The genitive case is different in all five declensions (we will visit them in another post!) - because of this the genitive case is often used to distinguish the declensions from each other.Įxample: ad portum Alexandrīae mox pervēnimus. This is the case that marks possession - it marks a noun as being the possessor of another noun. With case-specific prepositions such as per (through), ad (to/toward), and trans (across).Įxamples: amīcus puellam salūtat. The accusative case is typically used in the following cases:Īs a direct object (the person/thing having something done to them). Exceptions include singular second-declension nouns that end in -us in the nominative case.Įxample: contendite, amīcī! Hurry, friends! In Latin, the form of the vocative case of a noun is often the same as the nominative. The vocative case is used for a noun that identifies a person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed. The form of the word you find in dictionaries will be the nominative.Įxample: mercātor cantābat. The subject is the thing or person acting/doing. Now let’s take a look at the different cases.Īlso known as the subjective case, the nominative marks the subject of the sentence. You may also see the cases ordered as nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, and ablative this order is reminiscent of the work of grammarian Aelius Donatus.
Learning the cases in this order originates in Britain, introduced by Benjamin Hall Kennedy's Latin Primer (1866), designed to make cases easier to memorise. There are also traces of the locative case in Latin, however, it is limited to a few nouns.įor this blog post, and for the majority of our current and future resources, we will be discussing the cases in the order outlined at the beginning of this paragraph. Latin has 6 distinct cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, and ablative. The first two cases are also present in Latin and will be introduced below. English personal pronouns are said to have three cases: nominative, accusative, and oblique. Modern English has mainly lost the case system that was prevalent in proto Indo-European, however case is still retained in personal pronouns. For example, if you take the word puella (meaning girl), the stem of the word is puell and the ending -a indicates that the case is nominative (singular) - we will explain what nominative means further down. In Latin, nouns and adjectives take different endings added to the stem depending on the case. Simply speaking, a case is a marker that tells us how a noun or adjective is to be interpreted in relation to other words in a sentence. Understanding the different cases in Latin is fundamental to comprehending and constructing the language, but fear not! In this blog post we will introduce you to the different cases and explain how they work. If you are at the beginning of your Latin journey, you may be unfamiliar with grammatical cases.
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