Ecclesiastical Latin/Sentence2

New Patterns

The second sentence pattern we will look at is really two different sentence patterns that use two different grammatical structures to give us more information about he subject of the sentence.

The first is;

NN NA ESSE.

This looks very familiar to the sentence pattern from before, which was NN1 NN2 ESSE. However, in this sentence pattern, we are not saying that one thing is equal to another thing. We are using an adjective, in the nominative case of course, to give us information about our subject. So if I said, "I am tall." I do not mean to say that I am the personification of Tallness, just that I have the quality of "tall". This sentence pattern is used to introduce the idea that the subject has this quality. The listener did not know before that that the subject had this quality.

Maria pulchra est.

Here the listener did not know that Maria was pretty so we use the above sentence to inform him.

NOTE: The adjective must "agree" with the word it modifies, even if that word is dropped from the sentence. As such it must be in the Nominative case when used in this sentence pattern.

The second sentence pattern we will learn here is thus;

NN AV ESSE.

We use this sentence pattern to give more information about the subject in the form of an adverb. The adverb can imply location, wellbeing or anything else that makes sense.

Maria hic est. Maria bene est.

Notice that since the word giving additional information is an adverb, not an adjective, it does not need to agree with Maria, or any other word in the sentence. I will in fact never change form. It does not modify Maria directly the way an adjective does, but rather modifies the way Maria is by affecting the verb EST.

Extension of old patterns

Now that you have seen the adjectives and the adverbs, you should know that these can be added at will to sentence patterns that were learned earlier.

If we add an adjective to NN ESSE, we basically end up with NN NA ESSE. It will depend on the context to hear the difference but it is not so important. Examples in English include "The boy is small" versus "There is a small boy."

If we add adjectives to NN1 NN2 ESSE we get NN1 NA1 NN2 NA2 ESSE. Here again, the context will tell us which word the adjectives go with. As NA2 is not next to NN1, it can not go with NN1, but as NA1 is next to both NN1 and NN2, it could go with either but would probably go with NN1. However, as the two nouns are equal to each other, it isn't that big a deal.

Puella pulchra discipula bona est.

The same can be done to add Adverbs as seen here.

Puella hic discipula bona est.

In these cases, the adjective or adverb is only an extra idea tacked onto the sentence and is not the central point of the sentence as seen in the sentence patterns studied above.