How To Parse Latin Nouns (With Sample Exercises)

Analyzing Latin words is important. This post teaches you how to parse Latin nouns in easy steps!

When you parse a noun, you identify all its properties. In other words, you describe the word grammatically.

Latin nouns have three relevant properties: gender, number, and case. A full parsing will include all of them.

Parsing is important because Latin is a highly inflected language with flexible word order. You need to be able to identify a word’s case so you can understand how it fits into the rest of the sentence.

Eventually, you will analyze words automatically and understand Latin on its own, without the need to resort to grammatical analysis. But in the beginning parsing is an excellent tool for students.

So, without further ado, let’s go through the various steps.

How To Parse Latin Nouns

We will start with an example sentence.

Librum in mēnsā magistrī videō.

Our job is to parse mēnsā – to give its gender, number, and case. But before we can do this, we need to take two important preliminary steps.

1. Look the noun up in a dictionary or textbook.
2. Determine what declension it belongs to.

If you already know the word, you don’t need to consult a dictionary. (By “knowing” the word, I mean that you know its nominative and genitive singular and its definition.)

A good Latin dictionary will tell you that mēnsa, ae is a noun meaning “table”. This gives you the necessary information to start the analysis.

Next you need to determine what declension the noun belongs to. You don’t usually include a noun’s declension in your parsing, but you can’t parse a noun properly if you don’t know its declension.

The genitive singular ending –ae tells us that this is a 1st declension noun. Armed with this information, we can now move on to determining gender, number, and case.

Find the noun’s gender

There are three grammatical genders in Latin: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Every noun has a single gender.

Finding a Latin noun’s gender is usually quite straightforward. The noun’s declension will often tell you which gender it is, and it is only 3rd declension nouns that cause problems. You can read all about Latin noun gender here.

In the case of our example noun, mēnsā, we know that it is 1st declension. And 1st declension nouns are overwhelmingly feminine.

We have identified our first property: mēnsā‘s gender is feminine.

Find the noun’s number and case

Latin nouns also have number and case. There are two possible numbers: singular and plural.

A noun is singular if it refers to one person, place, or thing. A noun is plural if it refers to two or more persons, places, or things.

Latin has seven possible cases, but the five most common are nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative.

How do you tell the number and case of a Latin noun? Easy. You look at its case ending. This is the ending added to the noun’s stem.

(What is not so easy is memorizing all the case endings. Check out my post on noun endings and tips for memorization!)

To return to our example: the case ending on mēnsā is –ā. If you look at a declension chart for the 1st declension, you will see that –ā is the ablative singular ending.

Now you know that mēnsā is feminine ablative singular. You have parsed it!

Check the context of the noun

But wait – you’re not done yet. If you are given the noun in a sentence, then you need to make sure that your interpretation makes sense within that sentence.

Librum in mēnsā magistrī videō.

Does ablative singular make sense in this example? As it so happens, yes! Mēnsā comes immediately after the preposition in, which often is followed by the ablative case.

We can conclude that in mēnsā means “on the table”.

I stress the importance of context for two reasons. First, often Latin teachers will ask you to include the use of the noun as part of the parsing. In this case, we would say mēnsā is (feminine) ablative singular and is used as the object of the preposition in.

The second reason for paying attention to context is that sometimes there are multiple ways to parse a noun. Time for another example.

What do you do when a noun can be parsed multiple ways?

Now let’s look at the noun magistrī.

Librum in mēnsā magistrī videō.

The dictionary will tell you that magister, magistrī is a noun meaning “teacher”. The –ī genitive singular ending indicates that it is second declension.

Since this is a second declension noun ending in –er and it refers to a man (from the Roman perspective), the gender is masculine. But when we go try to identify the number and case, a problem arises.

The case ending –ī is BOTH the genitive singular ending AND the nominative plural ending. So what do you do? Which parsing is correct?

If you are parsing magistrī out of context, then you would simply indicate that there are two possibilities: 1) masculine singular genitive and 2) masculine plural nominative.

But in our example we have the context. And in any given sentence, a word can only have one correct parsing. So which is it?

In such cases you have to determine what makes the most sense by looking at the surrounding words. In this case, option #2 does not work. If magistrī were nominative plural, then it would be the subject of the sentence. But the verb is videō, which is a 1st person singular verb meaning “I see”.

The subject of the sentence is “I”, so it can’t also be “the teachers” (magistrī).

Genitive singular must be the answer. Does this work? Well, the most common translation of the genitive is “of [blank]”.

We can combine this with the preceding word, mēnsā, to mean “the table of the teacher” or “the teacher’s table”. That makes sense! This is the standard possessive use of the genitive.

Quick Steps for Parsing Latin Nouns

Let’s review. Here is a summary of easy steps for how to parse Latin nouns!

1. Look up the noun in a dictionary to determine its declension.
2. Figure out its gender (the declension will help with this!).
3. Look at the noun’s case endings and see which case and number it could possibly be.
4. If there is more than one possibility, then check the context of the word to decide which case and number are correct in this context.

An optional fifth step is to determine how the noun is used in its sentence. Many teachers will require this “use” as part of parsing on assignments. It is always best to check with your specific instructor to see what they want you to include in your parsing!

Before we move on to exercises, I will go through one final example.

Librum in mēnsā magistrī videō.

1. The dictionary entry liber, librī tells us that this noun is second declension.
2. Liber is a second declension noun with its nominative singular ending in –er, so it is masculine.
3. The case ending –um is the accusative singular ending.
4. The accusative is frequently used for the direct object of the verb. This makes sense here, where librum can be the direct object of videō.

Now we can finally translate the whole sentence: I see the book on the teacher’s table.

See how grammatical analysis can help you figure out what is happening in a sentence?

Parsing Latin Nouns: Exercises

Practice makes perfect, which is why the rest of this post consists of exercises. See how you do! And don’t forget to download my handy Latin noun endings cheat sheet to help you out.

For this first exercise, try to parse the following Latin nouns in isolation. The first tab is the nouns themselves, the Hints tab supplies the “dictionary entry” of the nouns (along with their declension), and the Answers tab gives the full parsing.

The next exercise includes nouns in context in sentences. This time when you parse them, also provide the use or context.

I hope that you have found this post helpful and that you now feel more confident about how to parse Latin nouns. Parsing can be time-consuming (especially at first), but it is an important step in understanding Latin. With time you will start doing it instinctively, unconsciously, in your head.

Latin Noun Study Aids

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