Learn Latin from the Romans A Complete Introductory Course Using Textbooks from the Roman Empire

Cases

Nouns are words for people, places, or things. In English, word order tells us how the nouns and verbs in a sentence are related: ‘Maria leads Julia’ has a very different meaning from ‘Julia leads Maria.’ The noun (or pronoun) that comes before the verb is usually the subject, the doer of the action of the verb. Likewise, in English, if there is a noun (or pronoun) after the verb, that is normally the object, the recipient of the action of the verb. In Latin, however, the information as to which noun is the subject and which is the object is conveyed not by word order, but by the endings of the words (inflection). The subject has an ending that identifies it as belonging to the nominative case, and the object has an ending that identifies it as belonging to the accusative case. Therefore any word order can be used in Latin without altering the basic meaning of the sentence, and when translating a Latin sentence into English one normally has to change the order of the words.

Names like Marīa and Iūlia belong to the first declension, a group of nouns that end in -a in the nominative singular (when they are subjects) and in -am in the accusative singular (when they are objects). Thus ‘Maria leads Julia’ could be written in Latin Marīa Iūliam dūcit; this would be the normal order with the verb at the end. But ‘Maria leads Julia’ could also be Iūliam Marīa dūcit, dūcit Iūliam Marīa, dūcit Marīa Iūliam, Marīa dūcit Iūliam, or Iūliam dūcit Marīa. These six sentences are not identical in meaning; there are differences of emphasis depending on how they vary from the normal order. But all six could be translated into English as ‘Maria leads Julia’. Similarly ‘Julia leads Maria’ could be written in Latin Iūlia Marīam dūcit, Marīam Iūlia dūcit, dūcit Marīam Iūlia, dūcit Iūlia Marīam, Iūlia dūcit Marīam, or Marīam dūcit Iūlia.