The genitive case can be used for purposes other than possession. A partitive genitive is used to indicate the whole from which a part is taken: ‘some of the men’, ‘one of the boys’, and ‘half (of) the pie’ are partitive genitives in English. Objective genitives are used with a noun or adjective to indicate the kind of relationship to that noun or adjective that an object would have to a verb: thus ‘fear of falling’ (one fears falling) and ‘love of music’ (one loves music) are objective genitives.

Latin has a relatively large group of words that can function either as adjectives or as pronouns. We have seen quis ‘who?’, ‘which?’, hic ‘this’, ille ‘that’, and is ‘he’, ‘this’, ‘that’, but there are also a number of others, including iste ‘that of yours’ and ipse ‘-self’. These two are declined as follows; note the similarity to the declension of ille.

The imperfect subjunctive, like the present subjunctive, does not have a fixed translation; its meaning depends on its construction. One construction in which the imperfect subjunctive is often used is the purpose clauses discussed in chapter 15.2: these use either present or imperfect subjunctive for the subordinate clause depending on the tense of the main verb. This relationship between the tense of the main verb and the tense of the subjunctive is called ‘sequence of tenses’ and is one of the most important rules of Latin syntax. Indicative tenses fall into two groups, primary and historic (also called primary and secondary); primary tenses in the main verb result in present subjunctives in the subordinate clause, and historic tenses in the main verb result in imperfect subjunctives in the subordinate clause.

So far all the verbs we have seen have been in the present tense, but Latin has a future as well. Third-conjugation verbs (the only type we have seen so far) form their futures by changing the vowel in the ending to e, except in the first person singular.

The nominative, vocative, and accusative are only three of the six cases in Latin. Another is the genitive, whose singular endings you have already seen in the vocabulary entries. The genitive is traditionally used in dictionary entries because it was the second case (after the nominative) in the order that the Romans themselves used, and many modern Classicists (especially in North America) follow this ancient order. British Classicists, however, tend to learn the cases in a revised order that puts similar endings together and therefore makes the paradigms easier to learn. In order to accommodate both traditions, this book will give all declensions twice, first in the British order and then in the ancient order. It is recommended that any given class choose one order and stick to it consistently throughout the course, to avoid confusion.

So far we have seen only one past indicative tense, the perfect, but Latin has an imperfect indicative as well. The imperfect is used to describe actions as ongoing in the past, such as ‘I was doing’ or ‘I used to do’. It is relatively simple to form, because all the different conjugations take exactly the same endings, and the only differences between them come from the stem vowels used before those endings.

Latin poetry is different from the type of writing we have so far seen. It uses a wider range of vocabulary and grammatical forms (including some borrowed from Greek) and an even freer word order than prose. Adjectives are often some distance from the nouns with which they agree, and the words of one clause may be interspersed with those of another clause. The extracts below come from the beginning of Virgil’s Aeneid (first century bc); they have not been altered in any way. See whether you can translate them using the vocabulary below and being imaginative with the word order; if you get stuck, try looking at the version below each vocabulary, where the words have been re-arranged into an order more like that of prose.

Word in parentheses modify the noun or pronoun that is the subject or object; for the purposes of this exercise it is legitimate either to consider them part of the subject/object or not to do so.

We have so far seen two kinds of indirect speech: indirect statement (accusative + infinitive) and indirect commands (ut + subjunctive). There is also a third type of indirect speech, indirect questions. Indirect questions take the subjunctive like indirect commands, but they are introduced by an interrogative word rather than by ut or nē; if they are negative nōn is used. The Latin subjunctive is translated with an English indicative (usually in the same tense; see 54.3 below).

Dimittit nos magister; regredior domum. intro domum patris, exuo vestimenta mundiora, induo cottidiana. posco aquam ad manus. quoniam esurio, dico meo puero: ‘pone mensam et mantele et mappam, et vade ad tuam dominam, ut afferas panem et pulmentarium et vinum. dic meae matri me iterum reverti debere ad domum magistri. ideo ergo festina mihi afferre prandium.’ satis prandeo et bibo. sed dicit mihi meus paedagogus: ‘quid pateris hodie? nihil gustavisti.’

In addition to the first and second declensions, Latin has a third declension. Nouns of the third declension can be masculine, feminine, or neuter, and all three genders decline similarly, except that in the neuter the nominative, vocative, and accusative are always the same as each other. The nominatives singular of third-declension nouns are unpredictable: the first form in the vocabulary entry will always be the nominative and vocative (and accusative in the case of neuter nouns) singular, but there is no reliable way of predicting what the relationship between that form and the other forms in the paradigm will be.