Nouns and their relatives III: agreement

• One difference between Latin and English that I haven't called attention to yet is the inclusion of adjectives in the family of nouns and their relatives. In English, adjectives don't decline at all; they belong, if you like, to the family of "other words" like adverbs and conjunctions and prepositions that don't change their endings. In Latin, though, adjectives do inflect, and not only that but they inflect to match the noun they qualify. This is what's called grammatical agreement between adjectives and nouns.
  

• Note that agreement between adjectives and nouns doesn't mean they have the same series of letters on the end. They might, if the adjective and noun belong to the same declension and the genders happen to work out:
  

• But often the same sequence of letters on the end of a noun or adjective can be quite deceptive. None of these pairs of words actually agree:
  

• The rule is that the two endings should be grammatically identical rather than alphabetically identical: they should share the same case, number, and gender, and exhibit the appropriate endings for that case, number, and gender for their own declension.
  

• Here's a kind of exercise I do a lot with my group, where you have to match up the right pronominals, adjectives, and nouns. It's the kind of thing that faces you a lot when you have to translate one of those scrambled Latin sentences.
  

• If you can do this, you know pretty much all there is to know about nouns and their relations: recognising the endings, spotting pairs of words that agree, and connecting them up to translate. Now that you know all this, let's finish off this section with a bit of real Latin syntax.