Latin: Feminine, Masculine and...Neutured?

When you take any foreign language course, you learn about nouns and how they have different sexes. Most of the time, you have either feminine or masculine, right? Feminine has its own set of rules, and masculine has the same. But in Latin, you also have a type of noun called neutered. This means that it is neither feminine nor masculine, and that it follows its own set of rules, despite the fact that it closely relates to masculine.

If you have taken any foreign language classes, then you know that when you structure your sentences, then you have to make sure that all of your nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, etc, are in the proper gender, and number. So instead of having only two genders to choose from, in Latin you have three, and they are not always easy to see. For example, if I wanted the say “the roman boy” I would say, “puer Romanus”. If I wanted the say “the roman girl,” I would say, “puella Romana”. If I wanted to say “the roman war”, I would say, “saxum Romanum”.

If you look at the word ‘roman’, you would see that in each example, it had a different ending. The ending signifies the gender and number, or whether the adjective is feminine, masculine, or neutered, and whether it is singular of plural. Now, this is just a very basic example, but it does show the differences rather well.

I’ve only been taking this class for a little over three weeks now, but I think I am starting to get the hang of all of the rules. Hopefully, by the end of the semester, you will also have a good amount of knowledge of Latin, but don’t always take what I say as absolute truth. I’m only learning too.