Latin grammar

Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. The inflections are often changes in the ending of a word, but can be more complicated, especially with verbs. Thus verbs can take any of over 100 different endings to express different meanings, for example regō "I rule", regor "I am ruled", regere "to rule", regī "to be ruled". Most verbal forms consist of a single word, but some tenses are formed from part of the verb sum "I am" added to a participle; for example, ductus sum "I was led" or ductūrus est "he is going to lead". Nouns belong to one of three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). The gender of the noun is shown by the last syllables of the adjectives, numbers and pronouns that refer to it: e.g. hic vir "this man", haec fēmina "this woman", hoc bellum "this war". There are also two numbers: singular (mulier "woman") and plural (mulierēs "women"). As well as having gender and number, nouns, adjectives, and pronouns have different endings according to their function in the sentence, for example, rēx "the king" (subject), but rēgem "the king" (object). These different endings are called "cases". Most nouns have five cases: nominative (subject or complement), accusative (object), genitive ("of"), dative ("to" or "for"), and ablative ("with", "in", "by" or "from"). Nouns for people (potential addressees) have the vocative (used for addressing someone). Some nouns for places have a seventh case, the locative; this is mostly found with the names of towns and cities, e.g. Rōmae "in Rome". Adjectives must agree with their nouns in gender, number, and case. When...