Latin Declension - Grammatical Cases

Grammatical Cases

A complete Latin noun declension consists of seven grammatical cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and locative.

They are abbreviated to the first three letters.

The sequence NOM-VOC-ACC-GEN-DAT-ABL has been the usual order taught in Britain and many Commonwealth countries since the publication of Hall Kennedy's Latin Primer (1866). It reflects the tendencies of different cases to share similar endings (see Syncretic trends below). For a discussion of other sequences taught elsewhere, see here. However, some schools teach it in the order NOM-GEN-DAT-ACC-ABL-VOC, as first given.

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