Pronoun and declinations

[Discipulus_latinus]

How do you know what declination a pronoun is belonging to?
I often give it the same declination as the noun in the same sentence but feel that this is a bad rule since the sentence could be missing nouns but contain a pronoun.

If we e.g. had the sentence Conditio sine qua non I would give qua the third declination (because of conditio) but would not know what to do with non.
Thank you.

 

[Marius Magnus]

I think you mean "declension", not "declination".

Declensions are just categories that nouns are put into, to help us learn how to form their oblique cases correctly. In reality, Romans simply would have spoken in a way that "sounded correct" to them, and our declension categories arose as a natural consequence of that.

Pronouns don't belong to declensions. Their case-forms often resemble the standard noun declensions, though. But in general, pronouns are all irregular.

Non is an adverb, and doesn't decline or belong to any declension.

 

[kmp]

Pronouns are irregular mainly. They do not have 1st, 2nd and 3rd Declensions like nouns. They do have a sort of pronoun (pronominal) declension of their own but really you learn each one more or less separately.

So it's meaningless to talk of the declension of a pronoun. You just have to learn each one in all its forms.

Your example, "conditio sine qua non", is not a sentence. It's a phrase. And "non" is not a pronoun. Qua is the feminine ablative singular of qui, quae, quod - the relative pronoun. Declension does not come into it.

Hope this helps.

 

[QMF]

Well declension in the sense of the gerund form of the word decline does exist for pronouns. But in the sense of one of the 5 declensions, as kmp said, pronouns are pretty much irregular. They sort of go by their own rules that you kind of just have to know.

 

[Andy]

Indeed. But don't worry. Don't go stuffing you head with the declension tables of pronouns, little by little you'll learn them.

Maybe just one line of a declension table today, another tomorrow. Latin's supposed to be fun.