Welcome! Alright!

Plurals:

So we know how to say "She likes a boy." (Puer amat) But that isn't very helpful of a sentence, honestly. Working off of what we know, let's learn a couple of latin sexuality identifiers.

Do you want to make clear to others that you like boys? For this, you'll need to know the word for 'boys'. In latin, plurals are fairly simple- however, they do not involve just tacking an 'S' on the end!

Boy= puer Boys= pueri

Latin is a major root of the romance languages, and all nouns have a gender on them, masculine or feminine. In english, remember, a picture is just a picture. In spanish, french, latin, and others, a picture has a gender.

The gender of the word boy, naturally, is masculine (male). Objects' genders can be hard to guess- luckily, it is fairly easy.

Generally, nouns ending with 'A' are female, nouns ending in 'us' are male. There are some gender neutral ('neuter') nouns out there, but we won't touch them yet.

So look at these words:

Pictura (picture)
Nuntius (messenger)
Lupus (wolf)
ancilla (slave-woman)
servus (slave)

It is pretty easy to sort which are male and which are female, right? Words that are assume male/female don't normally have these endings, unfortunately- you have to just memorize them. These are words like boy, man, mother and father.

NOW TO PLURALIZE.

Feminine plural is 'ae'
masculine plural is 'i'

So can you pluralize the words above? I'll post the below, but take a moment and just quickly check that you know how this works.

Picturae (picture)
Nuntii (messenger)
Lupi (wolf)
ancillae (slave-woman)
servi (slave)

SO. There is that! Looking at puella (girl), I'm sure you can figure the plural is 'Puellae'!

Puer, as mentioned above, is a weird word. Our plural is pueri.

QUESTIONS:

So what to do with our new knowledge but make statements about sexuality.
Remember the words from last chapter. Can you form these simple sentences? :)
One quick new word to help us out...

"Aut"= Or

And a reminder, since I realize we are moving pretty fast.

Amare= to like/love
Basic noun endings=
-O= I
-S= You
-T= He/She

"She doesn't like boys"
"I like boys and girls"
"He doesn't like boys or girls."
"You like girls"

Nice and simple, right? Now what if you want to ask someone something?

Questions in latin are a lot like questions in english- they end with a question mark. Otherwise, there is one simple word you need to know:

"-ne"

This makes any sentence a question, and attaches to the verb. Romans didn't use punctuation, so this would stand in for the question mark. However, we DO use punctuations. Combine both for a clearer sentence!

So we would say:
"Do you like boys?"
like this:
"Pueri amasne?"

Again, latin translates quite blockily- it us up to you to read between the lines and makes things more sensical. The above sentence, literally, is "You like boys?" The 'do you like' is politely implied.