In lessons 2–7, you have been required to learn a variety of endings for nouns and adjectives. Of the three parts of speech covered in this lesson, two are not declined, and the endings that you need to know for the third one can be learned in a few minutes.

Adverbs in English are sometimes created by adding an ending (namely “ly”) to an adjective. For example, adding the “ly” to the adjective “quick” yields the adverb “quickly”. Some Latin verbs are created in an analogous fashion. Consider the group A adjective liber, libera, liberum (free), whose stem is liber-. To form the adverb “freely”, find the stem (“liber”) and add “-e”. Thus, the Latin word for freely is libere (liber- + -e).
   To create an adverb from a group B adjective, add -iter to the adjective’s stem. For example, to the stem of distalis, -is, -e (distal-), add -iter to produce distaliter, which means “distally”.
   Some adverbs (e.g., subtus = “below”) are not formed from any particular adjective.
   Adverbs, like adjectives, have comparative and superlative forms, but these are infrequently encountered in botanical Latin descriptions and diagnoses and will be discussed in a later lesson.

Prepositions are (usually) short words that are placed before nouns and describe the relationship of those nouns to other information in a sentence. For example, in the sentence “John went into the house”, the word “into” is a preposition and describes where John went. Like conjunctions, prepositions are not declined, but, unlike conjunctions, prepositions do affect the ending of another word in the sentence, namely the object of that preposition. In the example sentence above, “house” is the object of the preposition “into” and would, thus, have an ending to indicate that fact. The noun that follows a preposition is usually in the accusative or ablative case, depending on the preposition. For example, ad (to, toward) requires the accusative (ad casam = to/toward the house) and ab (from) requires the ablative (ab casa = from the house). The case that a particular preposition requires should be learned at the same time as the preposition itself is learned.

Conjunctions connect two elements (e.g., words, phrases) of a sentence. In general Latin literature, two common conjunctions are et (and) and sed (but). However, in botanical Latin (and specifically in Species Plantarum, there are only two conjuctions, and both are enclitic. This means that they are appended to the second of two word that they connect. For example, if leaves of a plant are “lanceolate” (lanceolatum) and “ovate” (ovatum), these possibilities may be expressed as folium ovatumque. Conjunctions are not declined, and they have no effect on the endings of any other words in a sentence.