Mane pruina in herba manet, et imber e caelo cadit.

Mane here is an adverb, not a noun. It means in the morning or early in the morning.

Because it is an adverb, it does not change for case, number, or gender. Latin often puts a time word like mane near the beginning of the sentence to set the scene.

Pruina is the subject of manet, so it is in the nominative singular.

In other words, the frost is the thing that remains. Its dictionary form is pruina, -ae, a first-declension feminine noun.

In herba uses in with the ablative case to show location: in/on the grass.

In English, we would usually say on the grass, but Latin in can cover meanings that English splits between in and on, depending on context. Here the idea is location, so herba is ablative singular.

Because in can take two different cases:

• in + ablative = location, in/on
• in + accusative = motion into, into

Here the frost is already there; it is not moving into the grass. So Latin uses the ablative: in herba.

If there were motion into something, you would expect the accusative instead.

Manet is the third-person singular present active indicative of manere, meaning to remain or to stay.

It is singular because its subject, pruina, is singular. So:

• pruina manet = the frost remains

Et simply means and. It joins two complete clauses:

• Mane pruina in herba manet
• imber e caelo cadit

So the sentence is describing two related things happening in the same scene.

E means out of or from and takes the ablative case. So e caelo means from the sky or out of the sky.

It expresses source: the rain is falling from the sky.

E and ex are two forms of the same preposition. Both mean out of/from.

A common pattern is:

• e before consonants
• ex before vowels or h

Since caelo begins with a consonant sound, e caelo is perfectly natural.

Caelo is ablative singular of caelum, meaning sky or heaven.

It is ablative because the preposition e/ex always takes the ablative. So:

• e caelo = from the sky

Cadit is the third-person singular present active indicative of cadere, meaning to fall.

Its subject is imber, which is singular, so the verb is singular too:

• imber cadit = the rain falls

There are two main clues:

1. Imber is in the nominative singular form.
2. Cadit is an intransitive verb here: something falls; it does not take a direct object in this sentence.

So imber is the thing doing the falling. Its dictionary form is imber, imbris, a third-declension masculine noun.

Latin does not have definite or indefinite articles like English the and a/an.

So a noun like pruina can mean frost, the frost, or sometimes even a frost, depending on context. The same is true for imber: it can be translated as rain or the rain, depending on what sounds natural in English.

Latin word order is much more flexible than English word order, because the endings show how words function.

Here the order is natural and descriptive:

• Mane comes first to set the time.
• pruina in herba manet gives the first image.
• et imber e caelo cadit adds a second image.

The verbs manet and cadit come near the ends of their clauses, which is very common in Latin. If some words were rearranged, the basic meaning would still stay the same, though the emphasis might change.

A good vocabulary list from this sentence would be:

• mane — in the morning, early
• pruina, -ae f. — frost
• herba, -ae f. — grass
• maneo, manere, mansi, mansum — remain, stay
• et — and
• imber, imbris m. — rain
• e/ex — out of, from
• caelum, -i n. — sky, heaven
• cado, cadere, cecidi — fall

Learning the dictionary form is important because the form in the sentence may be different from the form listed in a vocabulary book.