Questions & Answers about Mater nuces et ficus in cellario servat.
Latin does not have articles like English the or a/an. So a noun like mater can mean mother, the mother, or a mother, depending on context.
That means Mater nuces et ficus in cellario servat can be translated naturally as something like Mother keeps nuts and figs in the pantry/cellar, even though there is no separate Latin word for the.
Mater is in the nominative singular, which is the case normally used for the subject of a sentence.
Also, the verb servat is third person singular, so it matches a singular subject: mother keeps.
A learner may expect a feminine subject to end in -a, but mater is a third-declension noun, so it does not follow the common first-declension pattern.
Because they are the things being kept or stored. In Latin, the direct object is usually put in the accusative case.
So here:
- nuces = nuts in the accusative plural
- ficus = figs in the accusative plural
Together, nuces et ficus form a compound direct object: .