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.
Posted by joshua at January 26, 2005 10:04 PM