Pauper panem recentem a vicina accipit.

the bread

Breakdown of Pauper panem recentem a vicina accipit.

• a: from
• accipere: to receive
• vicina: the female neighbor

Questions & Answers about Pauper panem recentem a vicina accipit.

What case is pauper, and what is it doing in the sentence?

Pauper is nominative singular, so it is the subject of the sentence.

That means pauper is the one who performs the action of accipit.

A useful detail: pauper is originally an adjective meaning poor, but Latin often uses adjectives by themselves as nouns. So here it means something like the poor person or the poor man/woman, depending on context.

Why does panem end in -em?

Because panem is in the accusative singular.

It is the direct object of accipit, so it is the thing being received. The basic dictionary form is panis meaning bread, and its accusative singular is panem.

So:

• panis = bread
• panem = bread as the direct object

Why is recentem also ending in -em?

Because recentem is an adjective modifying panem, and Latin adjectives must agree with the nouns they describe in:

• gender
• number
• case

Since panem is , must also be .