INTRODUCTION My father started trying to teach me Latin when I was 9, and he kept asking me, "What does this word modify?" All I knew about "modify" was that it meant change something, usually by adding gizmos, and anyone could see that words are not adding gizmos, so I had no idea what modified what. We both became very frustrated because we hadn’t defined our terms. For this reason, and because I’ve received a couple of comments on the subject, I’d like to use this first lesson just to talk a little about grammar in general, so we all start with a baseline vocabulary. Latin is a heavily inflected language. Every noun and adjective has an inflection, or ending, to tell you exactly how it’s being used. Decode the inflections and you decode the meaning. English used to be heavily inflected aeons ago, but the only a few endings now survive, e.g. singular vs. plural (boy/boys; child/children). The inflections in Latin tell you the gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), the number (singular or plural), and the case of the noun or adjective in question. Latin has five cases that are used regularly, and two more than you almost never see but should be able to recognize on the rare occasions that they crop up. The most popular cases are nominative (for subjects and predicate nominatives, e.g., My son is a centurion), genitive (mostly possessives, e.g. the centurion’s sword), dative (indirect objects, e.g. I gave my centurion a sword, and certain special direct objects), accusative (most direct objects, e.g. I gave my centurion a sword, and some objects of prepositions, e.g. I sent my centurion to the frontt, and ablative (mostly objects of prepositions). The last two are the vocative, the case of direct address (Yo, Marcus, what time is the gladiator show?), which is only necessary to learn for a few nouns since it generally looks exactly like the nominative; and the locative, the case of place where, which by the time of medieval Latin has been totally taken over by the accusative with preposition except for about 4 words which managed somehow to retain it. When you decline a noun, that is, put it through its singular and plural cases, the declension typically looks something like this: Singular Plural Nom hortus (garden) horti Genative horti hortorum Dat horto hortis Acc hortum hortos Abl horto hortis Now you may be saying to yourself, "But many of those forms look the same! How will I know which is which?" To which I answer, what does the word fly mean? The context of the sentence will help you to know which case and number is meant (e.g., Horti pulchri sunt, Gardens are nice, is obviously different from Moenia horti collabrunt, The walls of the garden fell down). There are 5 declensions: a noun will fall into one of 5 patterns of nom/gen/dat/acc/abl. Adjectives only come in 2 declension flavors, combined 1st and 2nd declension, and 3rd declension. Every adjective must match its noun (the word it MODIFIES) in gender, number, and case. The whole inflected endings gestalt, by the way, means that nouns can be scattered freely about the sentence in any order, and their adjectives don’t have to be next to them, but because the endings tell you how they are used, the sentence means the same thing. For us, "The girl broke the sword" and "The sword broke the girl" are very different, because English is dependent on word order for meaning; but gladium puella fraxit and gladium fraxit puella and puella fraxit gladium are all the same in Latin (though with slight changes in emphasis: the girl broke the sword, the girl broke the sword, the girl broke the sword). Verbs are conjugated: the stem is literally joined together (con, "with," jugere, "to join") with the number, person, tense, voice and mood required. All together they tell you who did it (number and person), when they did it (tense), whether they did it or were done to (voice), and how they felt about it (mood). There are 4 conjugations: a verb will fall into one of 4 patterns of number, person, tense, voice and mood endings. 1st and 2nd conjugation verbs are overwhelmingly regular, that is, verbs of these conjugations will follow the same pattern of principle parts (see below); 4th conjugation verbs are somewhat regular, and 3rd conjugation are all over the map. The principle parts of a Latin verb are the parts you use to find the stem so you can stick the ending on so you can conjugate it. There are four principle parts, as follows: the first person singular present active indicative (voco, I call), the present infinitive (vocare, to call), the first person singular perfect active indicative (vocavi, I have called), and the neuter singular perfect participle (vocatum, called). Number (singular vs. plural) and person (I, you, he/she/it, we, you (pl), they) are pretty simple. Tense tells you when the action happened: present, imperfect (started happening but did not finish happening in the past), future, perfect (started happening in the past and finished really recently), pluperfect (started happening in the past and finished completely before another event), and future perfect (will be finished completely before another event). Voice tells you if "the boy hit the ball" (active) or "the boy was hit by the ball" (passive). Mood is a little more complicated, particularly since it’s pretty much disappeared in English. The three moods are indicative (simply indicates that something is so), imperative (the voice of command: "Eat your vegetables!"), and subjunctive (which frankly we’ll discuss as we get to it, since it has a lot of usages and shades of meaning). The simple past that is so commonly used in English (I ate dinner) is usually rendered in Latin by the perfect. Once we get going, I will not ask you simply to "conjugate this verb" for a Latin verb (though there are some complete conjugations in the exercises for today in English, for practice). That would mean showing you know all 6 persons, 6 tenses, 2 voices and 3 moods, for a total of 146 forms, not including infinitives and participles (imperative only comes in 2nd person present flavor). That’s a bunch. Now, doing a couple complete conjugations, especially of the verb "to be" when we get that far, is probably good practice, but it would also take forever to grade! Instead, the assignment will be something like: "Conjugate this verb through the first person singular indicative." This would be 1 person, 6 tenses, 2 voices, and 1 mood, for a total of 12 forms ­ much more manageable. First assignment: This is more of a diagnostic than anything else, to be sure everyone knows what all the words mean. No Latin involved today! I. Identify the following parts of speech in each of the sentences below (not all sentences will have all parts): subject, predicate nominative, direct object, indirect object, preposition, object of preposition, possessive adjective, appositive. 1. My brave son the centurion brought me the head of his sworn enemy when he returned from Parthia, where he was fighting in the war against Mithradates. 2. If swords are outlawed, only outlaws will have swords. 3. I have not seen the man whose racing chariot was overturned, but his horses will have been returned to the royal stables by now. 4. Poets in those days did not make great farmers, since they were often wasting their time in licentious living. 5. If you will help me to bring home this rather heavy bust of Pallas, I will ensure that you are not expelled from the Senate. 6. The tribune had not scheduled enough violent games at the Coliseum, so the people became angry and threw large rocks at him whenever he was travelling through the city. II. Identify the verb(s) in each of the sentences below and give its person, number, tense, and voice (we’re just doing indicative mood for now); also indicate infinitives. 1. My brave son the centurion brought me the head of his sworn enemy when he returned from Parthia, where he was fighting in the war against Mithradates. 2. If swords are outlawed, only outlaws will have swords. 3. I have not seen the man whose racing chariot was overturned, but his horses will have been returned to the royal stables by now. 4. Poets in those days did not make great farmers, since they were often wasting their time in licentious living. 5. If you will help me to bring home this rather heavy bust of Pallas, I will ensure that you are not expelled from the Senate. 6. The tribune had not scheduled enough violent games at the Coliseum, so the people became angry and threw large rocks at him whenever he was travelling through the city. III. Identify the adjectives in each of the sentences below and show what nouns they modify. 1. My brave son the centurion brought me the head of his sworn enemy when he returned from Parthia, where he was fighting in the war against Mithradates. 2. If swords are outlawed, only outlaws will have swords. 3. I have not seen the man whose racing chariot was overturned, but his horses will have been returned to the royal stables by now. 4. Poets in those days did not make great farmers, since they were often wasting their time in licentious living. 5. If you will help me to bring home this rather heavy bust of Pallas, I will ensure that you are not expelled from the Senate. 6. The tribune had not scheduled enough violent games at the Coliseum, so the people became angry and threw large rocks at him whenever he was travelling through the city. IV. Conjugate the following verbs through all possible combinations: to have, to run, to think. (No subjunctive required.)