Serva annulum in mensa ponit, sed nemo eum capit.

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Breakdown of Serva annulum in mensa ponit, sed nemo eum capit.

• mensa: the table
• sed: but
• annulus: the ring

Questions & Answers about Serva annulum in mensa ponit, sed nemo eum capit.

Why is serva the subject of ponit?

Because serva is in the nominative singular, which is the case normally used for the subject of a sentence in Latin.

Here, serva means female slave, maidservant, or servant girl. Its ending -a is the regular nominative singular ending for many first-declension nouns.

So in Serva annulum in mensa ponit, serva is the one doing the action of placing.

Why is annulum spelled with -um at the end?

Because annulum is the direct object of ponit and so it appears in the accusative singular.

The dictionary form is annulus = ring. In this sentence, the ring is the thing being placed, so Latin changes annulus to annulum.

A native English speaker often has to get used to this idea: Latin shows a word’s job in the sentence by changing its ending, while English usually relies more on word order.

Why is it in mensa and not in mensam?

Because in can take different cases depending on the meaning:

• in + ablative = in/on a place, showing location
• in + accusative = into/onto a place, showing motion toward

Here the phrase means that the ring ends up or , so Latin uses , with in the .