Lingua Latina CI

[Solus]

Crash Course Latin

I: Introduction: People called Romanes, they go the house?!

With the advent of languages on NFRP I have seen an increase in Latin on the site, that is, Google Translate Latin. Although Google Translate has made huge leaps in Latin last year, it still is usually wrong. Does it annoy me? I would be lying if I said ‘no’. Especially when I see things like ‘O Fortuna’ pop up, which is basically about a teenager having an emo moment. Or the very standard Latin phrases like Per ardua ad astra. Phrases which have been chewed out time and time again and used ad nauseam until they have become so overused that using them is more a sign of properly scouting the Wikipedia page of standard Latin phrases. What am I trying to reach here then? Nothing much actually. Perhaps some understanding, perhaps to transfer some ability? I do not even know why I am doing this. I think mostly because I want to add some flavour to the RP of those who try to RP a charry that understands Latin.

Very good Solus, nice save there. Now, after finishing this little crash course you are writing I will be able to read de re militari or Aeneis? Unfortunately no. I have had education to read and write Latin for seven years, but to reproduce all of that here would not only be too much for me, but probably too much for you too, beloved reader. What will you be able to do then after this little crash course? When I am finished with this, that would be to string together little sentences or be able to grammatically pry apart Latin sentences with the aid of a latin dictionary (for this Google Translate is excellent) like it happens in the second movie of this crash course. Not that you need much because Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur, ‘Whatever has been said in latin, will be seen as deep’. It’s a nice line, remember it, it is a good one to throw in the face of anyone who likes to recites random Latin one-liners, usually such people do not even understand it. As for this course, I will try to gather visual and hopefully humorous examples of Latin and Romans as much as possible to spruce this up, but expect me to dissolve into basic classical music once I struggle to find anything of interest since this is only a side project of mine and I expect minimal to no interest at all.

Now you are done reading through two paragraphs of my bullshit, let’s start with the bare basics.

II: Latin, ye basics

Yep, my childhood, it’s French I know. Asterix & Obelix were Gauls so that explains. It is one of the many ways I was first introduced to the Romans. Aaah, they are so much better when they are useless objects of fun for our French heroes to throw around. But let’s finally get to the point: Lingua Latina! If you look at standard latin phrases they seem to miss little words, let’s take an example: Cave canem. It means ‘beware of the dog’. But… There seems to be missing a lot. ‘Canem’, clearly means ‘dog’, we derive the modern word ‘canine’ from it. That automatically means that the other big word in that line, ‘Cave’ means ‘beware’. So far so good. But we are missing words here, where are the words ‘of’ and ‘the’ in the Latin phrase? Latin has no articles so whenever you encounter a Latin word like ‘canis’, which means ‘dog’ you yourself have to decide if you are going to translate this as ‘dog’ or ‘the dog’. This can become difficult when you have to choose between ‘the’ or ‘a/an’, but remember, the very concept of articles was unknown to Romans. For any article you put in your translation, remember that the concept was completely unknown to the Romans and that you only put it in your translation to make a grammatically correct line for your audience. Translating Latin in my opinion is not a one to one job as it is for modern languages, it is a lot of applying the wet finger, intuition and personal freedom. In essence, translate however you like to. Take for example the aforementioned line Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur. I prefer the translation ‘what has been said in Latin, will be seen as deep’ mainly because it is close to the original meaning of the words in Latin. Others will prefer translations such as (this is an Anglophone favourite) ‘What is said in Latin sounds profound’. It is shorter cleaner and more to the point. If that is your thing that is okay, both ways lead to Rome and the meaning of the line does not change.

Note how the comma has disappeared in the translation. That is okay. The classical Latin actually does not know punctuation. All punctuation, periods, commas, etc, has been added in Medieval times by the monks who had to copy the original Latin texts. They used every day languages like Franconian, Ancien Français or Anglo-Saxon that already used punctuations so imagine that huge laps of text without punctuation must have been horror to them. Thus they added their own. For translation purposes the punctuation is definitely helpful and I would probably not be able to translate myself without punctuation but always remember, it was added by Medieval monks and not part of the original text. Some Romans did not even add spaces to the text! Most notorious example of this was Cicero (whose writings I had for my final exams of high school, so with whom I am all too familiar). He was an orator, so his job was basically to stand in front of a crowd and shout his speech. He simply did not care for spaces between words. He did not even care for capitals or normal script. For example from Cicero his original writing would have been: NEQVEPORROQVISQVAMESTQVIDOLOREMIPSVMQVIADOLORSITAMETCONSECTETVRADIPISCIVELIT Quite confusing and nigh impossible to translate. Luckily, thanks to our ever helpful Medieval monks this line, at least eleven centuries later had become: Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit. which can be neatly translated to ‘No-one prefers pain for what it is or searches for it and wants it, merely because it is pain’. So keep always in mind that whatever Latin you translate that it is either modern or classical Latin that has been altered by Medieval monks to make it readable for the ordinary people like you and me.

SPOILER: Click to show

I specifically chose this line because it contains the infamous Lorem Ipsum which many people on NFRP like to use to fill empty ‘text here’ space. Clearly you can see that Lorem Ipsum is a lie because Lorem is not even a full word but part of a word! It confuses and infuriates me because Lorem Ipsum looks like Latin but it is nothing, just incoherent words that have absolutely no meaning.

Then finally, the order of words. In Latin in a single sentence or subsentence the order of the words does not matter, it is all regulated by the suffixes which determine the grammatical position and meaning of a word in a sentence. For example how canis becomes canem in Cave Canem. The –em suffix indicates here that we are the ones who have to beware of the dog, rather than it being the dog who has to beware. Cave Canis for example would be ‘Dog beware!’. This play of suffixes and the order of words not mattering has been endlessly exploited by Roman poets, who would put words together that although based on their meaning could fit together, they grammatically did not. For example, take this line (or part of a line, remember, punctuation does not matter) from a poem of Horatius: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte. Let’s translate the words without their grammatical position and just stick to their direct meaning. Note: ‘Soracte’ is the name of a specific mountain.

Vides	ut	alta	stet	nive	candidum	Soracte
You see/do you see	as/how	high	stand/stands	snow	white	Soracte

The words ‘high’ and ‘Soracte’ are far from each other and ‘snow’ and ‘white’ have been placed next to each other. Sounds good right? Snow is white and high and mountain have been put far away from each other with Soracte being put at the end of the line to build up tension. But wait, let’s properly translate this. A proper translation would be: ‘Do you see how the white Soracte stands under high snow?’ now it shows that grammatically snow goes with high and white with Soracte. In translation this only makes things difficult and thus I urge you to translate as freely as possible. It is better to make an understandable line in your own language that is neat and concise than to keep dawdling on the exact meaning and grammar of the Latin and how to precisely transfer this. Thus I conclude the first post on this.

Next time I get back to this we shall start to translate and write very simple lines. Imagine things along the lines of ‘The cat sits on the house’ and ‘The whore is in bed’. I hope this all helps and people find this interesting. If not Ill just keep going anyway. For now, I shall leave you with a quite liberal translation of the poem of Horatius for you to appreciate because he is one of my favourite Latin poets together with Catullus. Ready? Okay, here it is: Link.

Thank you very much for reading and until next time! If you liked this, please leave a reaction, the more the better, it energizes me to write more. ^^

Many thanks in advance,

~Solus

SPOILER: Click to show

Translation of my NFRP name: ‘The Only One’. You deserve to know now.

[Solus]

Part II: Pronunciation, Verbs, Nominativus, Accusativus and Vocativus.

III: Latin, how do I say it?

Welcome back to the second instalment of this Latin Crash Course. Later we will get to reading and creating small simple lines but first, let us concentrate on how actually to pronounce Latin. I can be very short about this: Nobody knows. On the 4th of September 476 the city of Rome fell to the Germanic Odoaker, the last Emperor was exiled and the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. The Eastern Empire lived on but guess what, they did not speak Latin but Greek there! From then on Latin as a spoken language started to dwindle and was only preserved as a language by those who used it for either scientific or clerical purposes. Of course, those people learned it as at least a second language so the pronunciation of the language was not preserved. Linguists have been able to reconstruct the language somewhat and this has revealed that for example the ‘v’ could have been pronounced in various ways, like a ‘w’ or a ‘u’ depending on the location in the line (in roman script they used the ‘v’ for writing down the ‘u’, the ‘v’ and the ‘w’, there were no different letters for the first and the last) but whenever a Roman would have spoken a ‘v’ he would probably have used a ‘w’. The Romans wrote everything that sounded like a ‘k’ with a ‘c’. They knew the ‘k’ as the Greek letter Kappa but not as a letter in Latin, so every ‘c’ would be pronounced as a ‘k’. The stress should be forward as much as possible, emphasizing the first syllable. The stress is never on the suffix! So anyone saying the all famous Veni, Vidi, Vici is automatically in the wrong (as is done is basically every song featuring the words where to make matters worse people stress the ‘i’s at the end of the words). The correct pronunciation would have been more like Wéni, Wídi, Wíki. There are different schools of thought on how Latin should be pronounced based on where you learn it, but I stick with the linguist reconstruction here. Of course this is not a full guide since it is difficult to teach pronunciation in writing. With this however I hope to have touched the most glaring and obvious pitfalls.

Does it really matter though? Of course it is the most important thing if you want to diss someone and it is the best way to knock their stones off. But in reality it does not really matter because there is barely anyone out there to understand your perfect pronunciation. Take for example the young man in the video of this chapter title who is reciting a poem from Catullus (My favourite Roman poet, expect him to pop up more), who is doing it with a half Italian accent and a half correct Latin with a big dose of Anglo-Saxon. Why does he do it this way (and quite good too in my opinion)? My best guess is that he does it to sound more interesting and is that not what the entirety of speaking Latin is all about? I prefer to speak it full on out Italian style to be completely honest. It sounds nice, it has a good ring to it and everyone around you will agree at your awesomeness. Latin, through the media and the church has become this language of deep interesting statements, of ominous chanting and intelligent mystery. It is all however a front. The more intimate you become with Latin and the works of the Classical Romans, the more you become aware that it was just a language. People on the street spoke it too, raunchy jokes were told in Latin between ordinary people. Some of them even survived in graffiti and writings. And let us be honest, the Romans were a dirty bunch, their range of swearwords and sexually tinted words is astounding, much like the language you speak now!

IV: Latin, verbs

I was lazy okay, I promise a different video on the next chapter. For now, let’s talk verbs. Here stuff will start to become difficult and you will see a great many lists. This is because the suffix regulates the entire translation of the verb in a line. Let’s take an easy example laudate which means ‘to praise’. This is the so called infinitivus, it is like the infinitive in English. By changing only the suffix the verb can go through an almost infinite range of meanings, here is a small list of examples

Laudare	To praise
laudo	I praise
laudem	Let me praise
Laudarem	I would praise
Laudabo	I shall praise
laudabar	I was praised
laudarer	I would have been praised
laudabor	I shall be praised
laudatus sim	let me be praised

As you can see you can go quite far before another word has to be added. This is also of course what makes Latin confusing, all the different suffixes are a bitch to learn and thus for now I will stick with the Praesens Activum Indicativus. Which I think translates to English as in ‘present’ and ‘present simple’. The suffixes are as follows:

Person	suffix
1st singular	-o
2nd singular	-s
3rd singular	-t
1st plural	-mus
2nd plural	-tis
3rd plural	-nt in the 1st and 2nd conjugation –unt in the other cases

If you know French some of these might look familiar, especially the 2nd and 3rd person singular and the the 3rd person plural. Might seem easy but now I am going to up the difficulty a bit.

There are four conjugations of Latin verbs. Almost all Latin verbs belong to one of the four conjugations though there are a few notable (and unfortunately often used) exceptions such as esse, ‘to be’. (‘To be’ for some reason is always a bitch in every language) The four different conjugations can for the most part be recognized in the infinitives form:

• The first conjugation in the infinitivus ends with –are Ex: Laudare (to praise)
• The second conjugation in the infinitivus ends with –ere Ex: delere (to destroy) and in the first person singular the first ‘e’ of the infinitivus –ere suffix is maintained. Ex: deleo (I destroy)
• The third conjugation in the infinitivus ends with –ere Ex: vincere (to conquer)but in the first person singular the first ‘e’ of the infinitivus is dropped. Ex: vinco (I conquer)
• The fourth conjugation in the infinitivus ends with –ire Ex: audire (to listen) and in the first person singular the first ‘i’ of the infinitivus –ire suffix is maintained. Ex: audio (I listen).

Drop the –o suffix from the 1st person singular and you get the stem of the verb to which you can stick the rest of your suffixes, simple enough. The only difficulty here would be the third conjugation. You’d get ‘vinc’ as a stem, which makes weird stuff once you start adding your suffixes beyond the 1st person singular. For the 2nd person singular for example you would get vincs which is weird to say the least. Thus they put a letter in front of the suffix to make things sound good again, usually this is an ‘e’, an ‘i’ or an ‘u’. In the case of vincere this is an ‘i’, making the second person singular vincis (you conquer). How do you know which letter to use? For this unfortunately you must simply use a latin dictionary. Don’t even bother with google translate, it will return something that is wrong. Now, let’s see how for four different conjugations the preasens activum goes:

Conjugation	I	EN:	II	EN:	III	EN:	IV	EN:
1st person singular	laudo	I listen/I am listening	deleo	I destroy/I am destroying	vinco	I conquer/ I am conquering	audio	I listen/I am listening
2nd person singular	laudas	you listen/you are listening	deles	you destroy/you are destroying	vincis	you conquer/you are conquering	audis	you listen/you are listening
3rd person singular	laudat	he is listening/he listens	delet	he destroys/he is destroying	vincit	he conquers/he is conquering	audit	he listens/he is listening
1st person plural	laudamus	we listen/we are listening	delemus	we destroy/we are destroying	vincimus	we conquer/we are conquering	audimus	we listen/we are listening
2nd person plural	laudatis	you praise/you are praising	deletis	you destroy/you are destroying	vincitis	you conquer/you are conquering	auditis	you listen/you are listening
3rd person plural	laudant	they praise/they are praising	delent	they destroy/they are destroying	vincunt	they conquer/they are conquering	audiunt	they listen/ they are listening
Infinitivus	Laudate	To praise	Delere	to destroy	Vincere	to conquer	Audire	to listen

So far the verbs in the present. There is way way way more as you could see from previous examples but I am not going to address that right now because that is way to much and you can already do quite a bit with this so without further ado, let us move on to nouns.

IV: Latin, Nominativus, Accusativus and Vocativus.

As I stated before almost everything in Latin grammar is regulated by the suffixes. This does not only go for the verbs but also for the nouns. Nouns are divided into five groups called declinations with various eight different noun cases. The suffix of the noun case regulates whether a noun is the subject of a sentence, the object, if it is possessive, if it is someone or something that is being talked to, if it is the indirect object, if something is in motion (connecting to, separating from something else or moving with something) and there is even one that indicates a location.

Whew. Fuck...

Leave it to the Romans to make their language not only incredibly silly but also horribly difficult. This is the part where Google Translate screws up too. It is unable to handle this since the program is not capable of recognizing the context and meaning of the words. This is stuff you will simply will have to learn.

Okay, here we go in the correct order:

Noun case	Used for	Examples in English (bold)
Nominativus	Object	Marii trains a lot
Genitivus	Possessive	Nira's post is long / The ninja's of Konoha are awesome
Dativus	Indirect Object	Natsumi gives her radio to Katsugan
Accusativus	Subject	Yoshi likes kittens
Ablativus	Movement (to and from or with)	Minoru travels with the ferry
Vocativus	Adressing something/someone	Solus, stop staring my eyes are up here!
locativus	Indicating position	Ayame is in the Otogakure

Now, remember, there are five declinations that contain these seven noun cases, that makes a total of 35 possible combinations. And then each of the declinations has several sub groups, cranking up the number of possible combinations. Scheisse. That’s why for now I’ll stick to only the Nominativus, the Accusativus and the Vocativus. If you look up Latin words in the (paper) dictionary they are noted in the Nominativus singular, that is the base form. Easy peasy.

SPOILER: Click to show

Do not use google translate for this, it picks random noun cases which are usually wrong.

Vocativus is exactly the same as the Nominativus with only two notable exceptions, if the word in the singular ends on –us it becomes –e (so Solus would be Sole in the Vocativus) and if it ends on –ius that becomes –i (so filius (son) becomes filii (son) in the Vocativus). Now of all the declinations I shall only address the first two and try to cover all the three word genders, female, male and neutral. The 1st declination is the so called –a stem and contains mainly if not almost only words of the female gender. The suffixes for the nominatives singular is –a, for plural it is –ae. In the Accusativus it is –am in the singular and –as in the plural. The second declination as the so called –o stems and contains both male and neutral words. For male gender words the nominatives singular is –us and for the plural –i. The Accusativus for this is singular – us and for plural –os. For neutral gender words the singular suffix is –um for both nominativus and accusativus and –a for both in the plural. To sum it all up in a table:

Row 1 column 1	1st declination female	2nd declination male	3rd declination neutral gender
nominativus singular	-a	-us	-um
accusativus singular	-am	-um	-um
nominativus plural	-ae	-i	-a
accusativus plural	-as	-os	-a

Now let us see this again with some actual words. I am going to use rosa (rose), dominus (master) and donum (gift):

Row 1 column 1	1st declination female	2nd declination male	3rd declination neutral gender
nominativus singular	rosa	dominus	donum
accusativus singular	rosam	dominum	donum
nominativus plural	rosae	domini	dona
accusativus plural	rosas	dominos	dona

Phew.... That was a lot. But now at least we can create simple lines such as canis in domum sedet (The dog sits in the house) and Dominus verberat servum (the master is beating up the slave) or Clericus irrumat prostibulum (the priest face fucks the whore). And that is all for now. In the mean time, please enjoy this fine poem by Catullus: Link and bask in the mystery, glory and implied intelligence of the Lingua Latina!

[Solus]

Reserved

[Solus]

Mea Culpa

[Solus]

Veni, Vidi, Mihi est

[Solus]

Also reserved

[Solus]

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