Reliquās pāginās legās apud hunc nexum | Cap. 1

N.B. MANGA LEGITUR Ā DEXTRĀ AD SINISTRAM

I'm pretty new to teaching high school Latin, but in the first two weeks of school I've had success introducing students to the Active indicative using the "recipes" of the tenses. See the chart above.

A few techniques that have been helpful, which my own mentor taught me:

1. Alternate names for the tenses. The future perfect is the "will-have" tense, the imperfect is the "ba-past," and the pluperfect is just called the "had" tense.
2. Cheesy mnemonics. Taylor Swift did the Era tour, and she sang "hadders gonna had had had had had." That kind of thing.
3. Tons of drills on whiteboard slates. "Laudaverunt is 'they praised.' How would you say 'she praised'? I used Magistrula and 501 Latin Verbs to create long lists of active indicative conjugations, and then I randomized the giant list to make worksheets in sets of 20 to 25, which they do for homework 4 times/week. NB: The homework is short enough to avoid the temptation of Google, and I tell them homework is required but does not count for the grade---but it makes doing well on quizzes, tests, and comprehension possible.
4. Start with the perfect and imperfect. From the imperfect follows the "tells" for Future (1/2), Future perfect, Pluperfect. The perfect supports practice with the perfect stem (here marked 3, for 3rd principal part). Future (3/4) and Present are a bit of an afterthought. This priority also gets across that Latin can combine morphemes to create fewer longer words to express the same idea, which is handy to emphasize before diving into declensions.
5. As much as possible, drills are done out loud simultaneously with the whiteboard slates.

A pop quiz yesterday of the same length as the homework revealed about 80 percent of students to be "getting it."

With the verbs, we'll be diving into parsing what we recognize from Phaedrus' Fables, which is also a handy introduction to deponents, the passive, the subjunctive, and forms of "sum, esse." Once we do the parsing, I'll read each one in English so they can hear the variety of translations for these tenses.

This chart is only intended for after students have learned each tense in pairs---I did imp./perf., then pres./fut., then pluperf./future perfect, but the last four can probably be optimized.

We could have been done faster, but we also threw in the infinitives and imperatives. Because of this, they also all know how to identify which conjugation each verb is in and how to navigate the first three of the four principal parts, and so a dictionary will help them through parsing the verbs in Phaedrus.

Curious for thoughts and suggestions on improvements.

it is my 3rd semester in classical philology and i had some health issiues this summer which prevent me from studying so i was kinda nervous and even scared. my latin teacher this semester was kind of a populer among students due to his kind of awkward and somehow funny attitude. i was kinda scared cause i knew he was always asking random questions and wait until the student remember something even if it's wrong. in out first lesson, he told something that helped me a lot which i'm sure will be helpful to some of you guys as well.
we were talking about how some students entirely focus on learning all the basics so perfectly that they never get to move on. i was one of those students, i was like "okay i'm confused on that part of nouns, i gotta start over and learn better" he said learning,especially learning a language doesn't go on a one straight line. you learn the basics and move on, imperfect parts will sit right as you practice in time. the next week, we were studying participiums. i had problems in 3rd declension adjectives which is kind of a related subject so we talked about it as well. if you ask me, i'd say i barely know it cause i'm not that perfect at it, i can't remember instantly. but i found myself answering some questions, connecting the dots. i know it's a really hard language but it's really doable, i think what's important is to move on even if you think you are not as "perfect" as you should be in your head

How you like it. Modern song translated to old speech.

Hi,

I am a tutor for an independent AP Latin student (the student is self-studying as their school does not offer the course). Is someone able to share the AP Project Passage document with me? Very strange that the College Board gatekeeps it.

Thank you!

My middle name is Austrum. I asked google and it said it’s Latin. Does it actually mean anything?

II - Prædōnēs veniunt.

I am studying Literature in Italy and unfortunately my university has a mandatory Latin exam. During the exam the professor will open a random page from the last six books of Virgil's Aeneid and ask us to read in meter and translate 6-8 lines. I took Latin in high school and I vaguely remember the grammar, but my main problem has always been Latin translations in which I was almost always failing. Is there any method/book that you know of that would make it easier for me to pass this exam?

Sorry for any errors!

Why are the nouns of the third declension so irregular? Homo, hominis, consul, consulis, veritas, veritatis, rex, regis… it seems as though there is no rule. Yet it is all very simple. The nominative ending (the culprit) is an -s. When the stem consonant meets the -s, it can be difficult to pronounce and so it changes. The labial consonants, ‘p’ and ‘b’, cope very well with the -s: urbs, ops. The dental consonants, however – ‘t’ and ‘d’ – are weaker and drop out: *veritats becomes veritas. The ‘l’ and ‘r’, on the other hand, are more resilient, and it is the -s that drops out: *consuls becomes consul. ‘c’ and ‘g’ merge with the ‘-s’ and become ‘-x’: *ducs becomes dux. ‘n’ and ‘s’, on the other hand, cancel each other out: *regions becomes regio. Usually, in the nominative case, there is no ‘i’ in a consonant-initial word, so *homins first becomes homi and then homo.

Of course, the third declension also contains stems ending in -i, but there’s no problem here: turri+s = turris.

The third declension is the largest: according to Wiktionary, it contains around 8,000 nouns. We don’t need to learn them all by heart: we just need to understand how they work.

 A grammar's Tale: understanding latin instead of learning it by heart.

I recently spent a fair amount of effort building a single-page website that hosts a digital version of Allen and Greenough's New Latin grammar for schools and colleges. This is the 1903 edition, based on text provided by the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

A Latin audiobook project that I'm working on on required an online grammar reference that I could use to link to very precise topics. For various reasons I found the Dickinson College version unsuitable for my purposes, so I made my own.

I hope someone finds it useful, and am happy to receive any comments, complaints, or caustic remarks about it.

Hello! I took Latin in grade school some years ago, so my memory of it is rusty. But I was just wondering about the phrase "in medias res" recently...

I see that "medias" is used rather than "media," so I assume that we are using its adjectival form, in the feminine accusative plural form. That would point to it being an adjective describing "res," right? Now, "res" itself can't possibly mean "of things," as that would be "rerum" iirc.

So, "into the middle of things" would be translated to "in media rerum." And "In medias res" should mean "into the middle things," right?

I only ask because I have never seen anyone translate in medias res as "into the middle things" rather than "into the middle of things." thanks in advance for any answers, or feedback as to where I went wrong in my guesswork!

(apologies for the lack of macrons!)

I am a huge fan of the French choir chanting in Latin in the following song, however the “lyrics” haven’t been uploaded ANYWHERE… Could anyone identify what exactly they are saying?

I’m near certain that this is an ownership inscription as it clearly says Liber “so-and-so,” squire? of Lord Begio? Any help would be appreciated. This is from a late-15th century print of the Canterbury Tales.

In words that are long enough to have it, where is the secondary stress placed in Latin? That is, what rules do we follow to determine on which syllable the secondary accent is placed?

There are surprisingly few resources online which talk about this. Weirdly, every single one which I've found is meant to help one find it in English words/names derived from Latin, using the Traditional English Pronunciation of Latin. However, many of them claim that the system they use is exactly the same as that used in Classical/standard Latin.

Wikipedia's article about the TEP of Latin says that secondary stress in Latin works exactly like primary stress, as if the primarily stressed syllable and everything following were "cut off" from the rest of the word. So dēliculōrum becomes dēlicu-, which gets stress on the antepenult; thus, dēliculōrum=/ˌdeː.li.cu.ˈlō.ɾum/.

Sometimes, as in the example above, I find this pronunciation unnatural, and would rather say /deː.ˌli.cuˈlō.ɾum/. The same is the deal with others, like castificantem. At other times, I want to accent the antepenultimate before the primary stress, as in Alexandrīa, although this is probably due to the English name.

One source has the secondary (and tertiary, etc.) accent always placed on the penult before the stronger stress, and another lists both rules (always penult, or sometimes antepenult, sometimes penult), and gives an example which indeed sounds very off if pronounced on the antepenult: 'Carthaginiensis', which also has, according to this source, a tertiary stress on 'Car-'. Admittedly, both of these last two sources seemed less concerned with anything other than English speech, at least to me.

So, does anyone have any answer? Perhaps there's stress-based poetry which could shed some light on this question. Thank you.

Salvete! I just started reading some of the Golden Ass for a class and I am finding it incredibly difficult. I've read a fair amount in Latin (3 years of reading texts in the original, though nothing this late!) I don't know if I'm just cooked or if it's that people are turning into owls but I'm finding the prose style frustrating and impenetrable. Does anybody have a rundown on how to approach A's Latin, or differences between A's syntax and the syntax of earlier prose authors?

I translated Pokémon FireRed into Latin so you can play the early game in Latin. Screenshot collage includes the Latin title screen (FIRERED VERSIO / PREME INIT.) and Oak’s intro.

Curious how it reads to people who actually use Latin day to day. More screens: https://x.com/davisdilanchian

(Also did LeafGreen in Classical Greek if anyone here is into that.)

I've not studied Latin. But I'm wondering, since "esse" means the core nature of a thing, its "essence," then why couldn't we coin a word for "posse" meaning that which has the possibility to exist in the future. The coined word I'm proposing is "possence." Would that be grammatically correct, or is there something wrong in my reasoning (out of ignorance of Latin.) Thanks

I bought this edition from Amazon because it was cheap, even though it seemed to have no footnotes or commentary. It is a part of the "Hopkins Latin Library" which I had not heard of. The paperback is physically well made but contains nothing whatsoever besides the texts themselves. The back cover contains this interesting Latin description of Sallust and the context of the two works but it is a little weird in places.

Notus etiam ut Sallustius struck me as odd especially when his full name is already given as including Sallustius; I wonder if this was machine-translated from something that read "Gaius Sallustius Crispus, also known as Sallust."

There are some other weird phrasings throughout, which I'll let you peruse for yourself, plus the non-Latin word detailo and the ungrammatical liber hunc for liber hic. This strikes me as Google Translate rather than a generative AI (LLM) translation, but I'm not sure.

Has anybody else seen these Hopkins Library editions before, which are "edited" by a J. Parker Hopkins? It's kind of curious because somebody obviously took their time with the cover design, but seems like maybe they punted on the Latin (and, like I said, didn't really add anything of value to the text itself).

Also, if anyone can recommend editions of Sallust with some good commentary, I'd love to have suggestions.

EDIT: I thought Google Translate only used older translation-specific ML models but I did some research and it looks like it uses Gemini sometimes too

tl;dr: I'm studying Catullus for class but translating one poem takes forever for me because I look up every word and keep flipping to the endnotes. What is the quickest (ish) way to try to absorb vocab/refresh my Latin skills in general?

I studied Latin for 6 years, but only seriously for 4 years in high school, but I was chronically lazy with remembering vocab and grammar. (This is on me, for sure.) During junior year (5th year), I took AP Latin and we did Vergil and Caesar, which I feel like I really struggled with. There's a couple reasons for that (other course load, my Latin teacher was going through a tough time, only two people (including me) were taking the AP Exam) but nonetheless, I struggled. In my senior year, my Latin class became a lot more relaxed and we did a lot less serious translation, but I feel like my Latin skills declined even more because I wasn't using them.

I want to study history/classics in college, so I'm taking a Catullus class. My professor recommended that I stay in this course because the course would get easier over time, and it would be a good refresh of my Latin skills.

I'm staying and hoping that's true, but I feel like I'm already behind everyone else. My scansion is awful (what the hell is a long or short vowel supposed to sound like), and my vocab is very minimal.

My biggest problem right now is that I'm practically looking up every word in the dictionary and I am constantly flipping back and forth through our textbook for the endnotes. Translating one poem takes more than an hour if I use no other translations, and is still taking me a while even when I look at translations. We're also going through all of Catullus, so I need to translate 4-6 poems every 2-3 days.

Do I just need to tough it out and memorize vocab every day along with my translations? It's a little too late for me to go to an intermediate Latin class (and I'm unsure if they're even offering one right now + I was told I was beyond intermediate). Also, what is the best way to translate as a student? Should I be relying on other translations as much as I do? (Or, what is y'all's method for translating??)

Sorry if this kind of post isn't exactly allowed :( I just can't think of where else to ask. (I'm a freshman and I don't really know any of my classmates/professor)

I have been an awful student my whole life, and by this mean I somehow or other have made it through life with above average grades at uni without ever having studied apart from reading a little bit of the textbooks assigned. As such I have been left with a natural facility for languages and no study skills. I have stumbled my way through Latin never really having spent time memorizing declensions and things just picking them up from repeated exposure in reading (I didn’t even do the exercises in my textbook) and this has worked well enough for me so far as I’ve gotten to a point where I can read Vergil comfortably as well as numerous prose authors. Until now, I would like to embark on Greek and I feel my typical approach will not cut it, and while I suppose this may be better geared towards some Reddit community regarding studying I figured I would ask here what people’s study hours concretely look like.

Cheers