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Second Declension: Masculine Nouns and Adjectives; Apposition; Word Order Time for another verse to Old MacDonald: US-I-O-UM-O! And then decline the plural noun: I-ORUM-IS-OS-IS! With the nominative first And the genative next Dative and accusative Ablative and vocative Decline a first declension noun: US-I-O-UM-O! You need to remember that some masculine nouns of this declension end in '-us' while others end in '-er'. Remind yourself that the '-us' in the song is a placeholder for whatever the noun's 'normal' ending is - the rest of the rules hold... except that in this case, the vocative ends in '-e' rather than being the same as the nominative. But there's an exception to that, too! Nouns that end in '-ius' simply drop the '-us' in the vocative, rather than becoming '-ie', and the adjective 'meus' becomes 'mi' rather than 'me-e'. Remember the invocation: 'O Marce, mi fili!' Which means 'Oh, Marcus, my son!' That'll remind you. Word order in Latin varies a lot. Wheelock uses mostly classical word order, which works like this, to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star: Adverbs, then at last the verb Should the subject missing go Verbs say what you need to know Subject, object: ind then dir Adverbs, then at last the verb This mnemonic also reminds you that if your sentence doesn't appear to have a nominative noun, you can infer one from the verb ending. If there's no subject, but the verb ends in '-o', the subject is 'I'. Etcetera. |