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| Hello, and welcome to Berengere’s EtherLatin! |
| The goal of this class is to learn enough Latin to be able to
decipher the basics of a Latin manuscript: who the subject is,
where the verb is, what the purpose of the document is. I don’t
expect anyone to be Latin Translator Extraordinaire at the end
of it, but rather to be sufficiently familiar with grammatical
and syntactical forms to look at a manuscript intelligently. The
class is currently scheduled to run for 9 weeks; we’ll continue
beyond that if there is enough interest in doing heavier-duty
study. |
| I propose to conduct the class as follows: Every Sunday night
starting 9/19, I will post a lesson and exercises on my homepage
for download (IP address: 63.194.22.232, enter portal and go to
Berengere’s EtherLatin). My server will be connected all day every
day except for a couple hours on occasional evenings Pacific time
(usually about 8-10 pm). Since the class is not for credit and
is really just to help you feel comfortable looking at manuscripts,
the "assignments" are not required; I will happily correct any
that are emailed to me, but there is certainly no penalty for
penalize anyone who doesn’t want to send them. I will also be
hosting a chat room on Yahoo every Sunday afternoon from 4-6 pm
PDT, which is also not required, for questions or discussion of
the lesson. I know people have time zone issues, and I’m hoping
that late Sunday afternoon my time will be the most accessible
time for the largest number of people. The class and chat room
are open to anyone who’d like to stop by, but I will only correct
assignments from the original 21 people who evinced an interest.
I anticipate that each lesson will take an average student about
5 hours to work through and do all the exercises. YMMV. All lessons
will stay on the webpage, so if you know anyone who wants to hop
in late the material will still be available. (In case the ftp
function doesn’t, function that is, each lesson will be available
as a page you can just copy and paste.) |
| The class syllabus is as follows: |
1. Introduction: basic terminology
2. 1st and 2nd declensions, nouns & adjectives; 1st conjugation
verbs
3. 3rd declension, nouns & adjectives; 2nd conjugation verbs
4. Prepositions; adverbs; 3rd conjugation verbs
5. 4th and 5th declensions, nouns only; 4th conjugation verbs
6. To be, to go, to happen; uses of the subjunctive
7. Pronouns; participles;
8. Deponent verbs; special objects; uses of the ablative
9. A word about medieval Latin: orthography, usage and handwriting
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| You do not absolutely need any textbook for this class, as the
online notes will contain everything you need for this 9-week
overview. If you want to go deeper into learning Latin, or if
you just want to add some great reference material to your library,
I recommend the following texts (available at Barnes&Noble and
similar bookstores, including Amazon): |
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Wheelock’s Latin Grammar, Frederic Wheelock. A standard for 40 years.
Latina pro Populo (Latin for People), Nicholas & Alexander Humez. Great explanations of grammatical
and syntactical terms, highly amusing exercises and vocab lists.
Each of these is about $14. If you plan to purchase Latina pro
Populo, I suggest you do so soon as I understand it is now out
of print.
An excellent dictionary, The New College Latin Dictionary, is available in paperback from Barnes & Noble for $6.95.
If at any time you have suggestions about how to improve the class,
please email me. This cyber-meeting stuff is entirely new to me,
and I would appreciate feedback. If it works well, I will leave
the page up and even expand it, depending on how long we end up
studying together.
Thanks for visiting Berengere’s EtherLatin, and vos videbo in
aethera!
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| Lesson 1 |
| Lesson 2 |
| Lesson 3 |
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