Salvēte, sodālēs. And welcome back.
Let’s take a look at the front cover of Handy Latin Tables Pars Prima. You will see two Roman gods with their Latin names, Minerva and Mercurius. Remember that the ‘v’ in Minerva is pronounced like a ‘w’ and I’ll put in caps the syllable that you want to stress. miNERva and merCUrius.
From Handy Latin Tables Pars Prima (front cover)
Take your attention to the fact that Minerva ends in an -a and Mercurius ends in a -us. When we meet the characters of our textbook next lesson, we are going to find that all the girls and women have names that end in -a and that all the boys and men have names that end in -us.
In Lesson One I mentioned that the Romans have two words for friend, amīca and amīcus, that are gender specific. The word for a female friend ends in -a and the word for a male friend ends in -us. The same is true for equa (female horse) and equus (male horse).
More relevant here, however, are the words dea (goddess) and deus (god). With this in mind, I’m going to show you your first Latin verb and give you some sentences to read. Your first verb is est, often translated as ‘is’. I’m also going to show you that Latin word order is more flexible than English word order; all four of the following sentences are grammatically correct.
Minerva est dea.
Minerva dea est.
Mercurius deus est.
Mercurius est deus.
This is enough (satis) for today. Satis est. See you tomorrow.
By the way - if you have any questions or comments about the course, please feel free to leave them in the comments section below.