NOUNS AND THEIR CASES
Nouns in Latin have different forms, or cases, depending on the job they’re doing in a sentence. This is a little tricky at first, but will become clearer with practice. Let’s try and put all these jobs into a single sentence.
“Sarah took Mark’s gift from the drawer and gave it to him.”
In this sentence, Sarah is the subject, the person or thing that carries out the action. The subject goes in the nominative case, and their action is represented by one or more verbs (took, gave). The person or thing that is the object of the verb’s action is called, naturally enough, the object (gift), and goes in the accusative case. Latin also has a genitive case (denoting possession, equivalent to of or ‘s), a dative case (to or for), and an ablative case (meaning by, with, or from). If we translated this sentence into Latin, Mark’s would be in the genitive case, him would be in the dative case, and drawer would be in the ablative case.
Every Latin noun will have a different ending depending on its case. Those cases are the nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative. You’ll find a detailed introduction to the different noun cases here.