Sacerdos aquam sacram portat.

Sacerdos means priest.

In this sentence it is the subject, so it is in the nominative singular. Its dictionary form is also sacerdos.

A learner may notice that it does not end in -us or -a, unlike many first examples in Latin. That is normal: sacerdos belongs to the third declension, which has more varied endings.

Because aquam is the direct object of portat (carries).

Latin changes noun endings to show their job in the sentence:

• aqua = water as a subject
• aquam = water as an object

So in Sacerdos aquam sacram portat, the priest is doing the action, and the water is receiving the action, so Latin uses aquam.

Because sacram is an adjective describing aquam, and adjectives in Latin must agree with the nouns they describe.

That means sacram matches aquam in:

• gender: feminine
• number: singular
• case: accusative

So:

• aqua sacra = sacred water as a subject
• aquam sacram = sacred water as an object

Because of agreement.

Sacram is:

• feminine
• singular
• accusative

Aquam is also:

• feminine
• singular
• accusative

But sacerdos here is the subject and is in the nominative, not the accusative. So sacram clearly modifies aquam.

Portat means he/she carries, or more literally carries.

The ending -t shows that the verb is:

• third person
• singular
• present tense

So portat means he carries, she carries, or it carries, depending on the subject.

Since the subject is sacerdos, the sense is the priest carries.

Latin usually does not have articles like English the or a/an.

So sacerdos can mean:

• the priest
• a priest

And aquam sacram can mean:

• the sacred water
• sacred water
• sometimes a sacred water, depending on context

Usually the wider context tells you which English article sounds best.

It matters less in Latin than in English, because the endings already show each word’s role.

So all of these could mean roughly the same thing:

• Sacerdos aquam sacram portat
• Aquam sacram sacerdos portat
• Sacram aquam portat sacerdos

The endings tell us:

• sacerdos = subject
• aquam = object
• sacram = adjective agreeing with aquam
• portat = verb

That said, word order can still affect emphasis and style.

They are from different declensions:

• sacerdos, sacerdotis = third declension
• aqua, aquae = first declension

This is a good reminder that words in the same sentence do not have to belong to the same declension. What matters is the ending each word takes for its function in the sentence.

It can be masculine or feminine, depending on the person being talked about.

The word sacerdos means priest/priestess in a broad sense, and it belongs to a group of nouns whose grammatical form does not by itself force one natural gender in every context.

In this sentence alone, if the meaning already shown says priest, then that is the intended sense. But grammatically, the noun itself can refer to either a male or a female priest depending on context.

Because in the third declension, many nouns have a nominative singular form that does not end in an obvious “subject” ending like -a or -us.

So sacerdos is simply the normal nominative singular form. You learn its role in the sentence by:

• recognizing the noun form
• noticing that aquam is accusative
• seeing that portat is singular and goes with sacerdos

A common classroom pronunciation would be roughly:

sah-kair-dohs ah-kwahm sah-krahm por-taht

More carefully:

• sacerdos = sa-CER-dos
• aquam = A-kwam
• sacram = SA-cram
• portat = POR-tat

A few useful points:

• c is always hard, like k
• qu sounds like kw
• a is pronounced like ah, not like the English letter name A

The pattern is:

subject + object + verb

So:

• Sacerdos = subject
• aquam sacram = direct object with adjective
• portat = verb

This is a very common and useful Latin sentence pattern, even though Latin can also move the words around more freely than English.