, pronouns, numbers, comparison of adjectives and verse metre are not in these ten lessons. There was no listening or speaking practice, and fewer than fifty words of vocabulary were taught. After ten lessons you can read very short simple sentences and parse a glossed line. You cannot read Caesar or Cicero unaided; a textbook and a dictionary come next.

Source basis: S33, S34, S30, S20, S8, S35. Example sentences and exercise items are original teaching material.

Worked example

Parse Dominus servum in urbem mittit using the reading routine.

1. Find the verb: mittit, third person singular of mittō, "sends".
2. Find the nominative: dominus, "the master", the one who sends.
3. Find the accusative object: servum, "the slave", the one sent.
4. Add the phrase: in urbem, accusative because of motion: "into the city". The sentence means "The master sends the slave into the city."

Mental model: Read from the verb outward, use the endings, and let prepositions pick their case by meaning. Gloss what you cannot yet read.

Common trap: Guessing the meaning of a sentence from the words you recognise and ignoring the endings.