LATINVM

AP Latin Caesar texts

2012-02-16T14:06:00.001-08:00

Latinum has created a suite of Caesar material that covers almost all of the
required ground for Caesar for AP. The audio materials make it easy for a student
to revise the text over and over again - it is easier to listen to a
text multiple times, than to re-read it multiple times in the book.
The Latin-English-Latin literal translations make dictionary work
unnecessary, as the student first approaches the text with the literal
translation, before studying it intensively in Latin only, until it is
familiar.
AP Caesar requirements are:
Caesar, Gallic War
Book 1: Chapters 1-7
Book 4: Chapters 24-35 and the first sentence of Chapter 36
(Eodem die legati . . . venerunt.)
Book 5: Chapters 24-48
Book 6: Chapters 13-20

http://latinum.org.uk
1. John Taylor's 'Caesar for Beginners'. (Book I, The Helvetic War).

2. Caesar - 'The British War ; Customs of the Gauls' - Caesar's Bello Gallico
Book 4, chapters 20 -38,
Book 5, Chapters 8 - 23,
Book 6, Chapters 12-19.
The reading is Latin-English-Latin, and repeated again in Latin only.

3. Lowe, Butler and Walker's
' Introduction to Caesar' A grammar book based around Book 1 of De
Bello Gallico, including the vocabulary learning files for Book 1, and
a reading of Book 1 in Latin.

4. Cannon's 'An Open Door to Caesar' - in Latin only - De Bello
Gallico Book 1, in simplified Latin,followed by the chapter in the
original form.

5. Sonnenschein's 'Ora Maritima' is a childrens story in Latin based
around themes in Caesar covered in the AP syllabus - can provide some
light relief.

Adler's textbook is possibly the most complete Latin Course ever written

2012-02-11T00:59:00.001-08:00

Adler's Practical Grammar for Independent Learners -

A Language Immersion Course.

Adler's textbook is possibly the most complete Latin Course ever written.  This audio presentation, originally produced by Latinum for the Latinum Podcast,  turns Adler into an immersion experience. It is unique, in focusing on learning the entire structure of Latin grammar through conversation. With over  200 hours of audio, it is the most comprehensive Latin course of its type in existence, and is excellent value for money.

read a review more>

comparison to Wheelock...>

Purchase the Adler course on three DVDs

Each of the 97 lessons is in 3 parts:

1. Grammar and syntax with extensive paradigms added to the text. The grammar is very detailed, with large numbers of additional paradigms and useful memory clues. Vocabulary is presented in advance of every lesson.

2. Model question-answer conversations in Latin-English-Latin. Here you consolidate your vocabulary, and learn the grammatical structures in use.

3. Slow repetition and fast repetition of the conversational material in Latin only,for review. Once you have mastered section C of any lesson, it is time to move to the next lesson

view the textbook pdf online...>

View the dictata online...>

Adler is available as digital downloads as well:

PART 1 PART 2 PART 3

PART 4 PART 5 PART 6

PART 7 PART 8 PART 9

PART 10

Swallowing the Dictionary

2012-02-09T04:35:00.000-08:00

In 2009, for my own use, I made a recording of Ripman's nomenclature - the recording isn't perfect, and contains a number of errors - some slips of the eye while reading,other just a result of tiredness, as the task of recording took a month of daily sessions, recording the material in Latin-English. Despite the problems with this recording,it still has great utility for a student, and I offer a copy of it as a download on Latinum. I still listen to this recording myself around once a month, to reinforce and expand my vocabulary.

I want to re-record the book, more accurately, and this time in Latin-English-Latin, giving a dual repetition of each phrase. This will take longer, but will increase the utility of the material. Ideally, I would like to memorise the entire contents of this text.

Schola

2012-01-04T02:55:00.000-08:00

Schola was founded on 28 January 2008. Today, January 4, 2012, we have just passed the 2,000 member mark.

Schola marks something new in the world - the first time since the renaissance where a functioning international community of people who use Latin to communicate, has been established, a place where Latin conversations take place every day, either in text, by video, or otherwise.

Much of the activity takes place away from Schola, on Skype, and elsewhere - Schola is simply the nexus, the directory.

I have taken a more backseat approach to Schola over the past year, to watch and give other personalities the chance to emerge. It was never a good thing for the site to be too closely identified with one person - now we have 2000 plus member, this is less of an issue.

Schola is paid for with donations from members, and also subsidised from sales of DVDs of Latin I produce - we pay Ning an annual rental for the site - around $200.

Shifting Sands Online

2011-12-20T02:40:00.000-08:00

2011 has really been a year of shifting sands in the online world. The biggest impact on my online presence, was the folding of the mypodcast server farm, and with it, the disappearance of Latinum from iTunes and the internet.
I had assumed this would eventually happen, and had started to produce DVDs with the podcast material, and to develop a presence on YouTube.

I still don't find YouTube is the best medium for what I am trying to achieve, however, I will keep working with it, as long as it continues to exist. I assume YouTube has a long term future,and so is worth making the investment of time.

Google's KNOL system is also shutting down in mid 2012, so I copied all my articles from there across to this blog. Blogger, I assume, has a future, at least in the medium term.

Schola still exists,as Ning took the brave move to start to charge for its hosting service, to protect itself from the fate of companies such as mypodcast. I assume that Ning is financially stable, at least in the medium term. I pay around $250 a year to keep Schola up and running - which is one reason why I ask for donations - and the few pennies I make from the DVD sales also go toward supporting Schola.

Tables of comparison for Latin Cases

2011-12-20T02:09:00.003-08:00

Latin Grammar

Over the course of putting my Latinum course together, I noted a few things about textbooks that teach grammar - the material is not usually structured for optimal memorisation. Material is presented in grammatical categories that have been chosen for good philological reasons, not for ease of learning.

For example, playing around with the ordering of the declensions makes for a system that can be learned very quickly indeed: Additional learning tables can be found here: Cases compared to the nominative singular.

The following tables are of the case endings for the five Latin declensions.

SINGULARS

CASE	I	II	III	IIII	V
NOMINATIVE	A	US	CLONES TRAX	US	ES
VOCATIVE	A	E	CLONES TRAX	US	ES
ACCUSATIVE	AM	UM	EM	UM	EM
ABLATIVE	A	O	E	U	E
DATIVE	AE	O	I	UI	EI
GENITIVE	AE	I	IS	US	EI

MEMORISE these endings:
AH-AH-UM-A-AE-AE;                ( AH AH UM A AE)
US-E-UM-OO-I                          ( MUSEUM OOEE)
CLONE'S TRAX EM-E-I-IS       ( CLONE'S TRAX AMAZE)
US-UM- U- UI- US                    (USE 'EM YOU USE)
ES-ES-EM-E-EI-E                     (S & M E HEY!)
Some notes: Just say these one after the other, and then write them down. The words in brackets are rough equivalents that help with memorisation.

PLURALS

CASE	I	II	III	IIII	V
NOMINATIVE	AE	I	ES	US	ES
VOCATIVE	AE	I	ES	US	ES
ACCUSATIVE	AS	OS	ES	US	ES
ABLATIVE	IS	IS	IBUS	IBUS	EBUS
DATIVE	IS	IS	IBUS	IBUS	EBUS
GENITIVE	ARUM	ORUM	UM	UUM	ERUM

MEMORISE:
AE-AE-AS-IS-ARUM ( I 'AS 'IS ARM           I.E. "I HAVE HIS ARM")
I-I-OS-IS-ORUM      ( EE -OS-'IS-ORM        I.E. "HE HAS HIS ARM")
ES-IBUS-UM          (EASY BOSOM)
US -IBUS -UUM     ( USE 'E BOSOM    I.E. "USE YE BOSOM")
ES - EBUS -ERUM (EASY BOSERUM)

Note the 'rule of two' the first two declensions have the first two cases the same.
The 'rule of three' - the next three have the first three cases the same.
Neuters always follow the 'rule of three'

ADJECTIVES:

Learn your adjectives in the order Feminine, Masculine, Neuter, NOT masc, fem,neuter, as in all grammar books.

Then, the adjective will follow the order of the declensions, and will give clearer patterns for memorising. Here are the endings for adjectives that are declined like BONUS.

CASE	FEMININE (follows 1st declension form)	MASCULINE (follows 2nd declension form)	NEUTER (follows masculine)
NOMINATIVE	A	US	UM
VOCATIVE	A	E	UM
ACCUSATIVE	AM	UM	UM
ABLATIVE	A	O	O
DATIVE	AE	O	O
GENITIVE	AE	I	I

Note the neuter of the adjective is a neutered masculine. Thus, it follows the form of the masculine, except if has the 'rule of three' for the first three cases. Putting it next to the masculine makes it easier to memorise.

CASE	FEMININE plural (follows 1st declension form)	MASCULINE plural (follows 2nd declension form)	NEUTER plural (follows masculine)
NOMINATIVE	AE	I	A
VOCATIVE	AE	I	A
ACCUSATIVE	AS	OS	A
ABLATIVE	IS	IS	IS
DATIVE	IS	IS	IS
GENITIVE	ARUM	ORUM	ORUM

A COMPARATIVE TABLE SHOWING FORMS COMPARED TO FIRST DECLENSION FEMININE SINGULAR. THERE IS SOME IRREGULARITY, BUT EVEN HERE THERE ARE PATTERNS.

CASE	FEMININE SING
NOMINATIVE	HAEC	MUSA	BONA	MEA	ILLA	IPSA	ISTA	EA
VOCATIVE	O	MUSA	BONA	MEA
ACCUSATIVE	HANC	MUSAM	BONAM	MEAM	ILLAM	IPSAM	ISTAM	EAM
ABLATIVE	HAC	MUSA	BONA	MEA	ILLA	IPSA	ISTA	EA
DATIVE	HUIC	MUSAE	BONAE	MEAE	ILLI	IPSI	ISTI	EI
GENITIVE	HUJUS	MUSAE	BONAE	MEAE	ILLIUS	IPSIUS	ISTIUS	EJUS

A COMPARATIVE TABLE SHOWING FORMS COMPARED TO FIRST DECLENSION FEMININE PLURAL. NOTE THE REGULARILY OF THE FORMS. MASCULINE PLURAL FORMS ALSO SHOW REGULARITY.

CASE	FEM. PLURAL
NOMINATIVE	HAE	MUSAE	BONAE	MEAE	ILLAE	IPSAE	ISTAE	EAE	QUAE	NOSTRAE
VOCATIVE		MUSAE	BONAE	MEAE						NOSTRAE
ACCUSATIVE	HAS	MUSAS	BONAS	MEAS	ILLAS	IPSAS	ISTAS	EAS	QUAS	NOSTRAS
ABLATIVE	HIS	MUSIS	BONIS	MEIS	ILLIS	IPSIS	ISTIS	EIS	QUEIS	NOSTRIS
DATIVE	HIS	MUSIS	BONIS	MEIS	ILLIS	IPSIS	ISTIS	EIS	QUEIS	NOSTRIS
GENITIVE	HARUM	MUSARUM	BONARUM	MEARUM	ILLARUM	IPSARUM	ISTARUM	EARUM	QUARUM	NOSTRARUM

A COMPARATIVE TABLE SHOWING FORMS COMPARED TO SECOND DECLENSION MASCULINE SINGULAR. THERE IS SOME IRREGULARITY, BUT EVEN HERE THERE ARE PATTERNS.

CASE	MASC SING.
NOMINATIVE	HIC	DOMINUS	BONUS	MEUS	ILLE	IPSE	IS	QUIS
VOCATIVE	O	DOMINE	BONE	MI
ACCUSATIVE	HUNC	DOMINUM	BONUM	MEUM	ILLUM	IPSUM	EUM	QUEM
ABLATIVE	HOC	DOMINO	BONO	MEO	ILLO	IPSO	EO	QUO
DATIVE	HUIC	DOMINO	BONO	MEO	ILLI	IPSI	EI	CUI
GENITIVE	HUJUS	DOMINI	BONI	MEI	ILLIUS	IPSIUS	EJUS	CUJUS

A COMPARATIVE TABLE SHOWING FORMS COMPARED TO SECOND DECLENSION MASCULINE PLURAL. NOTE THE REGULARILY OF THE FORMS. FEMININE PLURAL FORMS ALSO SHOW REGULARITY.

CASE	MASC PLURAL
NOMINATIVE	HI	DOMINI	BONI	MEI	ILLI	IPSI	ISTI	II	QUI
VOCATIVE	O	DOMINI	BONI	MEI
ACCUSATIVE	HOS	DOMINOS	BONOS	MEOS	ILLOS	IPSOS	ISTOS	EOS	QUOS
ABLATIVE	HIS	DOMINIS	BONIS	MEIS	ILLIS	IPSIS	ISTIS	EIS	QUEIS [quibus]
DATIVE	HIS	DOMINIS	BONIS	MEIS	ILLIS	IPSIS	ISTIS	EIS	QUEIS [quibus]
GENITIVE	HORUM	DOMINORUM	BONORUM	MEORUM	ILLORUM	IPSORUM	ISTORUM	EORUM	QUORUM

MORE PATTERNS IN ADJECTIVES (in the singular)

OBSERVE: ADJECTIVES THAT ARE LIKE BONUS, USE THE ACCUSATIVE ENDING FOR THE FIRST THREE CASES OF THE NEUTER IN THE SINGULAR.

CASE	FEMININE (follows 1st declension form)	MASCULINE (follows 2nd declension form)	NEUTER (follows masculine)
NOMINATIVE	A	US	UM
VOCATIVE	A	E	UM
ACCUSATIVE	AM	UM	UM
ABLATIVE	A	O	O
DATIVE	AE	O	O
GENITIVE	AE	I	I

OBSERVE: ADJECTIVES THAT ARE LIKE PULCHER FORM THEIR SINGULARS AS FOLLOWS: NEUTER ENDING IS THE SAME AS THE MASC. ACCUSATIVE ENDING. Note - the exception (marked in red) is in the name of the adjective, so is easy to remember.

CASE	FEMININE (roughly follows 1st declension form)	MASCULINE (roughly follows 2nd declension form)	NEUTER (follows masculine)
NOMINATIVE	RA	ER	UM
VOCATIVE	RA	ER	UM
ACCUSATIVE	AM	UM	UM
ABLATIVE	A	O	O
DATIVE	AE	O	O
GENITIVE	AE	I	I

OBSERVE: ADJECTIVES THAT ARE LIKE TURPIS FORM THEIR SINGULARS AS FOLLOWS: FEMININE AND MASCULINE ARE THE SAME, THE NEUTER REMAINS AS A NEUTER OF THE MASCULINE (& FEM. ). NOTE THE SIMILARITY OF THE NEUTER ENDINGS TO THE ACCUSATIVE ENDING.

CASE	FEMININE (roughly follows 3ND declension form)	MASCULINE (roughly follows 3ND declension form)	NEUTER (follows masculine)
NOMINATIVE	IS	IS	E
VOCATIVE	IS	IS	E
ACCUSATIVE	EM	EM	E
ABLATIVE	I	I	I
DATIVE	I	I	I
GENITIVE	IS	IS	IS

OBSERVE: ADJECTIVES THAT ARE LIKE ACER ( SIMILAR TO TURPIS ABOVE) FORM THEIR SINGULARS AS FOLLOWS: NOTE THE SIMILARITY OF THE NEUTER ENDING TO THE ACCUSATIVE ENDINGS. Note, the exception (marked in red) is in the name of the adjective, making it easier to recall.

CASE	FEMININE (roughly follows 3RD declension form)	MASCULINE (roughly follows 3RD declension form)	NEUTER (follows masculine)
NOMINATIVE	IS	ER [IS]	E
VOCATIVE	IS	ER [IS]	E
ACCUSATIVE	EM	EM	E
ABLATIVE	I	I	I
DATIVE	I	I	I
GENITIVE	IS	IS	IS

Declensions arranged by case in Latin

2011-12-20T02:08:00.001-08:00

DECLENSIONS ARRANGED BY CASE

When the declensions are arranged in this fashion, clear patterns emerge. Learning the singular next to the plural, and comparing forms for each declension reduces the amount of memorisation required.
First Declension (green)
Second Declension(blue)
Third Declension( two shades of purple)
Fourth Declension(pinkish)
Fifth Declension (yellow)

NOMINATIVE CASE

SINGULAR	PLURAL
haec MUSA	hae MUSAE
hic DOMINUS	hi DOMINI
hic DEUS	hi DII
hoc REGNUM	haec REGNA
hic HONOR	hi HONORES
hic SERMO	hi SERMONES
hic MILES	hi MILITES
haec TURRIS	hae TURRES
hic LAPIS	hi LAPIDES
hic PATER	hi PATRES
hoc ANIMAL	haec ANIMALIA
hoc CARMEN	haec CARMINA
hoc ITER	haec ITINERA
hoc OPUS	haec OPERA
hoc CAPUT	haec CAPITA
hoc POEMA	haec POEMATA
hoc SEDILE	haec SEDILIA
hic FRUCTUS	hi FRUCTUS
hoc CORNU	haec CORNUA
haec DOMUS	hae DOMUS
haec RES	hae RES
hic /haec DIES	hi DIES

ACCUSATIVE CASE

SINGULAR	PLURAL
MUSAM	MUSAS
DOMINUM	DOMINOS
DEUM	DEOS
REGNUM	REGNA
HONOREM	HONORES
SERMONEM	SERMONES
MILITEM	MILITES
TURREM	TURRES
LAPIDEM	LAPIDES
PATREM	PATRES
CARMEN	CARMINA
ANIMAL	ANIMALIA
ITER	ITINERA
OPUS	OPERA
CAPUT	CAPITA
POEMA	POEMATA
SEDILE	SEDILIA
FRUCTUM	FRUCTUS
CORNU	CORNUA
DOMUM	DOMOS/US
REM	RES
DIEM	DIES

ABLATIVE CASE

SINGULAR	PLURAL
MUSA	MUSIS
DOMINO	DOMINIS
MAGISTRO	MAGISTRIS
GENERO	GENERIS
DEO	DIS
REGNO	REGNIS
HONE	HONORIBUS
SERMONE	SERMONIBUS
NUBE	NUBIBUS
MILITE	MILITIBUS
TURRE	TURRIBUS
LAPIDE	LAPIDIBUS
PATRE	PATRIBUS
ANIMAL	ANIMALIBUS
CARMINE	CARMINIBUS
ITINERE	ITINERIBUS
OPERE	OPERIBUS
CAPITE	CAPITIBUS
POEMATE	POEMATIBUS
SEDILI	SEDILIBUS
FRUCTU	FRUCTIBUS
CORNU	CORNIBUS
DOMO	DOMIBUS
RE	REBUS
DIE	DIEBUS

DATIVE CASE

SINGULAR	PLURAL
MUSAE	MUSIS
DOMINO	DOMINIS
MAGISTRO	MAGISTRIS
GENERO	GENERIS
DEO	DIS
REGNO	REGNIS
HONORI	HONORIBUS
SERMONI	SERMONIBUS
NUBI	NUBIBUS
MILITI	MILITIBUS
TURRI	TURRIBUS
LAPIDI	LAPIDIBUS
PATRI	PATRIBUS
ANIMALI	ANIMALIBUS
CARMINI	CARMINIBUS
ITINERI	ITINERIBUS
OPERI	OPERIBUS
CAPITI	CAPITIBUS
POEMATI	POEMATIBUS
SEDILI	SEDILIBUS
FRUCTUI	FRUCTIBUS
CORNU	CORNIBUS
DOMUI	DOMIBUS
REI	REBUS
DIEI	DIEBUS

GENITIVE CASE

SINGULAR	PLURAL
MUSAE	MUSARUM
DOMINI	DOMINORUM
MAGISTRI	MAGISTRORUM
GENERI	GENERORUM
DEI	DEORUM
REI	REGNORUM
HONORIS	HONORUM
SERMONIS	SERMONUM
NUBIS	NUBIUM
MILITIS	MILITUM
TURRIS	TURRIUM
LAPIDIS	LAPIDUM
PATRIS	PATRUM
ANIMALIS	ANIMALIUM
CARMINIS	CARMINUM
ITINERIS	ITINERUM
OPERIS	OPERUM
CAPITIS	CAPITUM
POEMATIS	POEMATUM
SEDILIS	SEDILIUM
FRUCTUS	FRUCTUUM
CORNU	CORNUUM
DOMUS	DOMUUM /DOMORUM
REI	RERUM
DIEI	DIERUM

The Syllable in Latin Poetry and Prose

2011-12-20T02:07:00.001-08:00

A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO THE READING OF LATIN PROSE AND POETRY.

Evan Millner, London, August 2007.

On Syllables:

Poetry in Latin is quantitative. This means that it depends for its effect on the length of syllables relative to one another, and only secondarily, if at all, on actual word stress. By contrast, English poetry depends for its effect almost exclusively on word stress.

There are two types of syllables in Latin, those that end in a vowel, and those that do not. A “third group” may be one or the other, depending on the need of the poet, and these either-or syllables are called ‘common’.

Those that end in a vowel are called open syllables.

Those that end in a consonant are called closed syllables.

How are such syllables formed?

The Romans, when speaking, ‘opened’ a syllable if the vowel was followed by only one consonant. This consonant was allowed to detach itself from the vowel, and join the following syllable. The result was an open syllable:

i.e. păt-er → pă -ter

This also could also occur if a vowel were followed by a mute in combination with l or r (l and r belong to a class of consonants called liquids).

The mutes

V, B, P, F (labials)

G, C, K, Qu (gutturals)

D, T (linguals)

A syllable that ends in a vowel, and that has a short vowel in it, is going to be shorter than an otherwise identical syllable that ends in a consonant, by the simple virtue that it has fewer letters.

pă is shorter than păt

It is then important to pronounce the syllable with the correct vowel length. If the vowel length is wrong, then the syllable is mangled from a long to a short, and vice versa.

This would be sufficient to destroy a poetical reading, or indeed the intended sound of a passage in prose that relies for its effect on the syllabic structure of the sentence or turn of phrase.

So much for open syllables.

As mentioned above, two syllables with short vowels that differ only in that one has a consonant at the end, and the other does not, share a fundamental, and blindingly evident difference: one is physically short, and the other is, by comparison, physically long. (i.e. it has more letters, so as an object, it is longer than if it had two letters.). As a consequence, the syllable also sounds longer.

pă versus păr

It is vital that the entirety of the syllable is fully pronounced. If the r on par were not pronounced distinctly, the long syllable could easily come to sound like a short one. This is a reason why readers of Restored Classical pronunciation take care to trill their r’s.

When does a syllable become long when reading Latin?

An open syllable automatically becomes long when followed by two consonants. (Except a mute + liquid, in which case this is optional.)

How does it get longer?

The first of the following consonants sticks to it. The open syllable then becomes long, simply because it now has more letters in it – it is physically longer, and it must be pronounced fully.

tem/pe/←stā/ti/bus this gives us: tem/pes/tā/ti/bus

note: pe is short, and open, pes is physically longer, and closed. Because it has more letters in it, it takes longer to say.

a/spér/sus a/←spérsus as/pér/sus

This syllable is now called ‘long by position’. One way to understand this is that you have positioned an extra consonant against it, and so it has become longer.

Here are some more examples:

Before (short)	After (long by position)
s t i /←r p ĭ s	s t i r/ p ĭ s
d i s/ c é /←s s ĭ t	d i s/ c é s /s ĭ t
m ŏ/ d é /←s t ŭ s	m ŏ/ d é s/ t ŭ s
ē /d u/←c t ŭ s	ē /d ú c/ t ŭ s

Double consonants – double trouble

It is not a mere fancy when we are told that the Romans pronounced their double consonants as two distinct sounds. They did, but they did so because each letter of the double consonant ended up in its own syllable, according to the rule we have just discussed.

a/ppa/rā/bat is how we would pronounce it if we did not know any better. However, this is what happens to the double consonant pp:

a/←ppa/rā/bat which becomes ap/pa/rā/bat

When reading Latin, getting the syllabic structure correct is therefore vitally important, otherwise it is impossible to read Latin verse with any degree of authenticity. You need to nurse these habits when reading prose as well, otherwise the transition to reading verse will be a hard and arduous one.

The Third syllable type – Common Syllables.

What is a common syllable?

Common syllables only occur when a short vowel is followed by a mute + a liquid (l or r).

In the ordinary course of things, a mute+liquid behaves like two Siamese twins joined together, and functions as though it were a unit “joined at the hip”.

The poet has the option of performing an operation, and separating the two. Once they are separated, they behave like any two consonants. One of them moves, in the same way we saw above, and closes (and thereby physically lengthens) the syllable immediately in front of the two consonants. The first consonant from the separated mute-liquid moves to the syllable in front of it.

pătrem pă/trem

If tr were a NORMAL consonant cluster, we would expect the t to move to the first syllable, like this:

pă/←trem resulting in păt/rem

This rule would be the same rule as that we saw above, for a short vowel followed by two consonants, and a poet can chose to apply it to a mute + liquid combination if he wishes to.

However, because the consonant cluster is a mute-liquid combination, if he does not perform the operation on the twinned mute-liquid cluster, then things stay as they are, and this results in

pă/trem

How do we know which of the two the poet has chosen?

We need to read the verse aloud that contains a word with a common syllable. It should be apparent which way the poet has divided the word, depending on whether he needs the common syllable to be physically long or short to complete the rhythmic patterning of long and short syllables. Only one reading should sound right. This is a matter of developing your ear. It never will develop if you are not always careful about quantity when reading both prose and poetry.

SYLLABLE QUANTITY

A source of much confusion is the use of the macron and breve to mark out syllable quantity. This may be fine for a speaker with native level fluency, (and to be frank, who speaks Latin with that level of fluency?) who has an instinctive knowledge of the true lengths of the vowels the words would have in ordinary conversation. For a modern second language Latin speaker, this system of marking the syllable long by position with a macron above its vowel spells disaster, and adds unnecessary complications.

While it is true that Latin versification depends on syllable quantity, the underlying vowel quantities of the words remain unchanged.

Syllables with short vowels are either physically long, or physically short.

Syllables with long vowels, are needless to say, always long, as their vowels are long, even if the syllable is physically a short one: pā is long, and so is pāb

Such a vowel that is naturally long, is called ‘long by nature’. Even in a physically short syllable, (one that that has fewer letters) it is still long.

However, with syllables that have short vowels,

pă is ‘physically’ short, and păd is ‘physically’ long. Placing a macron above the a, pād to show it is physically long, invites the reader to mispronounce the syllable and lengthen the vowel, when it is the syllable, not the vowel, that is long. Even worse, it leads people to think that ‘long by position’ means that the vowel is lengthened. This is a not uncommon error, but it is a very serious one.

The use of the macron above the vowel of a syllable that is long by position, gives rise to much confusion, as the same notation is also used for vowel length.

It is not the case that a syllable that is long by position, i.e. one containing a short vowel that is followed by two consonants, has its vowel lengthened. Marking it with a macron only gives rise to confusion, especially in a student reader who does not have an instinctive appreciation for vowel length, but who rather relies on the macrons. Macrons should be used to mark long vowels, and long vowels only, and not be used to serve another purpose.

To avoid this difficulty, some educators have proposed a super- macron, which would be extended over the entire syllable. The vowel length notations would remaining in place below it – however, standard computer word processing software does not allow for this, and nor does html coding.

PROPOSAL:

In order to keep the actual vowel quantities marked, another method needs to be found to show syllable quality that does not interfere with the true vowel markings. This method needs to make use of standard word processing tools that are also available on standard web editing packages. It also needs to be easy to apply when marking up a printed text for reading aloud, or, for that matter, for writing out with pen and ink.

A simple and elegant solution is proposed – that the macron for a long syllable should be placedunderneath the entire lengthened syllable cluster, as an underline. The original vowel quantities can still remain marked in their places above the line, as per usual.

a m a v i

Marking short or light syllables might also need an intervention that will not interfere with the usual markings; However, it it not really necessary to mark the short syllables, if the long ones are marked. Should, for educational reasons, or otherwise for reasons of clarity be necessary to distinguish them in a positive manner, it is proposed that short syllables be italicised, rendering them visually light, with all the letters in the cluster being italicised. legĕrĕ

The advantages:

This system has the advantage that a syllable that is long by position will not lose its actual vowel length markings, which would be retained in the superscript:

b ô b ŭ s

c ŏ n c ĭ d o

Another advantage, is the ease with which a printed text can be marked up for recital. This system is also easy to apply using handwriting.

It could be argued that italicising the light syllables might be excessive – and indeed, is largely unnecessary if the subscript macron is used, as the correct vowel quantities are then clearly visible in their correct locations above.

In monosyllables, vowels that are long take the circumflex, and vowels that are short take the acute.

árs	flôs
fáx	spês
párs	môns

Polysyllables take the circumflex accent when the penult is long by nature (This simply means that it has a long vowel, see above), and the final vowel is short. A circumflex can only appear over a syllable with a long vowel.

jûrĭs lûcĕ mûsă spînă

The circumflex accent is thought to have has a slight up-down tone, the acute a straightforward upwards tone. Final unaccented syllables had a slight falling tone. (This is called the grave accent, but this is not written, it is simply understood to be there.)

These accents were applied by the Romans in imitation of the Greeks, and may have been used when reciting poetry and during orations.

Evan Millner

London

August 22 2007

The resulting ‘ter’syllable on the end is closed. You’ve heard it said that the Romans trilled their r’s. They certainly sounded them one way or another, otherwise,’ter’, if pronounced with an English ‘r’, would be an open syllable as well.

Advice: Trill those r’s.

While counting letters is a simple and efficient way to get the point across, it may be misleading if you look into the matter more carefully, for it begs the question: ‘Is “sti” longer than “i”, since it has more letters?’ In fact, only the vowel and what follows it is relevant. Technically speaking, the beginning part of any syllable is irrelevant for Latin syllable quantity.

If we take the word, say, carmen, the proper syllabification is car-men. Then it is not the case that the first syllable is “followed by two consonants”, as it is not an open syllable. The vowel of the first syllable, for the syllable “car” is followed by only one consonant.

The Tonal Accent in Latin

2011-12-20T02:06:00.002-08:00

W.S. Allen, in his “Vox Latina”, dismisses the idea that Latin had a pitch accent, despite the description of this accent in great detail by a number of Roman grammarians writing prior to the fourth century AD. Allen states that the accent is “a minor detail of the Greek”. This would be like saying that the musical accent of Italian was “ a minor detail of Italian”. In fact, the survival of the pitch accent, albeit in modified form, in Italian, and the survival of tonality in the five main Romance languages descended from Latin. provides evidence that educated Romans adopted it into their Latin. Cicero himself speaks of the musicality of Latin, likening Spoken Latin to a form of singing. Further evidence exists in the adoption of the tonal accent into Hebrew recitation. Indeed, the Jews adopted the Greek system, including the method for manually marking the tones. (Manuum variis motibus altitudinem, depressionem, flexus vocis significabant) Talmudic texts were published with accents for this tonal singing, until well into the mediaeval period. This accent has similarities to the Greek accent , and probably developed in imitation of the Greek recitation of the Laws to a chanted tune.

Edgar H. Sturtevant, "The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin" University of Chicago Press, 1920, gives a much more developed analysis of the accent than Allen does, and he reaches the opposite conclusion. In paragraph 214 of The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin, Sturtevant sets forth the summary of his argument:

"214. The evidence compels us to conclude that in the period of the classical and post-classical literature the Latin accent involved both stress and high pitch upon the same syllables. For stress we have abundant evidence also for both the pre-classical and the latest periods; but we learn directly of the Latin pitch only for the period from about 100 B.C. to about 300 A.D. It is probable, however, that it existed both earlier and later. In fact, it is not unlikely that the considerable element of pitch in the modern Italian accent is a direct inheritance from Latin."

Bennett, along with David (see below), both of whom I regard as authoritative on this matter, come down in favour of the "Greek" accent. Herman and Wright in “Vulgar Latin” also hold the view that the accent in Classical times was a tone accent (pg 36).

One major plank of the argument regarding Classical Latin and tone versus stress, (Vulgar Latin, J Herman) is defeated by Hungarian, which “has a very strong stress accent involving intensity, while at the same time a whole operating system of vowels based on distinctions in length”.

In other words, a clear strong stress accent and a vowel system based on phonological length distinctions are not ipso facto incompatible. Yet one hears this recited again and again by Classicists, educated linguists and laymen alike, so often has this notion been repeated, that is has taken on authority simply by dint of repetition. I am not sure with which linguists this canard arose – for canard it surely is. There is no empirical scientific evidence for this opinion, only evidence that weighs against. Indeed, as Bennett notes, no human language has either an exclusive tonal accent or an exclusive loud-soft or stress accent. Some languages lean more towards the stress accent than the tonal accent, and others vice versa but the only human speech that would be devoid of tonal variations would be a totally monotone language, which, as far as one may suppose, does not exist, except in the minds of some misguided Latinists.

Classical Latin had both a stress accent, with tonal differentiation, and vowel length distinctions. Earlier Roman Grammarians assert quite explicitly that Latin used a tonal accent, similar to the Greek, and only from the fourth century onward to Roman grammarians talk about relative loudness, as opposed to pitch. (pg 36 Vulgar Latin, J. Herman & R. Wright, 2000, Penn State Press.)

The question of the nature of the Classical Latin accent was initially argued for cogently in English by Abbott, in his paper “The Accent in Vulgar and Formal Latin” (Classical Philology, II ppp 444 ff). Abbott held the view that the accent of the common people continued to be one of stress, but educated Romans developed an accent in which pitch predominated. This view is reasonable enough, when we consider to what extent Roman literature is based on the Greek. Also, educated Romans spoke Greek, with its pitch accent. This view is also supported by R.G. Kent ( Transactions of the American Philological Association, LI, pp19 ff), and Turner (Classical Review, 1912, pp147 ff).

Kent writes “In the middle of the second century BC the Greek teachers of the Roman youth set a fashion of speaking Latin with a pitch accent, for as Greeks they kept this peculiarity of their mother tongue when they learned Latin. From that time on, Latin was spoken with a pitch accent by the highly educated class, while the general populace retained the stress accent” (quoted on pg 55 of “Accentual Change and Language Contact” J. Salmons, 1992, Routledge.

Another recent study in support of the Pitch accent, is “The Non-European and Semitic Languages”, Saul Levin, SUNY Press, pg 236 ff

“ The ancient grammarians say clearly that the accent of Latin is either acute or circumflex, and they describe it just like Greek. In many details the distributions of acute and circumflex [between the Latin and Greek] agrees remarkably.”.

Levin continues to say “ Some in modern times have wrongly doubted, or rejected altogether, the testimony of the Roman Grammarians about accent. But since Latin literature conforms to the syllabification and vowel quantity of Greek, the literary language of Rome can hardly have failed to employ a pitch accent compatible with such versification and prose rhythm.” He then says even more emphatically, “ It will not do to dismiss the Latin pitch accent as an artificial imitation of Greek. The most classical Latin, the kind most thoroughly described in our sources, is the most thoroughly Hellenized. If Latin was ever free from Greek influence in some prehistoric time, that Latin is unknown to us, and to reconstruct it, be peeling off what we may label the literary, Hellenizing features, is a fantasy……..Admitting that there was a raised pitch does not conflict with the stress which undoubtedly was present in early Latin.”

See also the seminal work of J. Vendryes, “recherches sur l’histoire et les effets de l’intensite initiale en latin” (Paris 1902), which is quoted by Bennett.

“New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin” Andrew Sihler 1995, OUP , pg 241 also argues in favour of the pitched accent.

“ Roman Grammarians, down to the 4th C AD, describe the Latin accent in terms only appropriate for a pitch accent. Scholars have been wary as taking this as cogent, however, as not only is the terminology of Roman Grammarians taken over entire from Greek, their statements are often cribbed from Greek sources. Some scholars protest, however, that ancient authorities could hardly have thus identified Greek and Latin accent had there not been at least an appreciable element of pitch in the latter….The familiarity of educated Romans with Greek accent in both practice and theory probably would not have caused them to adopt an element of accent wholly irrelevant for their natural speech, but could have made them more aware of an existing element of pitch, and even to a studied enhancement of it – Latin with a Greek accent, if you will, in oratory or recitations of poetry”

Pulgram 1975, pg 116, quoted in “From Latin to Spanish”, Paul M Lloyd, Diane Publishing, 1987, argues that speakers of Classical Latin adopted the Greek pitch accent, and certainly made an effort to adopt it on formal occasions, if not in general speech.

“A New Theory of the Greek Accent” A.P. David, Oxford University Press, 2006 pg 76-7 is the most recent, and authoritative of the new school of scholars who promote the view that the original statements of Quintillian, etc, are accurate descriptions of Latin as it was spoken. Here is Davis' argument:

“It is also possible that Greek forms with an acute on the antepenult are a product of the reflex described in Vendryes’ Law, if the Latin penult in these words was heard to be pronounced with a circumflex.

Might there have been such a contonation in Latin? A simple synchronic picture, which accords with the traditional account, emerges if we assume a contonation. We are informed by a recent commentator that “ Roman Grammarians, down to the 4th century, describe L[atin] accent in terms appropriate only for a pitch accent” (quoting A.Sihler, see above, pg 241).

Modern scholars, however, tend to see a sort of ‘Greek envy’ in this native description and to be dismissive. But if we frame the new rule for Latin in terms of a recessive contonation, where the voice was required where possible to rise two morae before the ultima – without, in the case of this language, any stipulation as to the quantity of the ultima – the traditional stress rules for polysyllabic words in Latin automatically follow, if the combination of pitch and quantity worked in the way that I have described for Greek. A long penult, with two morae, containing the rise combined with the Latin version of the svarita, would produce a circumflex on the penult (amIcus); [circumflex on the capitalised I] while a short penult (of one mora) would cause the rise to revert back to one mora to the antepenult, producing the Latin acute with a deemphasised svarita (facilis).

In making an authoritative correction, Quintillian actually points to this recessive rule. Discussing errors in accentuation, he cites CethEgus [circumflex on the capitalised E] as properly having a flex on the penult (Institutio Oratorio 1.5):the common error was to pronounce the penult grave in this word instead of circumflex, which apparently rendered the penult short. (A circumflex requires two morae). He implies that this change in the quantity of the penult necessitates an acute first syllable (Cethegus) [with acute on the first e] – an erroneous pronunciation, but one which conforms to the proposed rule. The Latin accent was a recessive contonation, a rise and fall, where the rise occurred, wherever possible, on the second mora before the ultima.”

This is sound reasoning for dismissing W.S. Allen’s view.

As a final point, I would like to note, that one reason why one seldom hears Latin declaimed with this accent, is that one seldom hears Classical Greek spoken with it, even though there is not even a sliver of doubt that Classical Greek was spoken with a pitch accent. Current practice, however, is not necessarily a guide to good practice, and I would advocate the use of the tonal accent, for purely pedagogical reasons – it makes Latin more intelligible, and also makes clearer distinctions between stressed and unstressed, unaccented and accented syllables, and long and short vowels.

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Notes:
In monosyllables, vowels that are long take the circumflex, and vowels that are short take the acute.
árs
flôs
fáx

spês
párs
môns

Polysyllables take the circumflex accent when the penult is long by nature (This simply means that it has a long vowel, see above), and the final vowel is short. A circumflex can only appear over a syllable with a long vowel.

jûrĭs lûcĕ mûsă spînă

The circumflex accent is thought to have has a slight up-down tone, the acute a straightforward upwards tone. Final unaccented syllables had a slight falling tone. (This is called the grave accent, but this is not written, it is simply understood to be there.)

These accents were applied by the Romans in imitation of the Greeks, and may have been used when reciting poetry and during orations.

Mnemonics for Latin

2011-12-20T02:06:00.000-08:00

Mnemonics for Latin

Using the Method of Loci to Memorise the Verb Table.

The use of mnemonics can help speed up the learning of various elements of Latin Grammar. Methods like this were used successfully by Roman Orators, and studying how to apply mnemonics formed an important part of the curriculum, as one of the tools needed for rhetoric. The method comes down to us through a work in Latin by an unknown author. The piece, called Rhetorica ad Herennium, is estimated to have been written around 85 BC, though it is unlikely that it was original with this author. The author of this textbook of rhetoric examines each of the five parts of rhetoric, including as the fourth part memoria in which he explains the method of loci. It is the only complete source from the classical world to survive, although there are brief references to the method by others, including Cicero and Quintilian, the chief teachers of rhetoric in the ancient and medieval worlds, and later in the Renaissance.

NOTE - not everyone can 'see' images in their mind's eye - I can't - at least - not clearly, yet the system can still work well for me. I can remember the shape and texture of objects very clearly, so, instead of 'visualising' them in the boxes, I imagine running my hands over them to feel them - very odd it is indeed, running my hand over an imaginary eyeball with an arm growing out of it - but I can then 'see' - for want of a better word, the object very clearly. I don't really 'see' it, but I know exactly what shape it has, and where it is. So the method of loci is still a powerful system for me, even though I can't imagine pictures. If you have an auditory memory, you could do the same thing, but with sound.

A Verb Room using the Method of Loci.

The curious diagram you see here, is very useful, as it is a systematic method for the loci, developed by Fenaigle in the early 1800's. When combined with Gouraud's perfection of the mnemonic system, (which Grey had attempted to base on the Ancient Hebrew mnemonic system of acrostics, known in Classical texts as 'Simanim'. ) we end up with a very powerful artificial memory system. All this sounds very arcane, but has a beautiful simplicity to it.

Step One:
Get comfortable. Sit with your back to the fireplace, or to a wall of your room.
Imagine the floor is divided into 9 squares, 3 squares per row.
Number them:
1-2-3
4-5-6
7-8-9

These 9 are represented in the diagram above, by the 9 squares in the middle.

On your left, is the first wall. Divide this, too into nine squares. Number them, starting from the top left
1-2-3
4-5-6
7-8-9

Now, compare your floor with your wall. None the consistency? This,however, is the FIRST wall, so each of the numbers has a ONE in front of it.
11-12-13
14-15-16
17-18-19

However, don't remember them like this, just as plain single digits.

Place the number TEN just above this wall, on the ceiling.

Then, do the same for the remaining two walls. The second wall will be the numbers 21,22,23 etc, and the third, 31,32,33, and the wall behind your back, 41,42,43 etc

Now, examine, the diagram above. If you cut it out, and folded it up, with the numbers on the INSIDE, you will have your room.

Take some time to get this pattern firmly into your head - I would spend a good 10 minutes, running over it in your mind's eye. The method for constructing this memory room is outlined very clearly is this little books by S.Sams
Ignore everything in the book, except for his very clear description of how to imagine the memory room.
You can put one of these memory rooms in every room and closet in your home. The first room would be for numbers 1 - 50, and the second for 50 -100 and so on.

Setting this system up in your head requires a small investment in time. Once you have it, you'll have it with you for life. Getting a large sheet of card, and drawing out the diagram above, and constructing the cube, can also be of assistance.

NOW, for memorising the verbs using the method of loci:

Turn to page 191 of Sam's Book, (i.e. the last 4 pages or so) where he sets out his system for using the memory cube for learning the Latin verbs. I used the system very successfully myself, so it appears to work for me. It might work for you as well. Sams does not give all forms in his example, you can supply the passive and deponents yourself on the remaining 2 walls of your first room, and place irregulars in another room - or put them alongside the regulars in the same boxes, once you have learned the regulars - remember to keep the tenses in the same loci, even in a new room.
IGNORE the number-word equivalent system given by Sams. If you want to play with this acrostic system, use the more advanced system developed by Gouraud:

Here is the floor of your room:

FIRSTLY, memorise the positions of these in their boxes. You may make up stories, visualise them. ( See the declension tower for examples of how to do this)

The first step is to be able to quickly recognise the forms. The second step, is to be able to give them over.

Here is a simplified set-up. We will learn it, then flesh it out with the full forms of the four paradigms for each tense. Aids to memory are in parentheses - feel free to make up your own ones)

1 I DO Am-o ( note how it resembles i do)	2 I DID am-abam (I did fall on my bum)	3 I HAVE am-avi (note the resemblance avi - have)
4 I HAD am-averam (I had Avraham over for dinner)	5 I WILL am-abo (I will be about to arrive)	6 I MAY am-em (am-em, I may)
7 I MIGHT OR COULD am-arem ( I might visit a hareem)	8 I SHOULD HAVE am-averim	9 I SHALL HAVE am-avero

Note - all forms on the diagonal ( in green) from amo, end in o - i.e. amo, amabo, amavero.

The form 'I should have' (red) is almost identical to the form of I shall have.

You can think of your won mnemonics for the forms I have not given.

So, sit in your armchair, and imagine these arrrayed on the floor, in their boxes. Be as vivid as you can, make your images as concrete as you can.

Once you know exactly where the words fall, and which words are in which box, add the rest of the forms of the paradigms of each verb to each box. I would draw up a plan of the floor, and write out the tables in each square, as per the instructions in S.Sam's book.

An hour or so of effort should have you remembering where the things are.

Remember, make use of the objects in your room that happen by chance to fall in the squares. For example, in my room, the top right corner had a table with a top hat on it, so I thought up the line ' I have a top hat', and so immediately recalled that that square was occupied by 'I have'

Now we leave the floor, and turn our imagination to the wall on our left, which we divide into nine squares:

1 I WOULD HAVE (I would have missed him) am-avissem	2 TO DO (the standard infinitives, amare, monere,regere etc) TO HAVE ...'D (To have missed the 'm; that fell off amavissem was really irresponsible!) amavisse ( with no final m)	3 TO BE ABOUT TO To be about to put a suppository up your recturum esse
4 DOING amandi IN DOING amando TO DO amandum (a giant eatingalmonds, while chanting fee fi fo fum)	5 TO DO (To do: to lose some weight from my tummy) amatum TO BE DONE ( To be done, now that its gone, to keep it off) amatu ( the tum has gone!)	6 DOING amans What am I doing? I'm eating almonds! (amans) What am I about to do? I'm about to give some almonds to this tourist! ABOUT TO DO amaturus
7 DO! ama!	8 SHALL DO! am-ato	9 DONE amatus TO BE DONE amandus (This is the last square and we're all done, but there is still more to be done)

If you have a reasonably good visual or spatial memory, you should be able to get all of this memorised in about one hour. Add all the other forms, as given in Sam's book at the very end. review it regularly...the first attempt will be really hard. Then it will get easier. You will find, even after one hour of this, that your comprehension of texts will jump, as you will recognise verb forms, and be able to relate them to their locations.

Learn to Speak Latin

2011-12-20T02:04:00.000-08:00

The Latinum Latin Language Course is a successful free online audio course, devoted to teaching the Latin Language. The course functions as a “Latin Language Outreach Program”, and has an international user base. Several thousand audio files are downloaded from the course website every day. The Latinum Course is supported by resource materials for vocabulary learning, located on Schola, with images and Latin words, but no other language. Users are encouraged to use their newly acquired language skills on the growing Latin-only Social website, Schola.

The Latinum Course uses modern language methods to teach Latin, based around an intensive oral system that would be too time intensive to implement in a classroom situation, but which is very well suited to distribution via the internet and iTunes, for use through the medium of a computer or personal stereo.

Apart from offering lessons in Classical Latin, Latinum also hosts a growing range of readings from Classical Texts and the Roman Poets, recorded by a number of contributors worldwide, some of whom are famous for their delivery of Latin prose. Thus, Latinum attracts both new students of the language, and also those who may have been studying for many years.

The Latinum Course is unique, in that it focuses on Latin as a living, spoken language. The course is aimed at giving its users a high level of fluency in spoken Classical Latin. This has not generally been a goal of courses in Latin since the Renaissance. The premise of the course is that the fastest road to an all round complete knowledge of the language, is to treat it as a modern language, and to learn it using the techniques that have successfully been applied to teaching English as a second language. A user who can speak Latin with some fluency, can then read the language as a fluent speaker. They should be able to think in the language, and not perpetually translate every sentence into their mother tongue in their heads. A fluent speaker will have a fast reading speed, and will be able to read and enjoy more aspects the vast and varied literature that has been written in Latin over the past 2300 years. It is the goal of the Latinum Course to assist in producing such students, a new generation of fluent Latinists, who will be able to use their Latin practically as a means of active communication, indeed a generation of Latinists such as the world has not seen for over 400 years.

to learn a language successfully, you need to expose yourself to it - the studying you do in class is really only ever going to be a very small part of the effort needed. Latinum is designed to help fill a gaping hole in Latin study - the lack of enough immersion material.

The U.S. State Department groups languages for the diplomatic service according to learning difficulty.:

Category 1. The “easiest” languages for speakers of English, requiring 600 hours of classwork for minimal proficiency: the Latin and Germanic languages. However, German itself requires a bit more time, 750 hours, because of its complex grammar.

Category 2. Medium, requiring 1100 hours of classwork: Slavic languages, Turkic languages, other Indo-Europeans such as Persian and Hindi, and some non-Indo-Europeans such as Georgian, Hebrew and many African languages. Swahili is ranked easier than the rest, at 900 hours..

Category 3. Difficult, requiring 2200 hours of study: Arabic, Japanese, Korean and the Chinese languages. Classical Latin falls into this group

Will you get a chance to practice Latin? This is the thorny problem with Latin - partially solved by the internet, and access to Schola and the growing number of Latin Speaking clubs around the world. If you had been learning latin 300 years ago, you wouldn't have this problem - there would be enough Latin speakers around.

To be a successful learner of any language you need the chance to hear, read and speak the language in a natural environment. Language learning takes an enormous amount of concentration and repetition, which cannot be done entirely in the classroom. Will you have access to the language where you live, work and travel?

The Latinum Course uses as its base text the comprehensive textbook for Spoken Latin, written by the famed 19th century linguist, G.J.Adler, called " A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language".

The map above shows red dots, representing clusters of ten users, showing the location of the user base of the Latinum Course for learning how to speak Classical Latin, over the months of May - July 2008. Larger dots are clusters of 10-99. During this period, over 12 700 individual users accessed the Course website. Over 2 million audio files will have been downloaded from the Latinum Course since the program came online in the first quarter of 2007 through to the end of July 2008.

Why Study Latin?

2011-12-20T02:01:00.003-08:00

Why Study Latin?
by Molendinarius, December 8 2009.

"Today, every laptop with an internet connection contains more information than the Great Library of Alexandria. At its peak, that library contained 700,000 books, until the Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered it burned down; today, Google Books has over seven million – and that's before you count everything else online. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story imagining a "total library" containing all written information. Seventy years later, it exists." Johann Hari, The Guardian, 8 December 2009.
The implications of Google books, and the availability of the vast universe of literature written in Latin, previously hidden - even, in many instances, to specialists, should be sending a shudder through your world.
For once, you have an honest answer to give, an answer you can shout from the rooftops - to the perennial question, "Of what use is Latin".

The answer lies behind your search box on google books. Type in 'haec est" and a torrent of literature will pour forth to assault you. The cultural production of two thousand years, written in Latin, unread, unknown, there for the picking and reading.
What do we have? Novels - both Roman remains, and Renaissance fiction - science fiction even! Poetry - more than you could imagine. Dialogues. Plays. Stories and Fables, Philosophy, Science, Mathematics.....the vast bulk of the intellectual production of Europe, from Roman times, until the early 1800's, was written in Latin. The most renowned poets in Europe, wrote in Latin to continental acclaim.
Due to an ever shrinking pool of readers over the course of the 20th Century, this material is nowadays largely unknown, a vast terra incognita - even largely uncatalogued. The Latin works of Milton and Addison, Buchanan and Locke, go unread. There is also a vast, unread mountain of material in manuscript, some of it only now being published for the first time.
As one blogger online remarked recently, because of the wonderful thing that is Google, having thrown open the world's libraries - "we starve amidst a banquet". Never before in history, has anyone had access to the breadth and depth of Latin literature, that you personally have access to now, at the click of a mouse. The volume of material on Google increases by the day.

We see some signs of adjustment to this shift taking place in the teaching profession - "Latin for the New Millenium" - but old habits and old ideas persist. Teachers are reverting to renaissance teaching methods, that stressed an ability to read quickly, to speak and write Latin. Philological, pedantic methods of teaching, that will not equip our students to delve into this world, persist. For these books, there are no English translations. To read this material, you need fluency and command of the language - fluency to peruse quickly, and find the gold nuggets in the dross. Fluency to simply cover ground. Even if you pick a tiny area of knowledge, you could not hope to read all the texts written on the subject in Latin.

Some scholars claim they are only interested in reading 'Classical Latin', written by the very Romans themselves. These scholars cut themselves off from the 2000 years of literary criticism and commenting on Latin texts, written in Latin. The vast bulk of scholarship on Latin original texts, is only available in Latin. Most of this material is terra incognita, and professors of Latin have not yet adjusted to the paradigm shift that must necessarily take place. Most spend their time publishing in English, French and German, and reading the work of other scholars in English, French and German. Small surprise, then, that their skill in Latin remains stunted.

For a Classicist to ignore works written in Neo-Latin that discuss the poetics of Virgil, for instance, while happily reading modern critical material in Italian or German, is surpassing strange. Yet, that is our reality - as many of these pre-modern critical texts are unknown, and have sat on bookshelves, in vast repositories, unopened for centuries. Even their titles are often unrecorded in the literature, let alone discussion of their contents.

Now, more than ever, Latin teachers, and students of Latin, need to focus on fluency and an ability to read with fluidity - to give our students the tools to enter this sacrum sacrorum loaded with the wisdom of millenia. They need to show their students this vast depository, to demonstrate the usefulness of having a skill in reading this language.

If we do not transmit our wonder and amazement at this turn of events - then we will have failed to grasp an opportunity that no generation has ever had before.

The momentousness of this change is such, that it can be compared to the shift that took place in the world of letters after the invention of printing - leading to the wide dissemination of Classical texts, and to a burst of improved standards of Latin literacy. Once the preserve of a few monks in cloisters, anyone could now own Cicero, Vergil, and use these texts to improve their Latin. The result, the Neo-Latin Renaissance, that really only took off after the invention of printing.

Now, we face another paradigm shift - for us, as readers of Latin, we were more akin to the monks, with access to only a few valued tomes - the vast production of the renaissance was unavailable to us, even to the specialist - now, the floodgates have opened.
How will we respond?

Audio Visual Latin

2011-12-20T02:01:00.001-08:00

The Cursum Latinum is currently in development. At the time or writing, over 200 lessons are available , with new material being uploaded to the dedicated YouTube channel on almost a daily basis - the complete course, which will cover all the fundamentals of Latin, and a great amount of more advanced material, will comprise well over 1000 lessons.

This is a course designed for the serious student of Latin, who wishes to be able to read texts which do not have translations (i.e. the vast bulk of material ever written in Latin in the past 2000, most of which remains untranslated). Due to its unique structure, the Cursum Latinum can be used by both adults and children. Even advanced students of Latin can benefit enormously from this course.

The Cursum Latinum is designed to train students to read and think in Latin. It is not a translation course. The goal is to reach a high level of reading fluency.

The methodology is very traditional, and uses a methodology that has documented origins in Roman times.

At present, the Cursum Latinum is only available (for free) on YouTube. It is the only course of its type in existence. There are a small number of teachers around the world, who teach Latin in Latin, but at present, the Cursum Latinum is the only example of such a course openly accessible, outside the confines of the University of Kentucky's Latin department, the Vivarium Novum, and a handful of classrooms around the world.

Unlike a book-based course, the Cursum Latinum offers you a teacher. As the course follows Adler's text, "A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language for Speaking and Writing Latin", it is possible to use Adler (available on Google Books) to move along with the course, although the exact match to pages in Adler is not explicit, as the course uses other material, notably the educational materials for teaching Latin in Latin developed byJohn Amos Comenius in the mid seventeenth century, and materials developed by der Millner himself.

As the course is entirely in Latin, it can be used by students internationally. It also has the distinct advantage in that it will not date, as Latin is immutable, but the vernacular languages shift over time.

The foundational methodology of the Cursum Latinum is that developed by Jean Manesca in the late 1700's for teaching language orally, using conversation. This method was subsequently adopted by Henri Ollendorff, who wrote a textbook for teaching Latin using this method in the early 1840's. George Adler, a noted German-American linguist, re-wrote this text, and published it in 1856, the year before his death.

The text then sank into oblivion, to be rediscovered by der Millner in 2007.

Initially, the text was serialised as an audio course along with the English explanations, on the now defunct Latinum podcast.

A Historical perspective on Greek and Latin teaching

2011-12-20T02:00:00.001-08:00

A historical perspective on Latin/Greek teaching : by Evan der Millner

August 2010

This topic is a very wide ranging one – and a brief essay such as this, can only hope to cover the subject giving the barest of outlines. In this essay, I will mainly concern myself with what could be called the Rudiments of language education. I will also point out that some 'new' methods such as the approach favoured by the CLC and similar modern courses, are actually not new at all.

We are fortunate in knowing rather a lot about how the Romans went about teaching their children. Rome was a bilingual society – so education always involved an element of second language teaching. For contemporary foreign language teachers, the surviving evidence is fascinating.

Most of the direct evidence we have for language teaching dates from around the end of the third century, but we have an abundance of indirect evidence as well – fragments of papyri, ostraca and wax tablets, a syllabary inscribed on a tomb wall in Egypt that had been turned into a classroom, and, the most surprising survival of all, that body of texts now known as the hermeneumata. From around the same time period, we have the elementary Latin grammar of Donatus, which was composed for Roman boys who already spoke Latin.

My discussion of Latin education will keep returning to the hermeneumata, and Donatus, whose echoes keep reverberating through the curriculum down the centuries, except for a brief hiatus during the 'philological period' of the nineteenth century.

The hermeneumata contain a number of elements – vocabulary lists for everyday life arranged by theme, vocabulary lists arranged alphabetically, simple dialogues designed to activate the vocabulary, narratives, and simplified fables.

The dialogues aim to relate to a boy's everyday life, while also inculcating the virtues of good citizenship – piety and virtue.

We know that authors such as Aphthonius especially wrote simplified versions of fables for inclusion in primary textbooks. (N. Holzberg 2002, The Ancient Fable) These, and short, often humorous dialogues and narratives, were the elementary literature used in the Roman schoolroom. (Anglo-Saxon Conversations, Gwara and Porter. 1997)

Basic education started off with the alphabet, followed by the learning of syllables – extensive tables of syllables were composed. (Bonner,1977, Education in Ancient Rome). Each consonant was in turn combined with the five vowels – ba be bi bo bu, ca ce ci co cu, and so on, through the alphabet. This practice originated, once again, with the Greeks. An excellent reconstruction of a Roman syllable table can be found in the Institutionum Grammaticarum of Aldus Pius, (MDVII, Venice) whose comprehensive table of syllables stretches over five pages – consonants in front of vowel, vowels in front of consonants, two or three consonants in front of vowels, etc.

Pius writes” Imitati autem sumus antiquos et graecos et latinos grammaticos. Discant igitur pueri quot syllabarum sint dictiones”.

“Bona Fortuna, Dii Propitii!

Praeceptor, Ave! (c.f Comenius: Salve, Lector Amice!)

Quoniam volo et valde cupio loqui graece et latine, rogo te, magister, doce me. (c.f C: Quis docebit me hoc?)

Ego faciam, si me adtendas. (C: Ego, cum Deo)

Adtendo diligentur.....

Pollux then lays out his method : “Duo ergo sunt personae quae disputant, ego et tu. Tu es qui interrogas, ego respondeo. Ante omnia, lege clare, diserte”

We see the same principle operating in Donatus, whose Ars Minor is constructed as a sort of grammatical dialogue. “Verbum quid est? Pars orationis cum tempore et persona etc” (Gramatici Latini, Keil). Donatus is providing a textbook, and also the suggested outline of a lesson plan for the praeceptor.

This method of teaching continues through the Carolingian period, into the Middle Ages, and into the Renaissance, when several hermeneumata texts were 'rediscovered', with so many other Classical texts. (Colloquial and Literary Latin, Dickey and Chahoud, Cambridge 2010). The influence of these texts on Erasmus, Vives and, particularly, Comenius, was immense. Parsing grammars – more detailed than Donatus, and aimed at second language speakers, had started to appear even earlier, constructed entirely on the dialogic principle – composed in a self conscious effort to imitate classroom practice in Ancient Rome. (exemplified by Priscian's famous “Partitiones duodecim versuum Aeneidos principalium”).

The Roman method of teaching was lauded by Simon Grynaeus, in a letter included in the 1536 Basil edition of Polluxes Onomasticum, which itself formed the model for Comenius' Janua, and Orbis Pictus. The influence of the Omonasticum and the ideas in Gryneaus' letter, on Comenius, are self evident. “non gravabitur praeceptor, praesentes ipsasque si potest, si non potest, pictas, sculptas, aut quomodocunque seu verbis seu gestibus expressas bene certa cum nomenclatura res, principio puerilibus oculis animisque quam diligentissime subjicere”

In the 1800's there was a move away from this Classical Roman method of teaching, to a newly invented method I would characterize as grammar-translation, with an emphasis on only using texts that were written by the Romans themselves. A Latin sentence not penned by a Roman of the Golden Age, was not Latin worthy of consideration, and no student should set their eyes on, or be corrupted by such a thing. Aesop was rejected, as were parsing grammars, dialogues, and the short narrative stories that had been the stock in trade of second language education in Latin for over 2000 years. Teaching Latin came to mean teaching grammar, and reading Latin came to mean translation. The methods that had been used since Roman times, in a more or less unbroken tradition, were largely abandoned. Aesop, who was a staple of the Roman and Renaissance primary classroom, was abandoned, depriving students of a rich source of easily digestible Latin. Dialogue went the same way. Students were thrown straight into Caesar, or some such author, as the primary text, before being rapidly exposed to Virgil, and quite advanced Classical literature. This represented a total break with the Classical tradition. In the name of 'authenticity', a new and artificial method of Latin pedagogy arose, one that bore little relationship to its Roman predecessor.

Perhaps it was felt that, as Latin was no longer required as a spoken idiom, the teaching method should change:As Comenius noted: “discendae sunt non omnes totae ad perfectionem esse, sed ad necessitatem. Nec enim est opus Graeca et Hebraica tam expedite sonare, ut vernacula, quia homines desunt cum quibus loquamur.".Comenius astutely noted , however, “Omnis lingua usu potius discatur quam praeceptis. Id est, audiendo, legendo, relegendo et transcribendo”. It did not make a practical difference if a language needed to be spoken: the teaching method should not change.

Thus we find many modern courses, with their mix of grammar, dialogue and narrative, are far closer to the Classical curriculum than anything we have seen published in over 200 years. The only thing missing from most of these courses is the extensive parsing in Latin, and use of Aesop, which provided students in ancient times extensive active language practice in L2, in a safely delimited area, and through Aesop, a much wider range of vocabulary than that encountered by a modern student of the language.

Learning Latin with Comenius

2011-12-20T01:59:00.001-08:00

Comenius arranged his course in a gradated series:

1. The Vestibulum, with an associated grammar for beginners

1a. The Orbis Sensualium Pictus - an amplified form of the Vestibulum.

2. The Janua Linguarum, with an associated grammar and lexicon.

3. The Janua Linguarum Aurea, with an associated grammar and colloquia.

4. The Atrium, with an associated grammar.

5. A Lexicon wholly in Latin.

How could the student use this material?

1. His or her first step, should be to listen to the Vestibulum in bilingual audio until the work can be fully understood in the Latin only. This will mean listening to the book several times.

Once the student has done this, he or she needs to read the work - there are some digital scans available through the Europeana portal. Simply type "vestibulum" into the search box, the first three or four texts are examples in Latin and Hungarian. These texts can be downloaded as pdf files.

1a. The Orbis Sensualium Pictus is your next step. (If you cannot download the Vestibulum you could begin with the Orbis Pictus) You will notice that you have not been exposed to any formal grammar - this will follow, once you have started to expose yourself to the language, and build up an intuitive structure, and a good vocabulary.

The Orbis Sensualium Pictus is available in audio in a bilingual format on latinum, and also, for revision, in amonolingual format. There are many examples of this text in many languages parallel to the Latin available on google books, europeana, and archive.org

This text needs to be listened to and re-read many dozens of times - it is a long text, and will give you a rich vocabulary of 1000's of words - preparing you for reading a wide range of texts in Latin.

2. Comenius' introductory grammar is not yet available in bilingual form - this text can at present only be accessed through the CAMENA scan of Comenius Complete Educational Works (Opera Didactica Omnia)

here is the link to the introductory grammar: Scroll down to the bottom of the page to locate it, and then click through to read each page.

Once you have studied the Vestibulum and the Orbis Sensualium Pictus, and feel you know the vocabulary, you should consolidate what you know by reading the following texts, which cover the same ground, with differing degrees of variation and amplification of the material.

Reading these subsidiary texts is a useful self-check, to see if you have actually learned the material in the Orbis. If you are struggling, return to the Orbis Pictus, and re-read it a few more times.

1. Liber latinus in usum puerorum editus

2. Der Kleine Lateiner

3. Vestibulum Germanico-Latinum (Georg Vechner)

4. Vestibulum Majus

Locutorium Scholae

2011-12-20T01:58:00.001-08:00

Colloqviminī, O Sodālēs Latīnophōnī, in hōc novō Locūtōriō Virtuālī (chatroom) cum aliīs SCHOLÆ sodālibus.

LOCŪTŌRIUM VIRTUĀLE SCHOLÆ

Sī in līneā Interrētiālī cum Scholā nunc es, inscrībe, sīs, nōmen tuum et agedum: Intrā in Scholæ Locūtōrium Virtuāle, fenestrā hūjus Locūtōriī in angulō qvadrī vīsíficī (screen) apertā relictā qvō facilius perspectēs qvis alius in Locūtōriō sit cum qvō confābulārī (chat) forsitan velīs.

Memor estō illīus sapientis et vétĕris prōverbiī:

"Piscātor patiēns prǽdam suam capit."

"Qvōmodo illūc intrābō", fortasse interrogās. Preme cyberpressōrium (mouse) tuum super internexum rubrum(red link) qvī suprā appāret, et qvadrātum confestim vidēbis ubi "Screen Name" (nōmen cybernēticum) legēs. Dēlē deinceps "Screen Name", et ĭbĭdem intrōdūc, ope plēctrológiī (keyboard), tuum usōris nōmen. Deinde prĕmĕ cyberpressōrium super spatíŏlum qvod iuxtā est, ubi ánglicē legitur: "Log In" (= inscrībe hīc nōmen tuum ut in situm intrēs). Postrēmō prĕmĕ cyberpressōrium ĭbĭdem, et ecce: DICTVM FACTVM!

Nec cryptogrăphēma nec inscriptiōnem ēlectrónicam tuam est necesse intrōdūcere! Qvid potest simplicius esse?

In Locutōriō Virtuālī Scholæ, porrō, cum aliīs collŏqviōrum partĭcĭpĭbus pŏtĕrĭs commūnĭcāre, micrŏphōnum aut machĭnam phōtographĭcam tēlārem adhibēns, aut - sī vétĕrem, venerābilem, expertam, atqve, insuper, ā mājōribus trādĭtam commūnicātiōnis viam māvīs qvam illa technológiā modernā excogitāta artifícia - ad simplĭcem scriptiōnem, in mŏdum mŏnăchōrum mediævālium, confúgiēns.

LOCŪTŌRIUM VIRTUĀLE SCHOLÆ

Comenius Project

2011-12-20T01:57:00.000-08:00

Latinum’s Comenius Project

"A Rosetta Stone for Unlocking the Latin Tongue"

Project Outline August 2008

John Amos Comenius ( March 28, 1592 – November 15, 1670) was a European Educator from Moravia, who wrote an important series of school textbooks for learning Latin. These were textbooks covering the complete curriculum, as he devised it. The textbooks were written in Latin, and come in a gradated series. The aim of these textbooks was to get the students to become fluent in Latin, as school was taught in Latin - but the textbooks were not all LATIN textbooks, but general schoolbooks, covering the subjects we now recognise as history, politics, the sciences, &c.

The goal of learning Latin was combined with general scholarship, so the reader was not just learning the language, but useful information about the world as well, at the same time.

As such, these books are of enormous utility to the student of Latin, as they cover areas of knowledge with which we are somewhat familiar, and they provide a wealth of vocabulary, and knowledge about real things in the world – while at the same time giving us an insight into the mindset of the Renaissance, in a manner that no amount of academic study can give us – for by studying the course outlined by these textbooks, we become one of Comenius’ students, and are transported back in time. At the same time, we build up and strengthen our Latin.

Comenius' textbooks were very famous, and some editions remained in active classroom use until the early 1800's. Most editions are bilingual (Latin plus some other European language, including Hebrew and Classical Greek), some are trilingual or more, with the text running in parallel columns - such a text is a veritable Rosetta Stone for learning Latin. One of the online texts you can access has parallel translations in German, Polish, French, and Czech.

The Magna Didactica

LEVEL ONE
Orbis Sensualim Pictus

The first text Latinum will present will be Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus.
We will use the first American edition, in English and Latin, as this is available on Google Books. The book can be purchased as a reprint.

Versions:
Orbis Sensualium Pictus - Anglice - Latine. (1810) available at Latinum in audio Orbis Sensualium Pictus - Anglice - Latine - newer imprint of above text. available at Latinum in audio
Orbis Pictus Die Weldt in Bildern, Swet w Obrazych, Swiat w Obrazach, Le Monde en Tableaux. (1833)
Variant Text:
Nouveau Orbis Pictus - Germanice - Latine - Francogallice (1832)

This book is Comenius' foundation textbook, and it covers in a very basic format, all the main areas of knowledge as they were understood in the seventeenth century – biology, physics, geometry, trades, philosophy, music, recreation, law, politics, etc. This book was written for six to seven year olds, but it serves quite well for adults as well, although each topic is of course only treated in the barest of outlines.

Each lesson is an ‘object lesson’, and all the words given are illustrated in drawings that accompany the lesson, aiding in memory and understanding. The lessons are interesting historically, as they describe the processes of long extinct trades, adding to your store of Latin words related to everyday life.

In order to progress to Comenius’ higher level textbooks, it is necessary to master the vocabulary in the Orbis Pictus – and going through the book seven or eight times will be necessary – possibly more. The Orbis will give you a vocabulary of a few thousand words.

LEVEL TWO
The Vestibulum

The next text in Comenius’ series is the Vestibulum to the Janua Linguarum. This is a simple text, of a slightly higher level than the Orbis Sensualim Pictus. Comenius also wrote an essential introduction to Latin Grammar, to accompany it. He wrote two versions of the vestibulum, both of which are useful texts. Two versions of this text are in the Opera Didactica Omnia.
Versions:

Vestibulum in usum illustris paedagogei Albensis

Vestibulum ( Latine - Hungarice )

Vestibulum Majus.(Latine-Germanice)

LEVEL THREE
I will use 1796 text of Johann Georg Lederer: Der Kleine Lateiner, for level 3. This text follows the outline of the Orbis Pictus very closely, while introducing some material some material from the Janua, and thus serves admirably as the ‘next step up’. This text is in German and Latin, but is similar enough to the Orbis for a beginner to assimilate after studying the Orbis.

Comenius' Latin-Latin dictionary.

This dictionary was especially written for the vocabulary contained in the Janua and the Atrium. There are two editions, one for the Janua, one, more advanced, for the Atrium. The Lexicon Januale is in the Opera Didactica Omnia.
Several Editions of the Lexicon Atriale will be appearing on Google. The first one to appear online, is, unfortunately, a poor scan, with the edges of many pages sliced off. It, is, however, still very useful. Laura Gibbs has started a project to transcribe the dictionary, to create an online, fully searchable text. several people are already contributing. This is a very important project, as no 'pocket' Latin-Latin dictionary is available, either in print, or online, apart from this scan. As part of your Latin studies, I urge you to contribute, and help transcribe a few pages, lines, even one entry, of this dictionary. Every little will help to get this up and online as soon as possible.

LEVEL FOUR

The Janua

The Janua Linguarum Reserata Aurea uses the same chapter outlines as the Orbis Sensualim Pictus, but the material is fleshed out in much more detail. The text, reprinted so often, comes in several verrsions, as Comenius composed variant texts, and the editions from different places and times have important differences, but they all follow the same chapter structure.

Versions:
Latin, French, Dutch

Latin, Classical Greek, French

Latin and Classical Greek ed. Theodoro Simonio

Latin, German Italian and French.

Latin, German, French, Italian ed. Duez.

French-Latin

Copies of the Janua Linguarum can also be viewed as scans at the Comenius Library in Japan. (Before the first google editions appeared in late 2008, this was the only way to view these texts).

This text with its parallel translations is a veritable Rosetta Stone for unlocking the Latin language. I will be using the critical edition of the Janua. The earlier editions of the Janua are simpler than later editions, so I may present this text in two versions, a lower level and higher level version.

Comenius also wrote an intermediate Latin Grammar, composed in accessible Latin, for students of the Janua Reserata. This material is now available online in the two versions of this text are in the Opera Didactica Omnia.

LEVEL FIVE
Schola Ludus

This section will be the Schola Ludus, where the material of the Janua Linguarum Reserata is presented in short dialogues and ‘plays’ – although these are not dramatic plays, but rather expositions, using conversation.I will use the critical edition of the Schola Ludus. The colloquies in the Schola Ludus develop the educational themes in the Janua in more depth. This text is available online as individual photographs of the pages, and can be found listed here.
Schoal Ludus also exists in the Opera Didactica Omnia.

LEVEL SIX

A text composed of 700 sentences, all in alliteration, for ease of memorisation, called
" Vestibuli Lat. Lingvae Auctarium". This text is also avaiable in the Opera Didactica Omnia.

LEVEL SEVEN
Atrium

The Atrium. The atrium contains Comenius' Higher level Grammar, and advanced philosophical discussions of the material initially introduced in the Vestubulum and the Janua. See the Opera Didactica Omnia.

LEVEL EIGHT
Latin authors in the original.

Comenius thought a student should not open any works of original Latin literature, until fluency had been developed. He estimated this would take three years, if conducted FULL TIME in a school only following his curriculum. Part time, you are looking at six - ten years to attain the level of fluency that Comenius would have expected from his students.

Hesitation and umming as a language teaching tool

2011-05-04T03:45:00.000-07:00

The piece of research cited below is interesting - I had in my own language teaching built in things to deliberately give the student time to think, but the idea raised here, is far more elegant.

Speakers naturally do um and ha when speaking.

If when giving a language lesson, the um is deliberately introduced before the item that the teacher wants to draw attention to, this can be a very elegant teaching tool - if not over-used.

I will trial it in my forthcoming lesson, and see what eventuates. Used too much, it would, of course, be annoying.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2011) — A team of cognitive scientists has good news for parents who are worried that they are setting a bad example for their children when they say "um" and "uh." A study conducted at the University of Rochester's Baby Lab shows that toddlers actually use their parents' stumbles and hesitations (technically referred to as disfluencies) to help them learn language more efficiently.

becomes a much more difficult task and the child is apt to miss what comes next, says Richard Aslin, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and one of the study's authors.

"The more predictions a listener can make about what is being communicated, the more efficiently the listener can understand it," Aslin said.

The study, which was conducted by Celeste Kidd, a graduate student at the University of Rochester, Katherine White, a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester who is now at the University of Waterloo, and Aslin was published online April 14 in the journal Developmental Science.

The researchers studied three groups of children between the ages of 18 and 30 months. Each child sat on his or her parent's lap in front of a monitor with an eye-tracking device. Two images appeared on the screen: one image of a familiar item (like a ball or a book) and one made-up image with a made-up name (like a "dax" or a "gorp"). A recorded voice talked about the objects with simple sentences. When the voice stumbled and said "Look at the, uh…" the child instinctively looked at the made-up image much more often than the familiar image (almost 70 percent of the time).

"We're not advocating that parents add disfluencies to their speech, but I think it's nice for them to know that using these verbal pauses is OK -- the "uh's" and "um's" are informative," said Kidd, the study's lead author.

In the study, the effect was only significant in children older than two years. The younger children, the researchers reasoned, had not yet learned the fact that disfluencies tend to precede novel or unknown words.

When kids are between the ages of two and three, they usually are at a developmental stage where they can construct rudimentary sentences of about two to four words in length. And they typically have a vocabulary of a few hundred words.

The study builds on earlier research by Jennifer Arnold, a scientist at the University of North Carolina and a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester, which found that adults also can use "um's" and "uh's" to their advantage in understanding language. Additionally, work by Anne Fernald at Stanford University has shown that it's not the quality but the quantity of speech that a child is exposed to that is most important for learning.

Language Learning and Methodology.

2011-04-04T02:58:00.000-07:00

The piece of research cited below is interesting, in that is seems to reinforce the idea that a learner must do a lot of reading in order to learn how to structure a language.

It also illustrates the danger of using - in a language such as Latin - adapted texts, unless the learner is explicitly made aware that the texts are adapted to English word order, as there is a danger that this word order will be generalised.

Thus,if an adapted text is used - for example, in an interlinear - it is vital that the student moves to the original text as soon as possible.

The text is also encouraging for teachers - for example, the rule in Latin that an adjective always follows a monosyllable probably need not be explicitly taught. With enough examples, the rule will be learned.
We can say bonum vinum, or we can say vinum bonum (with a preference to the adjective coming before the noun in many cases) , but bonum sal is always sal bonum.

New Research Demonstrates Language Learners' Creativity

ScienceDaily (Apr. 4, 2011) — New research published in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), shows that language learning goes well beyond simple imitation, and in fact that language learners are quite creative and remarkably smart. Not only are learners able to generalize grammatical restrictions to new words in a category -- in this case, made-up adjectives -- but they also do not learn these restrictions in situations where they can be attributed to some irrelevant factor.

But how is the restriction learned in the first place? Drs. Boyd and Goldberg show that witnessing ablim used after nouns (i.e., postnominally, as in the hamster that's ablim) makes participants even more likely to avoid its use before nouns in their own utterances. While this may sound like learners are simply imitating the adjective uses they see in the language to which they are exposed, the authors go on to show that learning is savvy, and only occurs under certain conditions.This point is driven home in an article, "Learning what not to say: The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production," to be published in the March 2011 issue of Language. When authors Jeremy Boyd of the University of Illinois and Adele Goldberg of Princeton University asked adult speakers to produce sentences containing made-up adjectives like ablim, they found that people avoided using ablim before the noun it modified, unconsciously treating it like real adjectives that sound similar -- e.g., afraid, which also cannot be used before the noun it modifies (i.e., the afraid cat is a less preferred formulation than the cat that's afraid). This result indicates that speakers readily generalize a restriction against this use -- referred to as "prenominal" -- to adjectives that they've never heard before.

For example, in an analogous learning situation, when children see an adult with his right hand in a cast play a video game using just his left, they do not assume that there is a restriction on how the game can be played -- i.e., that one can only use one's left hand. They immediately infer that the adult would use his right hand (or both hands) if he could, but that the cast is preventing him from doing so. In similar fashion, when a new group of participants witnessed ablim used postnominally, but this time in a context in which there was a reason for its postnominal use that had nothing to do with ablim itself, participants did not learn a restriction against ablim's prenominal use. This indicates that learners carefully evaluate the input they receive, and that learning only occurs when the input is deemed informative.

This research demonstrates that speakers do not learn purely by imitating others, but bring sophisticated and creative resources to bear on the process. This is especially true when it comes to language, where the fact that children routinely produce sentences to which they have never been exposed indicates that they are not simply imitating what they hear.

I'm about 20% on my way through Bellum Helveticum

2011-03-19T16:43:00.001-07:00

by Karavinka on 2011-02-07, 20:35

http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=32605

My work contract expired as of Jan. 31 and I've been sleeping a lot since then. And the Chinese New Year fell on the first week of February this year so I had to waste my time visiting relatives etc, losing the precious time that I could have used to... not to learn Latin but to be with my gf. I still spent some time with Latin and I wanted to make a note before I take off to Jeju, a resort island off the southern coast, in a few hours.

Well, anyways. As of Feb. 8:

* Wheelock's Latin, Loci Antiqui and Loci Immutati : I read through the passages while making a vocab list. Didn't spend too much time with this, though. Both these sections and the reader volume seem too heavy on Cicero imho.

* Chamber's Latin Alive and Well : finished! It is actually awful like Wheelock, and many sentences and some reading passages are shared between the two. However, Chambers was nice enough to add review sheets (with answer keys) every few lessons, and he has more English to Latin exercises. (I don't think I just have the confidence unless I can produce it somehow) Most readings are adapted from classicals, heavy on Livy and Caesar.

* I'm about 20% on my way through Bellum Helveticum, a Caesar-based textbook available online with podcasts from Latinum. There are as many (if not more) English to Latin than just passively reading Latin, starting from a simple noun clause to full sentences. The podcast is helpful as well: though I'm not intent on speaking Latin, I still want to feel at least somewhat natural when I read out loud. I never knew there was elision in Latin. (Gallia est .. to Galliest.., according to the podcast.)

@KingHarvest: Yes, Eutropius reads differently from, say, Nepos or Caesar. But I'm still glad that it exists and there must have been some reason when the Renaissance schoolmasters picked it as the pupil's first Latin author... Thanks for the comment, I'll take a look at Augustine.

Bilingual Readings on Latinum

2011-03-16T03:51:00.000-07:00

In 2011 I started a new section of Latinum - composed of bilingual readings of the Classic authors, using the system of texts produced by Hamilton and Underwood, and those produced by John Taylor for the University College London.
These are the links to the current selection - comprising several hours of audio material.

1. Bilingual Caesar - Invasion of Britain
2. Bilingual Celsus - De Medicina
3. Bilingual Cicero - Orations
4. Bilingual Nepos - De Viris Illustribus
5. Bilingual Ovid - Metamorphoses
6. Bilingual Virgil - Eclogues

These texts have been edited with the syntax adjusted to make an English interlinear possible - thus they are to be considered as intermediate texts, and once the listener has used them to get to grips with the material, they should commence reading the original text, with the words in the intended order.

Bilinguals and Language Learning

2011-03-16T02:52:00.001-07:00

An interesting piece of research came out a couple of days ago, about those who use a second language, and perception.

I think it is of great interest to second language teachers: especially those who focus on translation - it should, I think, give pause for thought.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110314132531.htm

Reading over this article, my conclusion was that those students who remain in the 'translation zone' with their Latin - only comprehending it through translation, rendering the Latin into English, and then processing the translation, not the Latin, as their primary source text, are greatly retarded in their ability to understand the subtle gradations of semantic meaning - the true meaning of Latin words - whose sematic properties only become apparent through use within the language, on its own terms.

Constant translation and working with a text in translation would,I think, hamper this process. Perhaps it would take place, but imperfectly, as semantic fields between languages only imperfectly overlap.

This applies I suspect to grammatical structures as much, if not more than to vocabulary.

For example, the use of the ablative - constantly translating ablatives into their myriad of sub categories - attempting to shoe-horn them into English - probably retard the student's ability to reach an intuitive understanding of ablative usage within Latin - and this understanding only comes through the mechanics of the language itself, on its own terms, without translation.

Through, as many have said, "much reading".

Now, I am not saying some translation is not needed - a modicum of translation can speed up the learning process at the beginning. Interlinear translations can even speed up the process of intial language acquisition, be enabling the student to get through screeds of text in a short time - but the translation is necessarily limited - It can give the 'ball park' of new vocabulary. Some words transpose neatly. Canis and Dog, for example. Many key concepts do perhaps not, such as res publica, virtus, and a host of others.

Any thoughts?

Evan.

Latinum Update

2011-02-15T10:07:00.001-08:00

A few milestones were passed this week - Firstly, my booklet 'Declensions' has turned out to be the most popular title on the Tar Heel reader website, being over 50% more popular than the next title on the list according to Gary Bishop, who runs the site. It says something, that a dry book on declensions has beaten the Alphabet, Obama, and Lady Gaga!

Here is the list of the most popular titles.

Declensions
Our First Black President
The ABC Book
Lady Gaga
The ABC Book (yes there are two ABC books at the top of the list)
I am Michael Jordan
Disney Princesses
Three Little Kittens
Cupcakes

Secondly, my YouTube Latin course just passed its 200,000th upload view.

Schola now has 1,746 members, and continues to grow at a steady pace.

Latinum is also still proving popular,with between 3 and 5 thousand file downloads per day. Total downloads since inception in 2007 is well over 7 million.

De Vestibulo Comenii

2011-02-14T02:46:00.000-08:00

De Vestibulo Comenii

Paene cotidie emissiones electronicas ausculto latinas quas gratis praebet auditoribus ille industriosissimus et bene in interreti notus iuvenis Britannus cuius nomen Evan der Millner vel Molendarius. Has emissiones vel pod-casts invenietis ad I-Pod vestrum aptatas apud I-Tunes sub titulo "Latinum." Ab variis fontibus deducit locos suos Evan noster, amabilis fautor rerum classicarum et, ut videtur, humanisticarum, nam apud situm eius nuper inveni PDF antigraphum illius libri scholaris nomine "Vestibulum Ianuae Latinitatis" a Johanne Amos Comenio conscripti. Libellus quam pulcher est! Exemplar Molendarii Latinas sententias praebet iuxta sententias hungarice versas, quae Latinae procul dubio erunt utilissimae discipulis linguae archaeograecae, quo sermone hic vertam in usu alumnorum carissimorum.

Introitus ἡ εἴσοδος

Venite pueri. Ἔλθετε, παῖδες,
Discite latinam linguam, μάθετε γλῶτταν Ἀττικήν
Pulchram et elegantem. καλὴν καὶ κομψήν.
Comprehendite, Συλλάβετε,
pro vestro captu, ὥς γε κατὰ ὑμᾶς,
varias res, ποικίλα πράγματα,
sapientiae semina. τὰ τῆς ἐπιστήμης σπέρματα.
Deus vos iuvabit, Θεὸς συνεργήσει,
praeceptores amabunt, οἱ διδάσκαλοι φιλήσουσιν,
alii laudabunt, οἱ ἄλλοι ἐπαινήσουσιν,
ipsi gaudebitis. ὑμεῖς αὐτοὶ χαιρήσετε.
Si principium difficile, Εἰ χαλεπὴ ἡ ἀρχ ή,
medium erit facile, τὸ μέσον ἔσται ῥᾲδιον ποιῆσαι,
finis iucundus. τὸ τέλος ἡδύ.

Language Teaching in Ancient Rome

2011-01-01T01:13:00.000-08:00

A historical perspective on Latin/Greek teaching : Evan der Millner This topic is a very wide ranging one – and a brief essay such as this, can only hope to cover the subject giving the barest of outlines. In this essay, I will mainly concern myself with what could be called the Rudiments of language education. I will also point out that some 'new' methods are actually not new at all. We are fortunate in knowing rather a lot about how the Romans went about teaching their children.

Rome was a bilingual society – so education always involved an element of second language teaching. For contemporary foreign language teachers, the surviving evidence is fascinating. Most of the direct evidence we have for language teaching dates from around the end of the third century, but we have an abundance of indirect evidence as well – fragments of papyri, ostraca and wax tablets, a syllabary inscribed on a tomb wall in Egypt that had been turned into a classroom, and, the most surprising survival of all, that body of texts now known as the hermeneumata.From around the same time period, we have the elementary Latin grammar of Donatus, which was composed for Roman boys who already spoke Latin. My discussion of Latin education will keep returning to the hermeneumata, and Donatus, whose echoes keep reverberating through the curriculum down the centuries, except for a brief hiatus during the 'philological period' of the nineteenth century.

What were the hermeneumata? They were standardised texts,used across the Empire to teach Roman boys Latin or Greek, depending on which end of the Empire they found themselves in. They appeared to serve two purposes – they acted as primers in the child's native language, and were also used to teach a second language. The texts we have are bilingual in Latin and Greek. Most of the examples come from the Western Empire. However, we can see the uniformity of these texts across the Empire, as a Greek-Latin-Coptic example survives, that is almost identical to one of the European versions. Although the earliest surviving text we can date is from September 11 207 AD, the standardised format of the manuscripts would suggest that the methodology – probably originated by Greek pedagogues - was already well established by this time. The hermeneumata contain a number of elements – vocabulary lists for everyday life arranged by theme, vocabulary lists arranged alphabetically, simple dialogues designed to activate the vocabulary, narratives, and simplified fables. The dialogues aim to relate to a boy's everyday life, while also inculcating the virtues of good citizenship – piety and virtue. We know that authors such as Aphthonius especially wrote simplified versions of fables for inclusion in primary textbooks. (N. Holzberg 2002, The Ancient Fable) These, and short, often humorous dialogues and narratives, were the elementary literature used in the Roman schoolroom. (Anglo-Saxon Conversations, Gwara and Porter. 1997)

The primary reader ascribed to Julius Pollux, who was tutor of Commodus, is worth looking at as an example of a Roman lesson book. Written in the late second Century, this text begins as follows: (I have interpolated Comenius' sixteenth Century take on this, to show the direct influence of the Classical model) “Bona Fortuna, Dii Propitii! Praeceptor, Ave! (c.f Comenius: Salve, Lector Amice!) Quoniam volo et valde cupio loqui graece et latine, rogo te, magister, doce me. (c.f C: Quis docebit me hoc?) Ego faciam, si me adtendas. (C: Ego, cum Deo) Adtendo diligentur..... Pollux then lays out his method : “Duo ergo sunt personae quae disputant, ego et tu. Tu es qui interrogas, ego respondeo. Ante omnia, lege clare, diserte” We see the same principle operating in Donatus, whose Ars Minor is constructed as a sort of grammatical dialogue. “Verbum quid est? Pars orationis cum tempore et persona etc” (Gramatici Latini, Keil). Donatus is providing a textbook, and also the suggested outline of a lesson plan for the praeceptor.

The influence of these rediscovered texts on Erasmus, Vives and, particularly, Comenius, was immense. A large part of the renaissance educational enterprise was a deliberate attempt to revive the methods of the ancients. Parsing grammars – more detailed than Donatus, and aimed at second language speakers, had started to appear even earlier, constructed entirely on the dialogic principle – composed in a self conscious effort to imitate classroom practice in Ancient Rome. (exemplified by Priscian's famous “Partitiones duodecim versuum Aeneidos principalium”).

The Roman method of teaching was lauded by Simon Grynaeus, in a letter included in the 1536 Basil edition of Polluxes Onomasticum, which itself formed the model for Comenius' Janua, and Orbis Pictus. The influence of the Omonasticum and the ideas in Grynaeus' letter, on Comenius, are self evident. “non gravabitur praeceptor, praesentes ipsasque si potest, si non potest, pictas, sculptas, aut quomodocunque seu verbis seu gestibus expressas bene certa cum nomenclatura res, principio puerilibus oculis animisque quam diligentissime subjicere”

Teaching Latin came to mean teaching grammar, and reading Latin came to mean translation. The methods that had been used since Roman times, in a more or less unbroken tradition, were largely abandoned. Aesop, who was a staple of the Roman and Renaissance primary classroom, was abandoned, depriving students of a rich source of easily digestible Latin. Aesop's place in the Latrin curriculum is now so unfamiliar, few teachers have any idea of what to do with an Aesop fable, or its pedagogical utility.

Dialogue went the same way. Students were often thrown straight into Caesar, or some such author, as the primary text, before being rapidly exposed to Virgil, and quite advanced Classical literature. This represented a total break with the Classical tradition.

In the name of 'authenticity', a new and artificial method of Latin pedagogy arose, one that bore little relationship to its Roman predecessor. Perhaps it was felt that, as Latin was no longer required as a spoken idiom, the teaching method should change: As Comenius noted: “discendae sunt non omnes totae ad perfectionem esse, sed ad necessitatem. Nec enim est opus Graeca et Hebraica tam expedite sonare, ut vernacula, quia homines desunt cum quibus loquamur." Comenius astutely noted , however, “Omnis lingua usu potius discatur quam praeceptis. Id est, audiendo, legendo, relegendo et transcribendo”.

It should not make a practical difference if a language needed to be spoken: the teaching method should not change. Thus we find many modern courses, with their mix of grammar, dialogue and narrative, are far closer to the Classical curriculum than anything we have seen published in over 200 years - however, they only approximate it - we find no modern course, for example, composed with extensive parsing exercises in Latin. Model teacher-student dialogues that provide a template for classroom interaction in Latin, are largely absent, or, in some textbooks, only hinted at. The vast majority of Latin study, is till focussed on grammar and translation.

Latinum

2010-12-30T05:36:00.000-08:00

На одном форуме Эван Милнер (Evan Millner aka metrodorus aka Molendinarius) изложил (по английски, разумеется) некоторые соображения, касающиеся возросшей актуальности изучения латинского языка в наши дни по сравнению с недавным прошлым. Нынешнюю ситуацию Милнер сравнивает с началом книгопечатания. Некогда печатный станок сделал книги доступными широкому кругу людей и способствовал расцвету латыни, так как многие смогли обратиться к классическим произведениям. В наше время существование электронных библиотек (взять хотя бы Книги Гугл) приводит к тому, что человек, имеющий подключение к интернету, имеет в своём распоряжении не избранные томики Цицерона, а огромное множество пылившихся ранее на полках латинский книг, содержащих двухтысячелетнее культурное наследие. Милнер делает вывод, что для овладения этим наследием сейчас как никогда важно уметь по крайней мете свободно читать по-латински, что требует организации глубокого изучения этого языка.

Эван Милнер - энтузиаст, много сделавший и делающий для популяризации латинского языка в интернете. В частности, он является создателем сайта Schola и подкаста Latinum.

У нас на форуме близкие идеи некогда высказывал Damaskin, см., например, Латынь и эллинский.

Learning Latin with Comenius

2010-12-20T04:04:00.001-08:00

Comenius arranged his course in a gradated series:

1. The Vestibulum, with an associated grammar for beginners

1a. The Orbis Sensualium Pictus - an amplified form of the Vestibulum.

2. The Janua Linguarum, with an associated grammar and lexicon.

3. The Janua Linguarum Aurea, with an associated grammar and colloquia.

4. The Atrium, with an associated grammar.

5. A Lexicon wholly in Latin.

How could the student use this material?

1. His or her first step, should be to listen to the Vestibulum in bilingual audio, until the work can be fully understood in the Latin only. This will mean listening to the book several times.

The Orbis Sensualium Pictus is available in audio in a bilingual format on latinum, and also, for revision, in a monolingual format. There are many examples of this text in many languages parallel to the Latin available on google books, europeana, and archive.org

here is the link to the introductory grammar: Scroll down to the bottom of the page to locate it, and then click through to read each page.

1. Liber latinus in usum puerorum editus

2. Der Kleine Lateiner

3. Vestibulum Germanico-Latinum (Georg Vechner)

4. Vestibulum Majus

latinum

2010-12-19T18:11:00.001-08:00

Breadmaster: For Latin, check out the YouTube channel of evan1965. He's a chap in London who's made it his mission to teach people Latin orally, as part of which he's posting a series of short videos which, when completed, will in theory form a complete Latin course. He has also done a series of audio podcasts based on a nineteenth-century Latin textbook, which I got a good way through - they vary from a bit impenetrable to very useful. The new video series seems like a lot of fun. I liked it when he introduced the "potus inebriatus vilis" - a big bottle of vodka.

LATINVM

AP Latin Caesar texts

Adler's textbook is possibly the most complete Latin Course ever written

Swallowing the Dictionary

Schola

Shifting Sands Online

Tables of comparison for Latin Cases

Latin Grammar

Declensions arranged by case in Latin

The Syllable in Latin Poetry and Prose

The Tonal Accent in Latin

Mnemonics for Latin

Mnemonics for Latin

Learn to Speak Latin

Why Study Latin?

Why Study Latin? by Molendinarius, December 8 2009.

Audio Visual Latin

A Historical perspective on Greek and Latin teaching

Learning Latin with Comenius

Locutorium Scholae

Colloqviminī, O Sodālēs Latīnophōnī, in hōc novō Locūtōriō Virtuālī (chatroom) cum aliīs SCHOLÆ sodālibus.

LOCŪTŌRIUM VIRTUĀLE SCHOLÆ

"Piscātor patiēns prǽdam suam capit."

LOCŪTŌRIUM VIRTUĀLE SCHOLÆ

Comenius Project

Hesitation and umming as a language teaching tool

Language Learning and Methodology.

New Research Demonstrates Language Learners' Creativity

I'm about 20% on my way through Bellum Helveticum

Bilingual Readings on Latinum

BILINGUAL AUDIO

Bilinguals and Language Learning

Latinum Update

De Vestibulo Comenii

De Vestibulo Comenii

Language Teaching in Ancient Rome

Latinum

Learning Latin with Comenius

latinum

Why Study Latin?
by Molendinarius, December 8 2009.