h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you are completely new to Latin, you can get a basic introduction in this thread! When you understand the language enough to translate basic sentences, you can move onto the main teaching thread.

Latina maxima lingua est!
Latin is the greatest language!

Yay! How should I start as a way of introduction?
Let's see, I have a german friend who's kind enough to lend me her Latin dictionary, and I'm just thumbing through it for awhile.
I read a lot of Anglo-Saxon poetry, have horrid grasp on the English grammar, is enthused and willing to learn whatever you can spare.

Right, my brief introduction to Latin:

Latin is the language spoken by the ancient Romans, and the one that features in the orations of Cicero, the poetry of Virgil and the plays of Plautus. It was considered the lingua franca for European scholars through the middle ages and Renaissance, is still used in the Roman Catholic church today and is helpful if (like me) you want to go into medieval and Renaissance history. Like Anglo-Saxon (Old English) it is a heavily inflected language: 5 verb conjugations and 5 noun declensions, 7 noun cases and a variety of other grammatical bits. Knowing English grammar helps a lot in understanding Latin grammar, but it's not absolutely required.

Perhaps I should also mention that Latin, along with Greek, is at the head of the Italic family of languages that includes the Romance languages of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romansch. All the Italic languages belong to the larger Indo-European family that includes Germanic languages (like English and German), Eastern European languages (like Russian and Hungarian) and Indian languages - primarily Sanskrit; modern Indian languages like Hindi and Punjabi are not Indo-European.

When I can get my real life in order - maybe over the weekend - I'll start off with some lessons, if you like. You have two choices: you can either elect to learn based on little stories about Roman children from my primary school textbook, or you can let me teach you on my own (scary thought!) with made-up sentences and lessons.

Since I haven't tried either, I have no preference over anything I don't know

Whatever that is most convenient for you then.

Well, I'm going to post a story below, and then we can take a look at it.

Chapter 1 of "Ecce Romani"*: "Two Roman Girls"

[The chapter begins with a picture of two girls sitting under a tree in a pastoral setting. They appear to be doing lessons. There is a sort of villa in the background.]

Ecce! In pictura est puella, nomine Cornelia. Cornelia est puella Romana quae in Italia habitat. Etiam in pictura est villa rustica ubi Cornelia aestate habitat. Cornelia est laeta quod iam in villa habitat. Cornelia iam sub arbore sedet et legit. Etiam in pictura est altera puella, nomine Flavia. Flavia est puella Romana quae in villa vicina habitat. Dum Cornelia legit, Flavia scribit. Laeta est Flavia quod Cornelia iam in villa habitat.



VOCABULARY:
Ecce! - Look!
Puella - girl
Nomine - by name, called
Quae - who
Habitat - (he/she) lives, is living
Etiam - also
villa - country house
villa rustica - country house and farm
ubi - where
aestate - in summer
laeta - happy
quod - because
iam - now
sub arbore - under the tree
sedet - (he/she) sits, is sitting
et - and
legit - (he/she) reads, is reading
altera - a second
vicina - neighbouring
dum - while
scribit - (he/she) writes, is writing



The thing to remember with vocab is to think about what English words could have come from the Latin. For example, from 'legit', we get 'legible' and 'ledger', and from 'scribit' we get 'scribe' and 'script'. Don't think too much about grammar at this stage, though it might be helpful to remember the difference between nouns, verbs and adjectives. If you're not familiar with that I can post them, but I don't think I need to go into too much detail right now. Just plug in the given English definitions into the Latin and see how the words work together. You'll notice that word order doesn't matter; that's a feature of Latin. The endings on the words show what role they play in the sentence.

Take your time on this. And if you have any difficulty or questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

Oh, I forgot the footnote, as referred to in the asterisk after "Ecce Romani". That was meant to say that "Ecce Romani" means "Look, the Romans". Consider it said.

Thanks. Hmm.
Ecce! In pictura est puella, nomine Cornelia. Cornelia est puella Romana quae in Italia habitat. Etiam in pictura est villa rustica ubi Cornelia aestate habitat. Cornelia est laeta quod iam in villa habitat. Cornelia iam sub arbore sedet et legit. Etiam in pictura est altera puella, nomine Flavia. Flavia est puella Romana quae in villa vicina habitat. Dum Cornelia legit, Flavia scribit. Laeta est Flavia quod Cornelia iam in villa habitat.

Look! In picture is girl, called Cornelia. Cornelia is girl Roman who in Italy lives. Also in picture is country house where Cornelia in summer lives. Cornelia is happy because now in country house live. Cornelia now under the tree is sitting and reading.Also in picture is a second girl, called Flavia. Flavia is girl Roman who in country house and farm lives. When Cornelia reads, Flavia writes. Happy is Flavia because Cornelia now in country house lives.

Wow, I get the point, er, the gist. The order, as exactly translated, without inserted "the"'s is vastly different. It reminds me of French such as "who" and "lives" as well as how Roman comes after the girl, and "another" sounds like the word, but whoa, thank you for the vocab... should I memorize it?

Is there any particular rule, say descriptions after nouns, masculine/feminine, or is everything based on endings?

Now to make me happy.
Look! In the picture is a girl by the name of Cornelia. Cornelia is a Roman girl who lives in Italy. Also in the picture is the country house where Cornelia lives in the summer. Cornelia is happy because she now lives in country house. Cornelia is sitting and reading under the tree now. Also in the picture is another girl, who's called Flavia. Flavia is a girl Roman who lives in the country house and farm. When Cornelia reads, Flavia writes. Flavia is happy for Cornelia now lives in country house.

Can I try one exercise without the vocab to see how much I could wade through? Then I could feel properly stupid.

Or would you like to teach the endings?

Great job for your first Latin lesson!

Don't worry about memorising the vocab. I never do. Though you may want to write it down somewhere to keep it handy.

You can put words in whatever order you want. There are often little style things - for example, apparently if you put an adjective before a noun it's given more emphasis - but it essentially doesn't matter what order the words come in.

There are three genders of nouns: masculine, feminine and neuter. Each noun has different endings depending on what role it has in the sentence (whether it's the subject or the object, or a possessive, or something like that) and whether it's singular or plural.

Verbs also have different endings, depending on whether they're singular or plural and whether they're in 1st, 2nd or 3rd person.

Let's do verbs first. In the story you translated above, there were a few verbs thrown in, but they were all 3rd person singular verbs. Thus, they all ended in 't'. Other types of verbs have different endings:

Singular Plural
1st person 'o' 'mus'
2nd person 's' 'tis'
3rd person 't' 'nt'

Infinitive 're'
Imperative '*drop "re"' 'te'

So, let's take the verb 'laudare'. Since you know French, I take it, you'll know what I mean when I say that the form 'laudare' is an infinitive. It means 'to praise'. The 're', as you can see in the chart above, denotes an infinitive. If I were, instead, to remove the 're' and add 'o' to make 'laudo' (I take off the 'a' too since you can't have two separate vowel sounds in a row) I would have a 1st person singular verb, 'I praise'. Thus, the forms for 'laudare' would be:

laudo (I praise)
laudas (You praise)
laudat (He/she/it praises)
laudamus (We praise)
laudatis (You all praise)
laudant (They praise)
laudare (to praise)
lauda (praise!)
laudate (all praise!)

Make sense?

Now, to see if you understand, take the verb 'amare' (to love) and conjugate it in English and in Latin (that means list it in all its forms).

The grammar stuff is boring, I know. But if you get it down, then we can move on to more fun stuff. Can you translate the following sentences? You might need to use a dictionary, or ask me if you don't know the vocabulary.

1. Labor me vocat.

2. Laudas me; culpant me.

3. Rumor volat.

4. Saepe nihil cogitas.

Thanks for the explanation!

Grammar:
Conjugate infinitive 'amare' (to love)

I/je
You/tu (informal/singular)
He/she/it/il/elle/on
We/nous
You/vous (formal/all)
They/ils/elles

It helps if I structure the list with the French pronouns.
Anyhow, the endings are:
-o (I )
-as (You )
-at (He/she/it )
-amus (We )
-atis (You )
-ant (They )
-are (to ...)
-a (...!)
-ate (all ...!)

The root of the word is if I take away the "re" and get "ama-" or "am-" in cases of double distinct sounding vowels

I love amo
You love amas
He/she/it loves amat
We love amamus
You love amatis
They love amant
To love amare
Love! amara
All love! amate

~~I was wondering, this is a bit off track, but does Latin have past and future tenses in the word endings, or does the order no matter then as will?~~

Vocabulaire 1st stab.
1. Something mentioning labor and vocations?
2. Praise me, punish me? (make me a culprit?)
3. Rumour... ?
4. ... no knowledge ?

Gosh, where'd I put my dictionary?

Great job on 'amare', except... the singular imperative is 'ama', not 'amara'. Oh well, if anyone uses infinitives in real-life passages I'd be pretty surprised.

Tenses are all in word endings, too. Present, imperfect, future, perfect, pluperfect, future perfect, and all the same stuff in the passive voice and the subjunctive mood... we'll get to that when we get to it.

As for the vocab:

labor = labour
vocare = to call
laudare = praise
rumor = rumour
volare = to fly
saepe = often
nihil = nothing
cogitare = to think

Remember, when translating from Latin to English, to look at the endings on the verbs to see what person and number they are. For example, if you see the verb 'laudas', that would mean 'you praise', since it has an 's' on the end.

Duh, endings - right
Exercise:
1. Labor me vocat.

2. Laudas me; culpant me.

3. Rumor volat.

4. Saepe nihil cogitas.

2nd Tackle:
1. Labour calls me (?)

2. You praise me, the condemn me (punish?)

3. Rumour flies

4. You Often Think Nothing (?)
You don't often think (?)

Hmm...

Exactly right! (And your first answer on No.4 was the correct one, BTW. Always trust your instincts.)

I'll have some new stuff for you soon... but right now it's 2213 my time and I'm theoretically supposed to be asleep!

Oop!
2. You praise me, they condemn me
G'night

Looking good kids, well done EMR, you're the most active department

Kat

Gee, Kat - speaking of depts, is no one interesting in learning basic chinese?

I think there was a Mandarin dept at some point... dunno what happened to it. I unfortunately don't keep up on the news as much as I should.

I don't Now much latin all I now is Salve(te), Valve(te), Domina plese could you tell me of a website for this language. How does this language thing actually work because I haven't learnt anything yet. Plaes help. Thank you.

Well,you are ahead of me, I don't even know that much. I do speak chinese so if you're interested in that, I could teach you.

Hi Timclamp, Elwyn

Just to get Elwyn in the know, 'salve' means hello ('salvete' if you're talking to more than one person), 'vale' means goodbye ('valete' if to more than one person) and 'domina' means lady or mistress. The masculine form, 'dominus', can be used in the sense of Lord to refer to God, especially in liturgical music.

Timclamp, http://www.textkit.com is probably the best website out there for learning Latin. You could also check out http://www.perseus.org for some authentic Latin texts.

I also (try to) teach Latin here in this department, a part of the h2g2 Language Thing. You're welcome to join if you like

Elwyn, am I supposed to be teaching you something now? I've sort of lost track... do let me know.

Hey! I've tried posting on the Language thing, but I think the Chief is away, so no-one's gotten back to me. Thought I'd dive in here anway, lol. I'm ready to give it a go! i've read all these previous posts- isn't it great that word order doesn't matter?!One less thing to worry about- compare it to German
i also learn French, so i have an idea of the grammer.
So, anyway, you have another pupil, ready when you are!

Ecce Homo qui est Faba - Bless the Man who is a bean! (is that right?)



Ps. i will pay you in virtual cake: