The second building block of grammar is the noun. Latin nouns are divided into groups called declensions, and as with verbs, noun endings change according to how the noun is used – whether that is as the subject, the object or in another way. The way a noun is used is indicated by its ‘case.’

The paradigm below shows the pattern for all First Declension nouns.

First Declension Paradigm

Nom	a	ae
Gen	ae	arum
Dat	ae	is
Acc	am	as
Abl	a	is

Looking down the left hand column, you can see short versions of the Case names. The entire Case names are: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative.

My family uses a silly acronym to help us remember the correct order of these Noun Cases. The first letter of each word in our silly sentence corresponds to the first letter of each case: Never Give Dad Active Apples.

Heres is how the endings are applied to a specific first declension noun: regina, queen.

We’ll look at how this helps us to translate a simple Latin sentence below.

Declining regina, -ae (f), queen

Case	Singular	Plural
Nom	regina	reginae
Gen	reginae	reginarum
Dat	reginae	reginis
Acc	reginam	reginas
Abl	regina	reginis