BlogLatin

Particle Article

Tenser, said the Tensor: Posticle provides a list of English words which derive from the Latin diminutive suffix -culus. Enjoy

Sorry

Too busy at work to blog.

Gladiatorial combat really was a bloodsport

You may have seen a story in the news recently about somebody who has a theory that when gladiators fought, it was primarily a martial arts exhibition, and not a real fight.

To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. "Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood," he says. "But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was spectator-oriented."

Well, Cronaca says don't you believe it. Besides problems with the methodology of Tuck's research, we've got the cemetaries of gladiators filled with guys who'd been stabbed between the shoulder blades to prove it.

Speaking of Rhotacization

Haven't you always wondered why the imperfect active indicative of sum goes:

Who hasn't? Well, the rhotacization of intervocalic /s/ is to blame. The stem used to be *es-¹, which you can still see in the present active indicative es, est, estis. But the imperfect added -ā (with the usual endings -m, -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt), which made the the /s/ fall between two vowels. You can see what happened next: the universal change of intervocalic /s/ to intervocalic /r/ in the 4th and 5th c. BCE left the imperfect active indicative we all know and love.

This discussion, btw, recaps footnote 13 from page 35 of Keller and Russell. As you can tell, I'm groovin' on this book.

Update: I suddenly realized that while I had been talking about rhotacization, I'd been talking about it on one of my other blogs,
logomacy So the title of this post was a non sequitur. Sorry about that.

¹ * indicates a form that has been deduced, but not actually observed.

Learn to Read Latin

I just picked up a copy of the new (© 2004) Learn To Read Latin by Andrew Keller and Stephanie Russell, from Yale University press. Why another intro Latin book? Not just because I'm compulsive, though I am, but...no wait, it's just that I'm compulsive. It seems like a pretty thorough, painstaking approach to learning Latin. No Latin for Dummies, this. Even in the first chapter its vocabulary notes include things like using ferrum, ferrī (iron) to refer to a sword by metonymy, and the use of et as a coordinating conjunction as in nautārum et agricolārum or et nautārum et agricolārum (of the sailors and of the famers) or simply adverbially as in et vir (even the man or the man also). It's slightly pricey, but Amazon has it for $6 off the cover price (I used a $10 coupon I had at Borders). Unfortunately, one of the ways that they pack the information and the readings into its 586 pages is all the excercises are packaged as a seperate workbook. Of course, if you have other excercise books lying around, you might decide to skip it, or you can get them together as a pair from Amazon below for about $10 off the cover price. Nobody has yet purchased a single solitary item from my associates account in all the years I've been part of the program, but I live in hope. Actually it doesn't really matter to me (obviously) but I figure it might be convenient for someone some day.

By the way, the discussion of the law of the penult in the previous post was basically a restatement of the material presented in the Introduction. I don't think I'd seen it put quite that way before, and I found it very clear.

The Law of the Penult

Stress in Latin always falls on the penultimate or antepenultimate syllable¹.

If the word has two syllables, it falls on the penultimate (in this case first) syllable.

If the word has more than two syllables, it follows the Law of the Penult: if the penult is long it is stressed, if it is short the antepenult is stressed.

That's it, except for recognizing when a syllable is long. Long vowels and dipthongs are long, short vowels followed by two or more consonants are long. Everything else is short.

inimīcus
figūra
labōres
magnārum
patiēmur
perpauca
persaepe
poēta

ocellis
magister
intellegenda
adversōs

scientia
aequora
audācia
omnium

¹ just in case these terms are unfamiliar: the ultimate is the last syllable, the penultimate is the second-to-last, and the antepenultimate is the third to last.

Latin the Cherryh Way

SF author CJ Cherryh has written an online course in Latin, without teaching grammar (except incidentally):
Latin1: The Easy Way

I used to teach this subject. I use a method that's a little different than the standard, a method aimed at results, not tradition, and no need to learn grammar at the outset, when you've got enough new things to learn. If you learned by the traditional method you may find this radically different; but trust me.

If this is new to you...give it a try. Download this file and work with the pieces and see if you don't think this is easier than legend says it is. Think of Bren Cameron, with more than singular and plural to worry with...and try an alien language.

It's not going to be for everyone, with its breezy conversational style, but it's worth a look.

Lingua Latina

Lingua Latina aka WinLatin is, as far as I've found, the best free Latin drill program available. Although the page says it's unsupported, and doesn't work with Windows XP, I haven't had any problems with it (though I don't use all of its functionality). It's great for drilling on nouns, and pretty good for verbs (you have to be ready to drill all the moods and tenses, though, since there's no way to restrict it to, say, just the active forms). It stinks for vocabulary, since in order to get a right answer you have to match the entire entry, punctuation and all. E.g. for cogito, cogitare you have to type "think, ponder, consider, plan" or you it buzzes at you and won't let you continue. Still, what do you want for nothing? Rubber biscuit?

Universal Conjugator

Logos Universal Conjugator

Now this makes my little toy look pretty punk--although mine declines nouns and looks up other words, not just conjugates verbs. Give it a whirl.

Did Seneca have my number?

Hoc habent scholasticorum studia; leviter tacta delectant, contrectata et propius admota fastidio sunt. - Controversiae, X, Praefatio, 1

The Palatalization of C in Latin

My friend Scott asked the following question:

When did Latin palatize C before a front vowel? I note from the historical linguistics book you sent that almost all Romance languages do this in one form or another, except Sardinian, which kept the /k/ value here. Did Caesar refer to himself with a /k/, or had this shift already happened?

My answer, of the top of my head, was that Gaius Iulius almost certainly pronounced Caesar with the /k/ sound. In support of which I found this , via Google, which indicates that he might have pronounced it with a slightly softened /k'/. When I got home I was able to consult Palmer's The Latin Language:

The palatalization of c took place much later [than the 2nd
century], there being no unequivocal evidence until the sixth century. In Classical Latin this sound was pronounced as a plosive [k] in all positions. Before i^ (i with a circumflex beneath) and somewhat later before i and e, the consonant was palatalized and a glide sound developed[kj]. The next stage is postulated as [tj], which developed as above to ts, the convergence of ci and ti being apparent from the confusion of orthography: nuncius, amicicia, tercium, nacione, and conditio, solatium, intcitamento seems to imply an affricate pronunciation [ts] or [tf], but the treatment varies in different parts of the Romance territory. It is noteworthy that the more archaic dialectics of Sardinian have remained immune from this palatalization. - pp. 158

Now there's something you don't see every day, Chauncy

Contemporary Latin Poetry

This page is meant to be a jumping-off point for examples of modern (aka 20th and 21st century) Latin verse as well as information about such things as scansion, poetic style, and anything else that seems related.

Nuntii Latini

YLE Radio 1 in Finland offers Nuntii Latini, news in Latin, in both text and audio.

An example, from today:

Praesidens Finniae Tarja Halonen, oratione televisifica Kalendis Ianuariis habita, ceteris rebus omissis omnes cives appellavit, ut in victimis calamitatis Asiaticae adiuvandis interessent.

Just what I need

ECTACO Latin bidirectional talking dictionary

This talking English-English dictionary is built on the latest text-to-speech technology to give you advanced English speech synthesis and a dictionary with over 450,000 entries, which makes it a great learning tool and an extensive multipurpose linguistic resource.

Or maybe not. Not only is it pretty darn expensive, at $150, but I'm deeply suspicious of its 450,000 entries. The Oxford Latin Dictionary, a monstrous compendium of 2100 pages weighing in at eight and a half pounds only claims 40,000 words. To get up to ten times that number, they must be doing something stupid like counting each form as an "entry."

The Economist on the revival of interest in Latin

The Economist.com | Latin today begins, amusingly enough, with the famous scene from Monty Python's The Life of Brian:

TO SCARY music, a furtive Jewish nationalist of the first century paints on a wall the words Romanes Eunt Domus. A centurion enters:

Centurion: What's this, then? ? ‘People called Romanes they go the house?’
Nationalist: It—it says, ‘Romans, go home’.
Centurion: No, it doesn't. ‘Go home’? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?
Nationalist (being savagely beaten): Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the...accusative! Domum, sir! Ah! Oooh! Ah!
Centurion: Except that takes the...?
Nationalist: The locative, sir!