Questions & Answers about Sardina et ostreum in captura sunt.
Why is sunt plural even though sardina and ostreum are each singular?
Because sardina et ostreum is a compound subject: a sardine and an oyster. In Latin, just as in English, two singular nouns joined by et (and) normally take a plural verb.
- sardina = a sardine
- ostreum = an oyster
- sunt = are
So the sentence means that the sardine and the oyster are in the catch.
What case are sardina and ostreum in?
They are in the nominative case, because they are the subject of the sentence.
You can tell this from their forms:
- sardina is the nominative singular of a first-declension noun.
- ostreum is the nominative singular of a second-declension neuter noun.
Since they are the things doing the being in the sentence, they appear in the nominative.
Why do sardina and ostreum have different endings?
Because they belong to different declensions and have different genders.
- sardina is a first-declension noun, so its nominative singular ends in -a.
- ostreum is a second-declension neuter noun, so its nominative singular ends in -um.
This is very common in Latin. Nouns do not all follow the same pattern, so different endings often simply show that the words belong to different noun classes.