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Questions & Answers about Medicus cerebrum spectat.
What is the grammatical job of each word in Medicus cerebrum spectat?
- Medicus is the subject.
- cerebrum is the direct object.
- spectat is the verb.
So the sentence is built as subject + object + verb: The doctor looks at the brain.
Why does medicus end in -us?
Medicus is a second-declension masculine noun in the nominative singular. The nominative case is the case typically used for the subject of a sentence.
So medicus means doctor as the one doing the action.
Why does cerebrum end in -um?
Cerebrum is a second-declension neuter noun. In this sentence it is in the accusative singular, because it is the direct object of spectat.
A useful point: for neuter nouns in Latin, the nominative and accusative forms are often the same. So cerebrum can be either nominative singular or accusative singular depending on the sentence.
How do we know that cerebrum is the object and not the subject?