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Ablative of personal agent marks the agent by whom the action of a passive verb is performed. The agent is always preceded by ab/ā/abs. Example: Caesar ā deīs admonētur, "Caesar is warned by the gods". [3] Ablative of comparison is used with comparative adjectives, where English would use the conjunction "than".
They also differ as to gender, having different forms for masculine, feminine, and neuter. (But masculine and neuter are identical in the genitive, dative, and ablative cases.) Many adjectives belong to the 1st and 2nd declensions, declining in the same way as the nouns puella, dominus, bellum. An example is the adjective bonus "good" shown below:
Introduction to the ablative case from a 1903 Latin textbook. In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced / ˈ æ b l ə t ɪ v / AB-lə-tiv; sometimes abbreviated abl) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages. It is used to indicate motion away from something, make comparisons, and serve ...
"Dative" comes from Latin cāsus datīvus ("case for giving"), a translation of Greek δοτικὴ πτῶσις, dotikē ptôsis ("inflection for giving"). [2] Dionysius Thrax in his Art of Grammar also refers to it as epistaltikḗ "for sending (a letter)", [3] from the verb epistéllō "send to", a word from the same root as epistle.
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]
The dative singular is the same as the genitive singular in first- and fifth-declension pure Latin nouns. The dative is always the same as the ablative in the singular in the second declension, the third-declension full i-stems (i.e. neuter i-stems, adjectives), and fourth-declension neuters.
The dative construction is a grammatical way of constructing a sentence using the dative case.A sentence is also said to be in dative construction if the subject and the object (direct or indirect) can switch their places for a given verb, without altering the verb's structure (subject becoming the new object, and the object becoming the new subject).
This meaning is often incorporated in a dative case. In Latin this type of dative is called the dativus commodi. An example of a language with a benefactive case is Basque, which has a benefactive case ending in -entzat. Quechua is another example, and the benefactive case ending in Quechua is -paq.