First Declension rules:
1- It applies to all nouns ending in the Nom. sing. in -a and in the Gen. sing. in -ae.
2- Mostly they are feminine nouns, unless the noun refers to a male person like agricola (farmer), poeta (poet) or nauta (sailor), and they are not many.
Pronunciation
The pronunciation in Latin is quite simple for people who know another European romance language, such as Italian, French, Spanish, Catalan, Provencal and Portuguese. For English speakers it is somewhat more difficult; the reason being that vowels in English are not pronounced with just one single phonetic sound, whereas in Latin they are. Most textbooks, at this point, provide explanations using a phonetic alphabet that only specialists understand.
The key to pronouncing understandable Latin is dependent on two factors:
1- The sounding of the five vowels with just their natural sound- click here to listen to an mp3 file of these sounds and repeat them till they become second nature to you. [N.B.: file not yet uploaded.]
2- Understand where and how the word is accented.
Accents:
Latin has only two accents: the short accent called "breve" and represented by the symbol ˘ , and the long accent called "macron" which uses the symbol ˉ. The macron lasts twice as long as the breve.
They accent vowels, (a, e, i, o,u) and never consonants.
In practice, it is not so easy to hear the difference between a breve and a macron unless you do intent to speak with care and correctness. Sometimes you will meet texts with accents, other times you won't.
English, too, has accents but normally they are omitted as the meaning is obvious to a current speaker.
Click here to listen to another Audio file to help pronunciation. [To be uploaded]
Base or Root of a Word
The part of the word which remains unchanged and to which the terminations of the declensions are attached to make the six cases is called base or root.
For example, in "domină", "domin"- is the base and -ă the termination for the nominative case. In dominam the suffix -am defines the accusative case on the same base domin.
Likewise, in "puellā", "puell" is the base and -ā is the declension for the ablative case, because the accent on the ā is long and not short as in the nominative (ă) case. This implies that when I say puellā the final a is spoken for a bit longer than when I say puellă for the nominative case.
Reflect: Some form of declension happens in English, too!
E.g.: lov-e > noun
lov-ed > past participle
lov-ing > gerundive used as adjective
lov-erly > adjective
lov-ingly > adverb
lov-ely > adjective, noun or adverb.