Allen & Greenough · Part First — Words and Forms › THIRD DECLENSION (CONSONANT AND i-STEMS)

§80. The Locative Case

The Locative form for nouns of the third declension ends in the singular in -ī or -ē, in the plural in -ibus: as, rūrī, in the country; Carthāginī or Carthāgine, at Carthage; Trallibus, at Tralles. ¹

¹ The Indo-European locative singular ended in -ĭ, which became -ĕ in Latin. Thus the Latin ablative in -e is, historically considered, a locative. The Latin ablative in -ī (from -īd) was an analogical formation (cf. -ā from -ād, -ō from -ōd), properly belonging to i-stems. With names of towns and a few other words, a locative function was ascribed to forms in -ī (as, Carthāginī), partly on the analogy of the real locative of o-stems (as, Corinthī, § 49. a); but forms in -ĕ also survived in this use. The plural -bus is properly dative or ablative, but in forms like Trallibus it has a locative function. Cf. Philippīs (§ 49. a), in which the ending -īs is, historically considered, either locative, or instrumental, or both, and Athēnīs (§ 43. c), in which the ending is formed on the analogy of o-stems.

J. H. Allen and J. B. Greenough, New Latin Grammar (Boston: Ginn, 1903). Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.