Curator aquarium vocat.

Because curator is in the nominative singular, the form normally used for the subject of the sentence.

If curator were the direct object, it would usually be curatorem, not curator. So the form itself tells you that curator is the one doing the action.

Aquarium is the direct object of vocat.

A useful thing to know is that aquarium is a neuter second-declension noun, and neuter nouns have the same form in the nominative singular and accusative singular. So aquarium could, in principle, be either subject or object just from its ending alone.

But in this sentence, curator is already clearly the subject, so aquarium must be the object.

Vocat is:

• present tense
• active voice
• indicative mood
• third person singular

It comes from vocare, meaning to call.

So grammatically it means he/she/it calls or, depending on context, he/she/it is calling.

Latin usually does not need a subject pronoun, because the verb ending already tells you the person and number.

In vocat, the ending -t means third person singular, so the verb already contains the idea of he/she/it. Since curator is present, Latin does not need to add another word for the subject.

Classical Latin does not have articles like English the or a/an.

So a noun like curator can mean the curator, a curator, or just curator, depending on context. The same is true of aquarium.

English has to choose an article when translating, but Latin does not.

Yes. Latin word order is more flexible than English word order because the endings help show each word’s job in the sentence.

So forms like these are possible:

• Curator aquarium vocat
• Aquarium curator vocat
• Curator vocat aquarium

They all can express the same basic idea, though the emphasis may change.

That said, putting the verb at the end, as in Curator aquarium vocat, is very normal Latin style.

Because not all masculine Latin nouns belong to the same declension.

Curator is a third-declension noun, not a regular second-declension noun like servus. Third-declension nouns often have nominative singular forms that do not end in -us.

So curator is perfectly normal Latin, even though it looks different from words such as dominus or servus.

Yes. English curator comes from Latin curator.

In Latin, the word has a broader sense than the modern museum-related English word. It can mean something like caretaker, manager, overseer, or guardian, depending on context.

In a common Classical Latin pronunciation, you could say it approximately like this:

koo-RAH-tor a-KWA-ri-um WO-kat

A few helpful points:

• c is always hard, like k
• v is pronounced like w in Classical Latin
• qu sounds like kw
• the stress falls on RAH in curator
• the stress falls on KWA in aquarium
• the stress falls on WO in vocat