Declension Paradigms¶
The Declension Paradigms screen is the study half of the Latin noun coach — pure reference, no testing, no scoring. Use it to look up forms when you need them, browse paradigm tables when you're memorising, or sanity-check yourself after a drill.
What you see¶
For each noun in your selected pool, the screen renders the full case × number paradigm:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | rōsa | rōsae |
| Genitive | rōsae | rōsārum |
| Dative | rōsae | rōsīs |
| Accusative | rōsam | rōsās |
| Ablative | rōsā | rōsīs |
| Vocative | rōsa | rōsae |
The vocative is only rendered when it differs from the nominative — for second-declension -us nouns (serve!), -ius nouns (Marcī!), and a handful of others. For everything else, vocative = nominative and the row is suppressed to reduce visual noise.
Macrons are rendered exactly as they belong in classical Latin. The header above each table shows the lemma (citation form) and the noun's lexicon entry: gender, declension number, primary meaning, plus a small footer with the genitive singular for declension identification.
Browsing and navigation¶
The screen opens to the first noun in your pool. Use:
- Swipe left / right — move to the next or previous noun in the pool.
- A–Z sidebar — jump alphabetically. Works on the lemma's letters, ignoring macrons (ā sorts with a).
- Search bar — type any prefix (with or without macrons) and the list narrows in real time.
- Speaker icon — Latin doesn't have a native iOS TTS voice in v1.0 (Apple ships no Latin voice). The icon is greyed out for Latin and reactivates in v1.5 with the approximate classical pronunciation mode.
- Book icon (in the toolbar) — jump from any noun directly to the equivalent Sentence Parser entry, useful for seeing the noun used in context.
If you tap an inflected form inside the table, the app jumps to the Sentence Parser with that form pre-filled, so you can immediately see real examples of that form in the corpus.
How paradigms are derived¶
Every paradigm except two is generated by the declension engine from the lemma + gender + declension. The two exceptions are vīs and Iuppiter, whose paradigms are stored explicitly. All five textbook declensions, all i-stem variants, and the 4th-declension neuter (genū, cornū) follow the same engine.
For i-stem 3rd-declension nouns, the paradigm shows the i-stem features: genitive plural in -ium, ablative singular in -ī for neuters (marī), and accusative plural in -īs alongside -ēs where the textbook tradition allows both.
For plūrāle-tantum nouns (moenia, castra, līberī), the singular column is greyed out and the header notes the noun is plural-only. The picker also flags these so you can filter them in or out.
When to use this screen¶
- Before drilling a new noun group — read through the paradigms for the declension you're about to drill so you're not seeing the patterns cold.
- Between drill sessions — if a particular form keeps tripping you up, come here and stare at it.
- As a permanent reference — open the app, navigate to the noun, copy the form. The app works offline so the reference is always available.
For learners who prefer textbook-style explanations of why each paradigm looks the way it does, see the Grammar Coverage page which walks through the declension theory.