Latin vs. English, Part 2: Noun Cases

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In my first post in this series, we discussed Latin's reliance on word endings to organize sentences. English relies on word order, not word endings (for the most part). One of the most important roles of word endings in Latin is the determining of noun cases.

Noun cases are various "jobs" a noun can do. For example, most sentences need a subject (the doer of the action) and a direct object. In Latin, these jobs of the noun are called the nominative (subject) and the accusative (direct object). To be completely sure what job the noun is doing, the reader must look at the inflected ending and nothing else.

agricola
-a = nominative inflected ending, therefore the subject of a verb

agricolam

-am = accusative inflected ending, therefore the direct object of a verb

Next up: the remaining noun cases Pin It