Nouns and their relatives II: the declensions

• There are six declensions you need to learn: five for nouns, which are also used to produce the two declensions for most adjectives and a few pronouns, and a further so-called "pronominal" declension to which the remaining pronouns and a handful of adjectives belong.
  

• Here's a table of the endings for the five noun declensions.
  
  • As you can see when you lay them all side-by-side like this, there are a lot of similarities in the way they're formed. But you do need to learn them as separate tables. Let's take the first declension as an example.

    puella, -ae (f.)

    

  • You can stick these endings on the stem of any word that belongs to this declension. The one you learned first was puella, but you can use them on any word,
    

  • including proper names,
    

  • and words you've never met before.
    

    You can tell the declension of a noun from the way it's given in the vocabulary. You always get the nominative and genitive singular of nouns, along with the gender, because the genitive singular is the one form that's completely distinctive in all five declensions. It's important to learn the whole of the vocabulary entry like this - "puella, puellae, feminine", not just "puella, girl" - otherwise you won't be able to recognise the right endings.

  • One thing that'll help you is the recurrent sixfold rhythm in the most of the grammatical tables you have to learn. Keep this sixfold beat up when you recite, and think of the first syllable of the ending as the "snare drum" that holds the beat together.

• adjectives
  • There are only two declensions of adjectives, and they're both formed out of the noun declensions. There are adjectives like malus that take their feminine forms from the first declension and their masculine and neuter forms from the second; and there are adjectives like ingens and tristis that take all their forms from the third declension. There are a couple of small variations within the third declension adjectives that we won't bother with here: some adjectives, the so-called i-stems, have slight differences in the ablative singular and the genitive plural. Some adjectives have separate nominatives for all three genders, some for just two, and some use the same form for all three.

• pronouns and the "pronominal declension"
  • The pronominal declension is a bit of a double misnomer: it's not just used for pronouns, and it's not really an independent declension. What it really is is a variation on the first and second declension of adjectives, with a different genitive and dative singular across all the genders. There are quite a lot of variations on this for different pronouns, and in practice it's a good idea to learn the common ones as separate tables, but solus is the basic table.
    

  • Note that the personal pronouns I, you, and we are irregular, and have their own special declensions; so also with the numbers two and three. These are easy enough that we won't treat them specially in this guide.