Latin basics: Parts of speech

In my first year of organized instruction in Latin, that being a weekly class at the wonderful Catholic Church of St. Agnes in St. Paul, Minnesota we started out the year focusing on things most of us had forgotten from elementary school, parts of speech, parts of a sentence and diagramming sentences.  Most of us didn't really understand why we were going back to elementary school topics ESPECIALLY in English; we were here to learn Latin!  Well, after about five or six weeks of hammering on the fundamentals, things started to fall into place.  As a teaser, the reality is, that in Latin, nouns and adjectives look differently than verbs, and, as you build up your vocabulary, you quickly recognize prepositions and conjunctions (remember learning "sight words"!).  As you're trying to translate a sentence (especially with a rather small memorized Latin vocabulary), it's easier to piece together what's going on if you can readily point to a word and identify it as a verb or noun or adjective or whatnot.  Once you know what PART of the sentence it is, then finding the MEANING of the word becomes much easier in looking things up in your Latin dictionary.

Without further ado, here we go:

• Noun - a person, place, thing or idea
• Bob, Mr. Smith, car, heaven, man, thing, tree
• Pronoun - a word that replaces a noun 
• he, she, his, theirs, my our, it, that, which, these
• Adjective - a word that modifies a noun or pronoun 
• happy, quick, sad, young
• Verb - an action or state of being (of the subject) 
• read, throw, is, has, are, can see, have been
• Adverb - a word that modifies a verb, adjective or adverb
• happily, qiuckly, sadly, today, tomorrow, tonight
• Preposition - a word that shows relationship between a noun or pronoun and another word or word group
• under, around, by, near, through
• Conjunction - a word that connects phrases, clauses and sentences
• and, but, or
• Interjection - a word that shows emotion or excitement
• Hey!, Yo!, Ouch!, Yikes!

These are the things that a word IS.  Next we'll look a what the word CAN BE, i.e. what part of a sentence is the word functioning as.  Now that may seem like a subtle distinction, but it's important to understand both WHAT the word is and HOW it's being used because knowing that will lead us into those nasty things called declensions and conjunctions.  But I'm jumping ahead. All these "technical" pieces will build up and connect together and suddenly it'll all make sense.  Be patient and persistent in practicing; it'll be worth it in the end.