Differentiating between 2nd and 3rd declension with Spanish

Latin Learning Latin
1

Through my studies I have noted a general rule that can help people with knowledge of Spanish differentiate between nouns of the 2nd and 3rd declension. Differentiating between these two declensions is particularly important seeing as the 2nd D. singular genitive is so similar to the 3rd D. dative/ablative plural, which can easily lead to mis-translations.

The trick is that Spanish words that are descended from 2cnd declension nouns mostly end in “o”, here are some examples:

Latin Spanish
angustus angusto
auxilium auxilio
capillus pelo
exilium exilio
refugium refugio
initium initio
ovum huevo
speculum espejo
somnus sueno
amicus amigo
ferrum hierro

On the other hand, Spanish nouns that are descended from 3rd declension nouns mostly end in “es” in their plural forms, here are some examples:

Latin Spanish
luces luces
noctes noches
parentes parentes
partes partes
rationes raciones
salutes saludes
amantes amantes
felices felices
gentes gentes
nomines nombres
paces paces
partes partes
sacerdotes sacerdotes

So far, I have only come across 2 exceptions to this rule - 2 third declension nouns whose descendents end in “o”.

Latin Spanish
tempus tiempo
corpus cuerpo

Maybe this is common knowledge and is already explained in Spanish textbooks of Latin? But anyway, I thought it was interesting and useful.

2

Three minor mistakes in your table:

  • “Pelo” comes from “pilus”, not “capillus”. “Cabello”, however, does come from “capillus”.
  • The Spanish for “parentēs” is “parientes”.
  • The plural of Latin “nōmen” is “nōmina”, not “nōminēs”, since it’s neuter.

Fourth-declension nouns can also wind up in Spanish with -o: manus → mano, senatus → senado…

By the way, another third-declension exception: genus (pl. genera) → género.

3

yeah that’s what makes us Spanish speakers make so many mistakes between 2nd and 4th conjugations (I guess what confused us 1800 years ago still confuses us now).

Same with those horrible 3rd declension -us nouns, we turned them to regular 2nd declension ones: tiempo: plural tiempos (not tiémpora or tiémpores), cuerpo: plural cuerpos (not cuérpora or cuérpores).

BTW from angustus the word is angosto, not angusto; from rationes it’s razones (not raciones, this is a cultism); and saludes doesn’t exist in plural.

4

“Raciones” does exist, as the plural of ración, which means about the same as the English “ration”. But you’re right that the general sense of Latin “ratiō” is expressed better as razón, razones.

5

yes, but ración is a cultism, being razón the patrimonial word. Just like we have two words from collocare, the cultism colocar and the patrimonial word colgar.

6

Just for fun to compare French, (written) French helps with corpus and tempus, since it preserved the -s in the singular, corps and temps, but it provides virtually no help at all for the other words (and for some of them I can’t find even find any reflexes in French), what with the loss of all post-tonic vowels except a, so there’s no difference between ovum > œuf pl. œufs and noctem > nuit pl. nuits.