Questions & Answers about Puer sibi panem et aquam parat.
What case is puer, and how do we know it is the subject?
Puer is nominative singular. In Latin, the subject of the sentence is usually in the nominative case.
Here, puer means boy, and it is the one doing the action of parat. So puer is the subject.
A learner may expect a nominative ending like -us, but some second-declension masculine nouns end in -er instead, and puer is one of them.
Why are panem and aquam spelled that way instead of panis and aqua?
Because panem and aquam are in the accusative singular, not the nominative.
They are the direct objects of parat, the things the boy prepares.
Their dictionary forms are:
- panis = bread
- aqua = water
But in this sentence, Latin changes them to show their job in the sentence:
- panis → panem
- aqua → aquam
So the endings help show that these words are receiving the action.
What exactly does sibi mean here?
Sibi is a reflexive pronoun in the dative case. Here it means .