The genitive endings are most important, not only from the Latin point of view (because they indicate which declension a noun belongs to), but from the ENGLISH point of view. Most nouns fell into one of the first three declensions the fourth and fifth were rarer.Įach of the declensions had its own set of case and number endings (although there was some degree of overlap). The fifth declension has -ei in the genitive: fides, fidei The fourth declension has -us (having a long form of the vowel in the ending) in the genitive: The third declension has -is in the genitive: rex, regis The second declension has -i in the genitive: vir, viri
The declensions were numbered arbitrarily (first through fifth) by the Roman grammarians.įor example, the first declension is identifiable by the ending -ae in the genitive: femina, feminae In other words, you could tell what class the word was in by looking at the genitive form. The form of a noun that was most diagnostic of which declension it belonged to was the genitive (possessive) case. Membership in a given declension was arbitrary, or rather only understandable historically. (Declensions gradually became less important and finally essentially disappeared, leaving only the two-way gender classifications in the modern Romance languages). There were five different noun declensions, and the declensions were more important for determining the endings on nouns than the gender. Latin had two simultaneously operative noun class systems: gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) and also what are called declensions. The class a word belonged to determined the particular inflectional endings it occurred with
Latin had grammatical systems in which both the nouns and the verbs (and to a certain extent the adjectives) fell into classes. combinations of words the role of bound morphology for grammar is then proportionally smaller.) (In contrast, English and many other languages of the world primarily use syntactic constructions, i.e. Latin and Greek are both languages of the inflectional type, that is, they use a lot of bound morphology to indicate much of the grammatical information in the language. That's a complicated sentence, but basically, it's something like "most of the soldiers" or "all of the things" or "none of the slave-girls" - basically, any situation where you're talking about a number of something and you use "of" to describe it in English, that's where you use a genitive case for that thing in Latin.Classical Morphology Classical Morphology Partitive Genitive – the genitive case is also used to describe a number or amount of something that is part of a larger whole. The number of women who own the dresses is what changes the genitive. Notice that the number of dresses doesn't change the genitive ending. Here are some examples to illustrate what that means: Their cases don't affect one another.Īnother note about the genitive of possession is that its number reflects the owner(s), not the thing(s) being owned. Still genitive, because the merchant still owns the dog. Does that affect the case of the merchant at all? Nope. Its case has now changed to the accusative to reflect that. Notice that the dog is now the direct object of the sentence instead of the subject.
The dog is performing the action in this sentence - it's the subject - so it's in the nominative the fact that it is owned by someone in this sentence does not affect its case in any way. The dog belongs to the merchant, so the merchant is the one in the genitive case. The person, place, or thing that owns something is given in the genitive case, while the case of the thing being owned is not affected by the possessive. Possession – the genitive case is most often used to show ownership or possession of something.
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