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Ling 215 Course Page

Words in English
Linguistics/English 215
Prof. S. Kemmer

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. (In contrast, English and many other languages of the world primarily use syntactic constructions, i.e. combinations of words; the role of bound morphology for grammar is then proportionally smaller.)

Latin had grammatical systems in which both the nouns and the verbs (and to a certain extent the adjectives) fell into classes. The class a word belonged to determined the particular inflectional endings it occurred with.

Noun classes

Latin had two simultaneously operative noun class systems: gender (masculine, feminine and neuter) and also what are called declensions. There were five different noun declensions, and the declensions were more important for determining the endings on nouns than the gender. (Declensions gradually became less important and finally essentially disappeared, leaving only the two-way gender classifications in the modern Romance languages). Membership in a given declension was arbitrary, or rather only understandable historically.

The form of a noun that was most diagnostic of which declension it belonged to was the genitive (possessive) case. In other words, you could tell what class the word was in by looking at the genitive form. The declensions were numbered arbitrarily (first through fifth) by the Roman grammarians.

For example, the first declension is identifiable by the ending -ae in the genitive:

femina, feminae	'woman, of the woman'
porta, portae	'door, of the door'
nauta, nautae	'sailor, of the sailor'

The second declension has -i in the genitive:

vir, viri	'man, of the man'
amicus, amici	'friend, of the friend'
bellum, belli	'war, of the war'

The third declension has -is in the genitive:

rex, regis	'king, of the king'
mens, mentis	'mind, of the mind'
urbs, urbis	'city, of the city'

The fourth declension has -us (having a long form of the vowel in the ending) in the genitive:

manus, manus	'hand, of the hand'
senatus, senatus	'senate, of the senate'
cornu, cornus	'horn, of the horn'

The fifth declension has -ei in the genitive:

fides, fidei	'faith, of the faith'
dies, diei	'day, of the day'

Most nouns fell into one of the first three declensions; the fourth and fifth were rarer.

Each of the declensions had its own set of case and number endings (although there was some degree of overlap). 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. 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.

For example, the word for 'king' is in the nominative case form rex, but its genitive form is regis. Take off the genitive ending -is and we have the stem, reg-, which occurs in Latin borrowings like regicide and regency

Verb classes

Notice:

The first conjugation has a in the infinitive:

amare	'to love'
portare	'to carry'

The second has a long e in the infinitive:

monere	'to warn'
tenere	'to have'

The third has a short e:

facere	'to do'
agere	'to do, drive'
ducere	to lead'

And the fourth has an i in the infinitive:

audire	'to hear
venire	'to come'

The modern languages descended from Latin have for the most part reduced this to a three-way verb conjugation system, having lost the vowel length distinctions that Latin had. Again, membership in the conjugation classes was essentially arbitrary. It resulted from historical origin and sound change factors, but had nothing to do with the meanings of the verbs.

Knowing just four forms of a verb, one could derive all of the dozens of person/number/tense/voice/mood forms for that verb. These four forms are called the principal parts: