Learn Latin with the help of this grammar book. For intermediates, this 287 page grammar provides a good overview of basic grammar with brief lessons and examples.
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I want to learn the new Latin grammar perfectly by the grce &blessings of The Lord.Some few years ago I studied the same,but not perfectly.Thank you,Sir.Om.
Why do American publications have this very odd order of Nom, gen etc instead of Nom, Voc, Acc, gen, dat, abl as in Europe. It is most confusing!
I’m from Italy, and here too the standard order is nom, gen, dat, acc, voc, abl.
Why, we in Russia have the same order – Nom Gen Dat Acc Abl Voc.
When I first started studying Latin, I wondered about the order too. It seemed to me that Nom. Acc. would make the most sense. In my mind, Nom. Voc. would have been just as bad. The vocative is only different in the 2nd declension, why give it such a prominent place? Anyways, after learning more, I realized how much I like having Genitive in the 2nd position, since that is the other part that allows you to know what declension the noun is a part of.
Now that is a strange comment. I was just thinking how odd it was that other publications used Nom, Voc, Gen, Dat, Able! Bennett was an American Latinist and for some reason he used the alternative method. And most American students have used Bennett and Bennett’s students grew up to teach Latin and write Latin text books. So that is the reason for the difference. I can certainly see the value to the European model but it would be confusing to Americans to now change the Bennett model to the European. And if there is one thing all Latin students hate is change!
@asperges: There’s nothing odd about it.
First, I’m not sure what you mean about ‘as in Europe’. Certainly the Italian grammars I have seen use the ‘American’ order.
Second, I assume the rationale is that the genitive form is what you need to determine the root and declension of the noun. This is presumably why the nom. and gen. are given in Latin dictionary entries – so it makes a certain amount of sense to give them in that order in the grammar.
@asperges: I’d imagine it’s because the vocative is the same as the nominative in all but the second declension, it’d be a bit strange to cram the voc at the very beginning when very few people are going to check to see what it is.
As for gen before acc, most reference dictionaries – I’d say all but I’m sure there are counterexamples – give the nominative form, then the genitive form afterwards, e.g. “rex, regis” or “rex (-egis)” or some variation thereof. Since reference dictionaries give the nom and gen forms linked like that, it’d be sensible to place them beside one another on the declension table. For students, it’d help make that link so they could check dictionaries later on.
Sorry to double post but way back when, when I took Latin, we didn’t even have the vocative case on the declension table unless you went to the appendix and checked the mini reference grammar. We were just told that it was the same as the nominative with only two exceptions which were easy to remember, and we left it at that. So another reason why voc isn’t the second one given.
I suppose it might make sense from a linguistic categorization standpoint (i.e., group all the similar endings together so you have nom & voc’s “a”, and dat & abl’s “ā” together but at some point it becomes a needless hassle to reshuffle everything you learned from the beginning for the purpose of categorization.