Latin · Chapter 10 · Lesson 22 · Themed review
Mare et caelum
Sea, sky, storm and star-less night. The landscape words, from dies at rank 55 to tempestas at 847 - the whole course in one view.
Practise this lesson
15-word session
A quick mix of exercises - recognise, recall, type and build each word. Miss one and it comes back round until it sticks.
Worth knowing
Mare et caelum: one landscape, four declensions and forty English words
These fifteen words are the world the corpus happens in: the ground under a march, the sea a fleet crosses, the day something was decided on. They arrive scattered from rank 55 to rank 847, so you have never seen them side by side.
What the ranks say
| Rank | Word | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 55 | dies | day |
| 91 | | sea |
| 96 | | land, earth |
| 149 | | water |
| 193 | | ship |
| 194 | | night |
| 195 | | sun |
| 231 | | sky, heaven |
| 238 | | fire |
| 262 | | wind |
| 337 | | shore |
| 409 | | river |
| 471 | | wave |
| 758 | | moon |
| 847 | | storm |
Dies at 55 and at 194 are the corpus counting time rather than admiring the view: a narrative dates things. at 195 against at 758 says the same thing again - the sun marks the hour and the season, the moon mostly just hangs there.
is the one to watch. It is the physical sky, and it is also heaven, and in ecclesiastical Latin it is usually plural: in caelis, in the heavens. Same word, two registers, and only context separates them.
The declensions, all at once
| Declension | Words |
|---|---|
| 1st (f) | , , , |
| 2nd | (m), (n) |
| 3rd | (n), (m), (m), (f), (f), (n), (n), (f) |
| 5th | dies (m) |
Only the fourth is missing, which is no great loss here: the landscape simply did not happen to hand us one.
As ever, the third declension is where the nominative lies to you, so learn the genitive with the word: , ; , litoris; , ; , tempestatis; , . Dies belongs to the fifth declension, a tiny family that (rank 48) leads and that and more or less complete. You met first and you will meet it most; dies is the one that turns up in dates.
Bonus sightings
These are not on your word list. You will meet them in reading, and when you do, you already know them:
marinus,maritimus- of the sea. Behind marine, maritime, submarine.caelestis- heavenly. Behind celestial.nocturnus- by night. Behind nocturnal;also hides in equinox.diurnus- by day. Behind diurnal and, through French, journal and journey.
And the rest come free: gives ignite and igneous, gives undulate and inundate, gives navy and navigate, gives littoral, gives tempest, gives subterranean and Mediterranean (the sea in the middle of the land).
Try it
marique. - By land and sea.
in fluit. - The river flows into the sea.
ad egit. - The wind drove the ship to the shore.
, . - It was night, and the sky without a moon.
Post tempestatem tranquillitas. - After the storm, calm.