About Nautis

Nautis is the independent scribbling of Matthew Clapp. This website was originally launched on Blogger in September 2001. Subscribe today you will receive an email when new content when it's available. Thank you!

Ok, what the heck does 'nautis' mean?

A few people have asked me what nautis means. Here is my answer:

You have probably already guessed that it is Latin and has something to do with navigation. The rest of the answer requires a little Latin 101. Most languages conjugate verbs, and you probably do this every day. Latin not only conjugates verbs, but also declines nouns.

In a language that has noun declensions, not only do verbs have to agree in tense, but a noun’s gender, number, and case are contained within its ending. In English, case is usually determined by word order. In Latin, nouns can be put almost anywhere (and often are), because the case is shown in the noun itself. It is an efficient system, but unless you were born in ancient Rome, it is extremely hard to learn.

A quick refresher on grammar

  • gender: masculine, feminine, neuter. These categories sometimes align with male, female, and thing, but are often extended into purely grammatical classes. Some nouns are assigned to a gender arbitrarily.
  • number: singular or plural.
  • case: the syntactical relationship of the noun to the other elements in the sentence. The main Latin cases are: nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative (indirect object), accusative (direct object), and ablative (used with many prepositions, or for certain adverbial functions). Vocative is also sometimes listed as a sixth.

Each declension has its own pattern of endings, and a word belongs to only one declension.

So, what does nautis actually mean?

Nautis is from nauta (“sailor”), a 1st-declension masculine noun. The form nautis is plural, and its case is either dative or ablative.

  • As dative plural, it means to the sailors or for the sailors.
  • As ablative plural, it means by the sailors, with the sailors, or from the sailors.

For the way it is used here (the name of this site), the intended sense is the dative plural, so nautis means “for the sailors.”

Hoc opus est nautis.