Suppose one writes, in English, a sentence in which some Latin is embedded, such as
Eventually, they declared the rodent to be a squirrel non grata in their garden.
Of course this alludes to the diplomatic phrase "persona non grata", but suppose one wants to be pedantic about the Latin, even though one mainly is writing in English and the reader of English may not care. How would one determine for which Latin gender to inflect nón gráta?
- Would one use the masculine gender of sciúrus, for "squirrel nón grátus"?
- Does it depend on the sex of the squirrel?
- What if there instead are multiple squirrels of different sexes? (I assume masculine plural would be used traditionally?)
- What if the thing not wanted in the garden is inanimate, such as a rusting car? ("squirrel", "rusting car", "garden", and the rest of the English example sentence are used only for example.)
Google isn't very helpful, because it wants to tell me about the gender of Latin words rather than of English words.