Latin Lesson 8 is posted, covering the use of the dative case for indirect objects, and adjectives ending in -er.  When I get time, I think I’m going to start doing podcasts to go with the lessons, so I can explain things a bit more and give more examples.

Photo from Flickr.com

It’s 65 degrees out today—very hard to stay sitting here working and not go wandering outside to start planning the garden or just sit outside in the sun.  Can’t wait for spring.

There was no blog post last night because I ended up doing some unexpected system triage.  I upgraded some software, and that upgraded a low-level library which a whole bunch of other programs depended on, so I ended up needing to rebuild a whole bunch of stuff.  As long as I was at it, I thought I’d go ahead and upgrade FreeBSD from 7.0 to 7.1.  That went fine, but when it booted, it froze when it tried to bring up the onboard network card (which 7.0 had happily ignored because it didn’t support it).  Turning the card off in the BIOS got things back to normal so I could continue on with my upgrades.  (Like I need gigabit speed on my home network anyway.)  So instead of a quick blog post and an early bedtime I was up late getting all that done, but it’s all shiny and new now. Read more »

Latin Lesson 7 is up, covering the imperfect and future tenses of verbs. Also, the answers to Lesson 6 are in place.

Sorry for the light posting frequency this week; it’s been a busy one all the way around.

Latin Lesson 6 is up, covering adjectives.  Also, the answers to Lesson 5 are in place.  Enjoy!

Latin Lesson 4 is posted, dealing with the second declension masculine and the genitive case.  This is shaping up to be a busy day, but I’ll try to come up with a more substantive post for here later.

Lesson 3 of my Learn Latin series is posted, introducing the verb sum (I am) and one use of the ablative case.  Enjoy, and as always, feel free to discuss or ask questions here.

In other news:

My wife Angel just started a blog of her own.  I don’t know what all she’ll be writing about, but she’s a good writer, so go check it out.  Her article on driving through the Alps in her tiny blue car (which you might have seen around Quincy) is both funny and interesting.

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.

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.

This isn’t actually a lesson; that’s why I numbered it zero, so lesson #1 will be the first real one. I thought instead of jumping right into vocabulary and grammar, I’d kick this series off by explaining why I’m doing this and why anyone should care.

Why Learn Latin Anyway?

Learning Latin Improves Your English

English is such a simple language that you can muddle along, writing and speaking it fairly well without really understanding how it works. As long as you get the words in the right order, people will usually know what you’re talking about. Not so with Latin. Since Latin changes the endings of words to indicate their relationship in the sentence, you can’t learn it without knowing how those relationships work. You’ll have to understand subjects and objects, active and passive, transitive and intransitive, or you’ll get nowhere. In turn, all that will help you speak and write better English.

At least 60% of English words descend from Latin, especially the hard ones. In a very general sense, the short words (house, cow, walking) tend to come from Anglo-Saxon/Germanic languages, while the longer ones (domicile, bovine, ambulatory) come from Latin. As you learn Latin, you’ll recognize those English words in Latin ones, and strengthen your comprehension of them in both languages.

Classic Literature

I don’t suppose many Latin students go on to read a lot of Cicero or Ovid outside the classroom in the original language. But if you want to, you’ll be able to. There are always nuances of meaning that don’t survive translation. Even if you read them in English, knowing the language behind the translation can help you understand the context.

Other Languages

All languages have things in common, so learning a second language makes the third one easier, which makes the fourth even easier yet, and so on. But Latin really stands out in this regard, because its “inflections” (changing the word endings for different parts of speech) help prepare you for other languages that work the same way, like German or Russian.

The Romance languages—called that because of their connection to Rome—like French, Spanish, and Italian, get 90% or more of their words from Latin. Having a base of Latin helps with learning those languages even more than it does with English.

History

While learning Latin, you’ll be exposed to some of the most important people and events in history, since many of the surviving texts from Roman times are historical records, like Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico (Commentaries about the Gallic Wars).

Latin has been the official language of the Catholic Church almost since the beginning. All important Church documents are still written in Latin and then translated into other languages. This way the language provides a certain amount of continuity through the centuries, since Latin is a “dead” language and the meanings of its words don’t change. If you want to study what the Popes have said over the years, or what the first complete Bibles were like, you can go to the source with Latin.

The Latin Mass

If you’re Catholic, you don’t have to understand a word of Latin to assist at the Latin Mass and have it be completely valid and meaningful for you. If you go a while, you’ll start to recognize some of the regular prayers anyway: Agnus Dei: Lamb of God; Dominus vobiscum: The Lord be with you; Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus: it’s time to kneel again. But understanding more of the prayers may help you feel more involved.

General Thinking Ability

Latin is very orderly. When you translate a sentence, almost every word has an ending that tells you its purpose in that sentence. Translating is partly like building a bridge and partly like detective work, as you move back and forth from the part you’ve figured out to the part you haven’t, building your translated text one word at a time, with each piece providing context for the next. That kind of mental discipline is useful in any field inside the classroom or out of it.

Why Are You Doing This?

I took Latin for four years in high school, and like most students, I forgot it soon after I graduated. (And I liked Latin; subjects I didn’t like were forgotten daily. Burn down the schools!!!—sorry, getting off the topic there…) I recently found my First Year Latin textbook and thought I’d re-teach myself. Serendipitously, this was just a couple months before I discovered the Latin Mass was coming to Quincy.

I breezed through the first 15 or 20 chapters, plowed through the next 10 or 15, and trudged through chapters 35-45. At first I was doing a chapter each night in about 30 minutes, but by the time I stopped each one was taking a few hours spread out over a week, and I realized it wasn’t sinking it very well anymore, and I needed to back up and regroup. This book has 75 chapters, and I don’t recall whether we used it all four years or moved on to another book. I do recall reading some Ovid and Caesar that aren’t in here, so there was probably another book. This one should provide a good grounding in the language, though.

There are some Latin tutorials and lessons online already, of course, but I haven’t been terribly impressed with them. Some seem to move too fast, some too slow, and some try to dumb it down too much. Like the modern use of “whole language” in English classes instead of phonics, they seem to hope you’ll absorb the language by osmosis from a lot of examples. Latin doesn’t really work that way; the structure (grammar) is too integral to understanding it. I intend to focus these lessons on the structure, which may make them seem hard at first, but should pay off in the long run.

I’m also hoping this gives me something useful for my web site beyond my usual blathering about whatever comes to mind. If this becomes a useful resource, it will allow me the time to develop other useful things here. I may put this into e-book form at some point too, but it’ll always be freely available in per-lesson form here. I’m also considering doing real-life classes or tutoring, if there’s an interest in that locally.

So I’m Convinced; Now What?

The next lesson will dive into words and inflections, so I won’t get into that here. Just a few notes:

• It’s easier to learn a language (or almost anything) if you can discuss it with someone else. Please feel free to ask questions or discuss the lessons in the comments boxes. I always welcome comments, but in this case they can help everyone who’s following along.
• I’m more qualified to teach Latin than my high school calculus and computer teachers were to teach those courses, but I’m no expert. I’m bound to make mistakes, so don’t be afraid to point them out. Also, sentences can sometimes be translated in different ways, so feel free to offer better translations than mine any time. People who already know some Latin are certainly welcome to jump in and help us out.
• I’ll be following much of the format of First Year Latin, but I’ll make up my own exercises so I don’t violate their copyright. That means you won’t need the book to participate in these lessons, but if you want it for your own use, that link is to a revision very close to mine. (My exact revision from 1975 is unavailable at Amazon.)
• Each lesson will explain a few new things and provide some exercises, from short phrases to longer passages to translate. I may give the answers to each lesson’s exercises in a separate post on a later day; I’m still figuring out some of those details. I expect to post at least one lesson each week, and produce at least a hundred of them. If you’re still with me after all that, we should both be pretty solid in the language by then.
• This textbook and my previous studies were all in what is called “Classical Latin,” the language written by educated Romans during the time of the Empire. Now that I’m going to Latin Mass, my interest has shifted somewhat toward “Ecclesiastical (or Church) Latin.” Fortunately, there aren’t great differences between the two except for pronunciation, and the Church Latin comes closer to what seems like natural pronunciation to us. I’ll try to mix vocabulary and texts from both sources, so if you’re particularly interested in either Classical or Church Latin, I hope you’ll find this useful.
• Speaking of pronunciation, I’m going to try making some audio clips to go with the lessons, if I can figure out how to record audio and make it sound decent.

I think that about wraps up this introduction. Next time: first declension (noun endings), genders, and a few other basics to get us started.

By the way, if you want to subscribe to these lessons via RSS but you don’t want to read all my other random stuff, click this link. That will subscribe you to this category only. You can do with that any category or tag on my blog, simply by adding “feed” to the end of the URL that you see after you select a category or tag.

(This is the first in a series of posts called Why the Latin Mass? I’ve been asked by several people why I like the 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’ll try to answer that in this series.)

Everything’s Better in Latin

One thing I always tell people is it’s not just about the language. There are many other differences between the TLM and the Novus Ordo (the new Mass said in most churches today). But the Latin is an important part of it, for a variety of reasons. When you hear someone speaking in a foreign language, it gets your attention, whether you can understand it or not. It’s an immediate sign that something unusual is happening here. That helps me focus and want to know what the speaker is saying and why.

Latin is also important because it’s a dead language, so it isn’t changing anymore. The meanings of the words are the same as they were centuries ago. Modern languages are always changing, and the meanings of words can change quite a bit in a short time. The sentence God Is the End of Man is inscribed over the door of a school near here. When that was written, the “final purpose” meaning of the word “end” must have been more commonly used. But now, I picture those kids looking up at that and thinking of God as a sort of Terminator character who will come “end” them someday.

If our prayers are in English, we’re going to have to keep tweaking them over the years to keep the meaning the same. (Anyone know what “vouchsafe” means? It was all over English prayers a century ago.) If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, or just used an online translator to translate something to a foreign language and back again, you know how quickly the meaning can vary with each translation. By sticking with Latin, we don’t have to worry about that. We may use different English words than they used 500 years ago to get the same meaning, but the essential prayers themselves and the meanings of the words won’t have changed.

Different languages lend themselves better to different uses. English is a very blunt, stripped-down language, great for quick dialogue and technical writing. Latin, with its more complex structure, has a formality that works well in the liturgy. Many prayers were originally written in Latin, so they flow better in it than when translated into another language. The Ave Maria (Hail Mary), for example, is awkward in English, but it flows like poetry in Latin, even if you don’t know what it means.

So it’s not about stubbornness, or using something old for oldness’s sake. The Latin language itself adds something to the Mass, especially when combined with the things I’ll talk about in the next articles.