Genitive, Latin

[Ohdanigirl]

Ds is having some trouble with this. It has been explained to him by a few people, but he just does not get it.

 

Any thoughts on some exercises to help him out? Or, anyone want to take a stab at explaining it here?

 

He is using Lingua Latina.

 

Thanks.

 

Danielle

[Teachin'Mine]

This gives a good description and examples:

 

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latin/Lesson_2-Genitive_and_Dative

[Aquinas Academy]

What exactly is he having trouble with? Does he understand the idea of the genitive? Or does he have trouble identifying it?

Here are a few links that might be helpful:

http://www.novaroma.org/nr/Genitive

More complex uses of the genitive (he may not be at this level yet: http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/genitive.html

[angela in ohio]

What kind of exercises? I'm not sure what else you can do besides explain what it is and compare it to English. At a certain point, too, it is best to explain, memorize, and then work with it until understanding comes with more use.

 

I have found that it helps to not tell my students the usual "Latin has declensions, English doesn't." I tell them that we do have something similiar in English, we just don't talk about it the same way. Then when we talk about Genitive, I can say that it is just like the Possessive in English (which is good enough for a beginning Latin student,) it just has a different name in Latin. When they think of it as having an English equivalent, it seems to help them.

[Ohdanigirl]

He understands what it is used for, but seems to have trouble identfuying it in his readings and putting it into practice.

 

Danielle

 

P.S. Thanks for the links.

[abbeyej]

Well, we have a genitive form in English -- we show it with an apostrophe. :)

 

Farmer. That's how we write the word "farmer" as a subject or object in English, right? And if we want it to be plural, we would write "farmers". Again, in English, it happens to look the same whether it's a subject or an object.

 

If we want the word "farmer" to show possession in English, we (often) use an apostrophe. Farmer's means something different than farmer or farmers, right? Farmer's means "belonging to the farmer" or "of the farmer". We could say "the farmer's field" or "the field of the farmer" or "the field belonging to the farmer". All of those would be phrases where the farmer shows possession. In Latin, the word "farmer" would be put in the genitive case to show that he has possession (in this case, he possesses a field). We can also say farmers' and that's how we show that "farmer" is plural and has possession in English, right? We could say, "the farmers' fields were flooded" or "the fields of the farmers were flooded" or "the fields belonging to the farmers were flooded" and all of those would indicate that more than one farmer owned more than one field and they had been flooded...

 

So in Latin, we've got this word "agricola, agricolae, m. - farmer" -- that's how you'd see it in a dictionary. The first form is the nominative singular (farmer as subject or subject complement / predicate nominative in a sentence) and the second form is the genitive singular ("farmer's" or "of the farmer). [some kids, when they first start, think the dictionary form is the nominative singular and plural, but it's not...]

 

Anyway, so we've got this word "farmer". It could be a subject:

The farmer has a field.

agricola agrum habet.

 

It could be a subject and be plural:

The farmers have a field. (Hm, I guess they're share-croppers...)

agricolae agrum habent. (The verb changes because the subject is now plural. We wouldn't want to say "The farmers has a field.")

 

The word "farmer" could be an object. In English, "farmer" looks the same to us:

The girl loves the farmer.

But in Latin, agricola (nominative) becomes agricolam (accusative) when the farmer is the object.

puella agricolam amat.

 

If the girl is rather fickle and happens to love a bevy of farmers, we would say:

The girl loves the farmers. (See how we change the ending in English? It tells us more about the word. We don't rely on our endings as much as the Romans, but we do use them sometimes!)

In Latin, we would say:

puella agricolas amat.

 

All that to say: the genitive isn't anything terribly different and scary. We've had "farmer" be a subject, we've had it be an object, we've seen that it has singular and plural forms in each of those...

 

Well, not "farmer" can show possession.

 

The girl loves the farmer's field. (This girl is a practical little thing, thinking of her future...)

puella agrum agricolae amat.

(puella = nom S; agrum = acc S; agricolae = gen S)

 

The girl loves the farmers' fields. or, The girl loves the fields of the farmers. (See, she's so practical she doesn't care much about the particular farmers -- she's just thinking of having some nice fields to hand down to her children some day...)

puella agros agricolarum amat.

(puella = nom S; agros = acc Pl; agricolarum = gen Pl)

 

We could say other things:

The queen's poet writes a book.

poeta reginae librum scribit.

(reginae = gen singular)

 

The poets' books are long.

libri poetarum longi sunt.

(poetarum = gen plural)

 

The sailor watches the farmer's daughter.

nauta filiam agricolae spectat.

 

.... Now, nouns are divided up into different groups based on the way they form their endings. Someone said, "Hey! Look! All of these kind of work the same... Let's put puella and stella and agricola and nauta and poeta and regina all in one pile and we can just memorize the endings since they all work pretty much the same way!" Then they made another pile for others like servus and amicus and equus... They ended up with five main piles. And named 'em declensions. :)

 

Agricola is a first declension nouns and the nouns that decline like it (other first declension nouns) have genitives that are -ae in the singular and -arum in the plural.

 

Servus is a second declension noun and it's genitives are -i and -orum.

 

But they work the same way as agricola in terms of when you'd use genitive endings and how you would translate.

The slave's daughter reads a book.

filia servi librum legit.

(filia = nom S; servi = gen S; librum = acc S)

[Aquinas Academy]

What declensions does he know so far? On of the tricky things is that in the first declension the genitive ending -ae is the same in the dat. sg., and nom and voc. pl. In the 2nd dec. the genitive ends -i, same as the nom. and voc. pl.. Some 3rd. dec. nouns look end in -is in the nom., voc., and gen..

It can be confusing!

Make sure your DS really knows his forms. Then, when he comes to a sentence with a noun that could be one of multiple cases, have him translate the noun in all the possible ways. For instance, if the noun is "feminae" it could mean "women", " of the woman", or "to the woman". Almost 100% of the time only one translation will be correct. Hopefully, after doing this a few time he'll start to get more comfortable with this and will be able to identify the genitive faster.