Parts of Speech
You are probably familiar with the parts of speech from your school days or watching the School House Rock lessons that used to be tucked in among Saturday morning cartoons.
Nouns: person, place, thing, or idea (e.g., “buddy,” “basement,” “potato,” “honesty”)
Pronouns: words that stands in for a noun (e.g., “she,” “who,” “those”)
Verbs: actions or states of being (e.g., “love,” “hang,” “go,” “dream”)
Adjectives: qualities of nouns (e.g., “greedy,” “colorful,” “slick”)
Adverbs: qualifiers for verbs (e.g., “beautifully,” “there,” “fast,” “yesterday”)
Prepositions: words that identify a relationship (e.g., “in,” “about,” “of”)
Conjunctions: words that join like things (e.g., “and,” “because,” “although”)
Interjections: exclamatory words (e.g., “Wow!” “Ouch!” “Yuck!” )
As you will soon see, some parts of speech in Latin have “parts.” English words do, too. For example, if you were learning English as a foreign language, the only way you'd know that the plural of “child” is “children,” or the past tense of “put” is “put,” is by learning those bits as you learn the words.
The little Latin-English dictionary in Appendix A contains the most common words in Latin literature. If you learn these, you will have 80 percent of all you need. They really are the essentials! It is still recommended that you use a Latin dictionary. There are many on the market, ranging from pocket size to monster size. Stick to the more modest size and you'll do fine.
