![]() ![]() (The infinitive is the form that can stand alone, but is not inflected with any person and number endings. That vowel recurred in different forms of the verb, but it is easiest to notice in the infinitive form. The most obvious way the conjugations differed was in the vowel in the second syllable of the root (or first, if only one syllable). The endings for person and number were slightly different depending on the conjugation the tense endings show a little more distinction between the classes. The verbs of Latin fell into four classes, called conjugations. Take off the genitive ending -is and we have the stem, reg-, which occurs in Latin borrowings like regicide and regency. The genitive shows the stem of the noun, that is, is the fullest form to which case/number endings were added and the stem is the form that occurs in almost all English borrowings from Latin.įor example, the word for 'king' is in the nominative case form rex, but its genitive form is regis. 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. Classical Morphology Classical Morphology ![]()
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