Serva allium et salem in catīnum pōnit.

Serva means female slave or maidservant. Here it is in the nominative singular, which tells you it is the subject of the verb.

So serva ... pōnit means the female slave puts ...

It is worth noticing that serva is different from servus:

• serva = female slave
• servus = male slave

They are both direct objects of pōnit, but they belong to different noun groups, so their accusative singular endings are different.

• allium is a 2nd-declension neuter noun, so its accusative singular is allium
• sal is a 3rd-declension noun, so its accusative singular is salem

So even though the endings are different, both words are doing the same job in the sentence: they are the things being put.

Because sal is the dictionary form, usually the nominative singular. In this sentence, though, salt is a direct object, so it must be in the accusative case.

For sal, the accusative singular is salem.

So:

• sal = salt, as a subject
• salem = salt, as a direct object

Because in can take two different cases depending on the meaning:

• in + accusative = into, onto (motion toward)
• in + ablative = in, on (location)

Here the idea is putting something into the bowl, so Latin uses motion toward and therefore the accusative:

• in catīnum = into the bowl

If it meant that something was already in the bowl, you would expect in catīnō.

Pōnit is:

• 3rd person singular
• present tense
• active voice
• from the verb pōnō, pōnere = to put, place

So pōnit means he/she/it puts.

Because the subject is serva, here it means she puts.

Because Latin word order is much freer than English word order. Latin uses word endings to show who is doing what, so the verb often comes near the end of the sentence.

This is very common:

• Serva allium et salem in catīnum pōnit

Even though English strongly prefers subject-verb-object, Latin often prefers subject-object-verb or other arrangements.

So the final verb position here is normal and natural.

Et means and. It joins allium and salem.

So the sentence has two direct objects:

• allium
• salem

Both are being put into the bowl.

It is singular accusative.

Formally, allium is one thing being acted on. In English, garlic is often treated like a mass noun, so translation may sound a little less literal than the Latin form suggests. But grammatically in Latin, allium here is singular.

In this sentence, the subject is stated explicitly: serva.

But even if it were omitted, the verb pōnit would still tell you that the subject is he/she/it because it is 3rd person singular. Latin verbs often contain enough information to identify the person and number of the subject.

Here, though, there is no need to guess:

• serva = subject
• pōnit = she puts

A simple breakdown is:

• serva — subject, nominative singular
• allium — direct object, accusative singular
• et — and
• salem — direct object, accusative singular
• in catīnum — prepositional phrase, into the bowl
• pōnit — verb, puts

So the structure is basically:

subject + object + object + direction phrase + verb