The Parts of Speech in Latin & Their Attributes
Eight Parts of Speech (AG § 20)
1) Nouns 2) Adjectives & Participles 3) Pronouns 4) Verbs
5) Adverbs 6) Prepositions 7) Conjunctions 8) Interjections
Nouns, Adjectives, and Pronoun all change their endings (i.e., decline) to reveal the role they play in the sentence and how they relate to other words in the sentence.
1) A Noun is the name of the person, place, thing, or idea (e.g., Julius, Rome, house, virtue).
Nouns have Case, Number, and Gender:
Case: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative, Vocative (+ Locative)
Number: Singular or Plural
Gender: Masculine, Feminine, or Neuter
Nouns belong to declensions, or general patterns of endings. The genitive singular signals a noun’s declension:
| -ae 1st
-ī 2nd -is 3rd |
-ūs 4th
-ēī 5th |
2) Adjectives attribute a quality (e.g., good, brave, black).
They agree with the nouns they modify in case, number, and gender.
Adjectives, like nouns, follow the patterns of the 1st/2nd or 3rd declensions.
Adjectives also have one of 3 degrees: positive, comparative, superlative (e.g., fast, faster, fastest; good, better, best).
3) Pronouns distinguishes a person, place, thing, or idea without naming or describing it (e.g., he, who, we).
Like nouns, Pronouns have case, number, and gender.4) Verbs are words capable of asserting something (e.g., I am, he loves)
They have Person, Number, Tense, Mood, and Voice.
Person: 1st, 2nd, or 3rd
Number: Singular or Plural
Tense: Present, Imperfect, Future; Perfect, Pluperfect, Future perfect
Voice: Active or Passive
Mood: Indicative, Imperative, Infinitive, Subjunctive, Participle
Verbs belong to conjugations. The present active infinitive signals the conjugation of a verb.
| -āre 1st
-ēre 2nd |
-ere 3rd
-īre 4th |
Adverbs, Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections are fixed. They do not decline or conjugate.
5) Adverbs express time, place, or manner of an assertion or attribute. Like adjectives, adverbs have degree (positive, comparative, superlative).
6) Prepositions show relation between a noun or pronoun and some other word or words in the same sentence.
7) Conjunctions connect words, groups of words, without affecting their grammatical relations.
8) Interjections are simply exclamations (e.g., oh! vae!); they are often not strictly classified as a true part of speech.
