Adjectives Flashcards
What is an Adjective?
Adjectives are words that describe nouns and tell us more about them. They are words like “happy,” “sad,” “cold,” “hot,” “fast,” “slow,” “smart,” “dumb,” “brown,” “red,” and so on. In English, we usually put an adjective in front of a noun in order to make it describe that noun, like “happy dog” or “sad panda” or “red monkey butt.”
How are Adjectives in Latin different from English?
In Latin, since word order is more fluid than English, adjectives are a little more complicated. An adjective could be right next to the noun it modifies, or two words away from it, or even on the opposite end of a long sentence. So how do you know which word that adjective is describing? You can use this rule:
An adjective matches its noun in case, number, and gender.
How?
An adjective is connected to its noun by matching it in certain ways. Like nouns, Latin adjectives can have different numbers (singular or plural), different genders (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and different cases (nominative, accusative, and so on). If an adjective is going to describe a noun, it needs to be in the same case, number, and gender as that noun. So if the noun is nominative, singular, and masculine, then the adjective needs to be nominative, singular, and masculine. If the noun is ablative, plural, and neuter, then the adjective needs to be ablative, neuter, and plural. You get the picture, right? Here are some examples of adjectives matching their nouns:
Examples:
filius meus . my son (nominative, singular, masculine)
camelopardalibus pulchris beautiful giraffes (dative, plural, neuter)
domos ligneas wooden houses (accusative, plural, feminine)
Also like nouns, adjectives are split into declension groups to show what kind of ending they will have in any given situation. Also ALSO like nouns, those declension groups are split up according to the adjective’s ending in the genitive case. There are two groups of adjectives: 1st-and-2nd Declension adjectives, and 3rd Declension adjectives.
