I didn’t realize my earlier post today was my 100th, so I’ll have to celebrate this one, the 101st.  (Or I could go back and delete one of the lamer ones….nah, too much trouble.)  I suppose that makes this as good a place as any for some thoughts about the past year and the coming one.

Read more »

This strip from the excellent XKCD.com pretty well sums up my thoughts on both schools and the perl programming language, so I had to share it:

11th Grade Activities

Dr. Eades has an excellent analysis of two diet studies on his blog today.  A lot of it repeats what I’ve said about low-carb, weight loss, and cholesterol; but he has put it in handy, easy-to-read charts.

Read more »

(This is the fourth  in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the Traditional Latin Mass—why people will drive a hundred miles to get to one, or spend a lot of time and money bringing it to their area. I’m trying to answer that from my perspective in this series.)

Photo by Carolyn Coles

I’m not exactly what you’d call a clothes-horse.  Since I work from home, most days my only fashion decision is whether to bother putting on shoes with my jeans and t-shirt, or stick with slippers.  If I couldn’t ask my wife whether my clothes match, I’d have to buy Garanimals.  I own one suit and about half a dozen ties—most of which were gifts, and at least one of them was last in style about the time Miami Vice went off the air.

Read more »

My second Latin lesson is posted at my new “Learn Latin” wiki.  It’s much easier to edit long documents there, especially ones containing a lot of tables, which these lessons will.   I’ll post a notice here every time I put up a new lesson, so we can discuss them, ask questions, correct my mistakes, and all that here in the comments.  As always, comments, suggestions, and complaints are very welcome.

This second lesson covers the first conjugation (of verb forms), the present tense, word order, using the accusative for direct objects, and a few other odds and ends.

I found this a while back and thought I’d save it for the actual season.  I’m not normally a fan of blinking Christmas lights, but if you can use them this well, go for it.  (The music’s not bad either.)

It’s Christmas Eve, so rather than write one of my long-winded screeds, I’ll settle for some short notes tonight.

In case anyone who comes here hasn’t checked out the St. Rose web site yet, I should mention that we’re having a Midnight Mass tonight, in addition to the regular Mass times of 8:00am and 11:00am tomorrow.  There will be Christmas carols before Mass at 11:30 tonight.  I don’t know if the organ repairs are finished yet; but with or without it, I’m sure the choir will be singing tonight.

Read more »

Jason wrote a very good article on being fat and losing weight, so that brings up something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while.

I’m continuing to low-carb, but I haven’t been very strict about it lately.  I haven’t had any more carb pig-outs like I wrote about the other day, but it’s remarkably easy for too many carbs to slip into your diet when you aren’t careful.  Some low-carb cheesecake here, some breaded fried chicken there, some sweet potatoes over here on the side, and suddenly I’m often close to double my daily limit of 30 grams of carbohydrate a day—even though I’m sticking to foods that can be okay on a low-carb diet if the portions are small enough and you count everything.  Not surprisingly, my weight loss has stalled. Read more »

Buculae sunt bestiae versutae. — Cows are wily beasts.

Yesterday as we were leaving the farm, we found a cow out on the road.  A heifer Jersey calf, really, about a year old, that goes by the name of China.  (About twice the height of the babies in the picture.)  I got out in the howling cold wind in my lightweight going-to-visit jacket and single layer of jeans, and started driving her toward the driveway.  She did not want to go.  But I’ll match my stubbornness against an animal’s any day.  We zigzagged back and forth, off the road into the ditch on one side, then off into a field on the other side, until I had her about three-quarters of the way there.

Young Jersey Calves

Then she made her move.  She took a few steps toward the ditch on the left, then when my guard was down, she bolted to my right.  I sprinted that way in a desperate attempt to cut her off, and got about three steps before I went face-down on the ice.  While I checked myself for broken parts and brushed the mud off my clothes (yes, I found mud somehow, on a ten-degree day), she wandered back the way we came.

Then I wised up and had Angel get out and help me, and we drove her the direction she wanted to go in the first place, toward the gate at the uphill end of the field.  (Animals always seem to prefer being driven uphill; I don’t know why.)  Maybe she used up all her moves shedding me the first time, because she went right along without any trouble this time.

Once all the excitement was over and we were walking back to the truck, I realized my right thumb was hurting.  I took off my glove and saw it was bleeding a little, but it was also jammed pretty good.  It ached and started swelling the rest of the night while we were out visiting, but I was more annoyed with the mud I couldn’t get off my shirt.

Today, it doesn’t just ache a little; it hurts to touch anything with it.  There’s no bruise (I never bruise, at least not close enough to the surface to see it), but it’s swollen and I can’t bend it.  I guess I’m lucky it’s the one digit you don’t use to type, or I’d be having a hard time at the keyboard.  Thumbs are one of those things you take for granted; it’s hard to turn a doorknob or pull a plate out of the cupboard with just your fingers.  I’ll pack some ice on it tonight, and hope it relaxes some by tomorrow.  It doesn’t keep me from typing, but the ache is distracting; I keep wanting to mess with it and loosen it up somehow.

This lesson starts with some concepts that will be new to anyone whose only language is English, then gets into the words and grammar.

New Concepts

Declensions

As mentioned in the introduction, Latin changes the endings of words to determine their meaning in a sentence. For nouns and adjectives, we call this “declension.” There are five declensions, but we will only look at the first one for now. Each Latin noun or adjective belongs to one of the five declensions, and that declension determines the endings we put on that word to mean different things. When we “decline” a noun, we show it with all its possible endings.

Case

A noun’s case determines its purpose in a sentence: subject, object, possessive, etc. There are five main cases and two rarer ones. Some cases have several uses, but here are the basic ones:

Photo by Joe Geranio

Nominative

Used for the subject of a sentence: The dog bit the mailman.

Genitive

Shows possession: The boy’s dog bit the mailman.

Dative

Expresses an indirect object of the action: The boy gave a treat to the dog.

Accusative

Limits the action in some way, often by showing the target of the action: The dog bit the mailman.

Ablative

Expresses separation, location, and many other meanings that English usually handles with a preposition: The dog chased the mailman from the yard. The dog bit the mailman on Tuesday.

Vocative

Used to directly address someone: “Boy, get that dog on a leash!” The vocative case usually has the same ending as the nominative case, so we don’t usually show it when we decline a noun.

Locative

Expresses location. The locative case is a bit of an artifact from earlier languages, so it only applies to certain words like domus (home) and names of cities and places. We’ll deal with the locative in chapter 60 or so.

Gender

In English, we don’t consider words to have gender except for a few things like ships. In Latin, every noun has a gender, and there are three: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Except for when they refer to people, these don’t necessarily have anything to do with the thing being named. For example, the word for island (insula) is feminine, bridge (pons) is masculine, and river (flumen) is neuter. The gender of each noun simply has to be memorized along with the word itself, although there are some hints we’ll find along the way.

The First Declension

Nouns of the first declension can be recognized by the ae ending in the genitive singular case. To decline a first declension noun, drop the ae from the genitive form to get the stem, and add the first declension endings to that stem. Declining the word puella (girl) looks like this:

(After a while, it will become second nature to picture nouns in this 5×2 form.) As you can see, the first declension endings are:

In all first declension words, the vocative is the same as the nominative.

Two or more endings may sometimes be identical, like -is in the dative and ablative plural. When translating from Latin, the context will determine which is being used.

To decline another first declension word like aqua (water), we again remove the -ae from the genitive form, aquae, and add the same endings:

For a word with a stem ending in a vowel, like Italia (Italy), the rule remains the same:

All first declension nouns will be declined this way.

Syntax

Uses of the Nominative Case

Subject

The most common use of the nominative is as the subject of a verb: The girl is walking. Puella ambulat.

Predicate Nominative

In correct English, we say, “It is I,” not, “It is me.” Latin is the same way. When a noun is used with a linking verb like “to be” to define the subject, that noun is in the nominative case:

The girl is a poet. Puella est (is) poeta.

Vocabulary

New nouns to learn will always be given in the format below: the nominative form, the genitive, the gender, and the meaning(s). When the genitive is obvious from the nominative, just the ending may be shown. Nouns are shown this way in Latin dictionaries, so you can tell from the genitive which declension they belong to.

The last two words are verbs, which we’ll learn about later. For now, just memorize them so you can form some basic sentences.

agricola, -ae, m. farmer
aqua, -ae, f., water
femina, -ae, f., woman
fortuna, -ae, f., fortune, chance
Gallia, Galliae, f., Gaul (France)
insula, -ae, f., island
Italia, -ae, f., Italy
lingua, linguae, f., language
littera, -ae, f., letter (of the alphabet); in the plural, a letter or letters you would mail
Maria, Mariae, f., Mary
memoria, -ae, f., memory
natura, -ae, f., nature
poeta, -ae, m., poet
provincia, provinciae, f., province
puella, -ae, f., girl
silva, -ae, f., forest
vita, -ae, f., life

est, is, there is
sunt, are, there are

Word Study

Latin has no articles, (a, an, and the), so leave them out when translating to Latin, and put them in where they make sense in context when translating to English.

Most first declension nouns are feminine in gender, except where they refer to male professions, like agricola (farmer) and poeta (poet). (That’s one of those hints I mentioned earlier.) (Yes, in Roman times, poets were all men.)

Drill

a. Practice by declining each vocabulary noun in all five cases and singular and plural, like puella and aqua above.

b. For each word in the vocabulary, try to think of an English word that derives from it. For example: agricola, agriculture. These connections make it much easier to memorize words.

Exercises

(Put your answers in the comments if you’d like me to check them.)

a. Give the case, number (singular or plural), and meaning for each of the following. For some, there will be more than one possible answer. Example: insulas: accusative, plural, islands.

1. naturis
2. Gallia
3. poetae
4. memoriam
5. linguas
6. silvarum
7. insulae
8. Poetae sunt agricolae.
9. Sunt litterae.
10. Maria est femina.

b. Translate:

1. memory (accusative)
2. O girls! (vocative)
3. for the women
4. the poets’
5. of life
6. province (nominative and accusative)
7. for Mary
8. There is a forest.
9. Gaul is a province.
10. The women are farmers.

Congratulations! You’ve finished lesson 1. Acta est fabula, plaudite! (The play is over, applaud!) Next time: verbs, so we can start making real sentences.