5 Basic Rules For Learning Latin
January Latin Challenge: Day 2 of 31
Hello, and welcome back to bambasbat for day 2 of the January Latin Challenge. Make sure you don’t miss a day by signing up here:
Today we will be looking at some of the rules and components of Latin, and how it works to learn an unspoken language. Don’t worry, we are going to be keeping it simple. We are just looking at some common rules and themes in Latin Grammar as a whole language. In later updates of the January Latin Challenge we will be delving deeper into actual grammatical lessons.
All languages have rules, and Latin is no different.
The basic things to keep in mind when you are translating Latin are
Who is in charge of this sentence?
What is actually happening? And
Is anyone affected by the action?
Let’s have a look at a sentence, and break it down by answering these questions:
The man greeted the girl.
The man is in charge of this sentence. He is doing the verb (greeting). In English, we often call this the subject of the verb. Because Latin teachers like to sound clever, we call it the nominative case. So our man is in the nominative case, he is the subject of this sentence.
What is happening? Well for this we need a verb, or the doing word. The verb here is greeted. We now know that this sentence is in the past tense, this event has already happened. And the more information you can get about the verb the better.
Who is affected? Here the girl is affected. The man greeted her. We can therefore label her as well. In English we call her the object of the sentence – she is having the action done to her. In Latin of course we have a more complex name for this – the accusative case. So the girl is our accusative.
Side note – people sometimes struggle to remember which case is which.
I learned it by remembering that “object” and “accusative” both start with a vowel, whereas “subject” and “nominative” start with consonants.
If you can see a different link, share it in the comments, you might give someone else that “eureka” moment!
This is all fairly easy to see in English, because of the word order of the sentence. The man comes first, so he is in charge. Then the verb he is doing, greeted, and then anyone or anything that is affected. Now this leads us to rule 1 of Latin.
Rule One: Word order doesn’t matter.
Now, this might sound like a huge issue. How are we going to know who is in charge of the sentence if we can’t tell from the word order?!
Well, Latin is very helpful in this regard, in that there are clear indicators in the words themselves. The endings of the words give us the most information in order to translate the sentences, and so are the most important thing to learn about.
vir puellam salutavit.
This is the same sentence as our English example above. However, if I follow the word order, this says:
man girl greeted
So how am I to know who is doing what? Well, as I will discuss in more depth in day 4 of the January Latin Challenge: Nominatives and accusatives – simple sentences, the endings show me exactly who is in charge. vir is a nominative. puellam is my accusative – I will teach you how to spot nominatives and accusatives in the coming days. salutavit is my verb. So when I translate it, I have to switch the words to match an English word order.
I translate vir first, “man”, then I go to salutavit, greeted, and finally do the accusative puellam, girl.
Now we have come across 2 other rules.
Rule Two: The verb is often at the end in Latin.
A word of warning: this is not always the case. You will find that Latin writes lots of rules for itself, and then often throws them out the window, especially as texts become harder. But for now, a general rule of thumb in Latin is that the verb will be at the end of the sentence or clause.
This means we need to move it in our translation. You can’t say “the man the girl greeted”, or you start to sound like Yoda. Don’t sound like Yoda in your translation!
We have to move the action to the place that sounds correct for English, which is just after the nominative. “The man greeted the girl”.
Rule Three: Latin does not have a definite article.
There is no set word for the or a in Latin. vir will be found in a Latin dictionary to mean “man”, and puella as “girl”.
However, “man greeted girl” is quite cave-man like. In order for our translations to sound right in English, we need to add a definite article in!
As you will see in my translations, I have added in “the” – vir becomes “the man” and puellam becomes “the girl”.
Rule Four: Pronunciation is key
Now in the future I plan to do a full post on this topic alone, but for your own peace of mind, here are some general rules of how to speak Latin aloud.
C is always hard – cracker, not ceiling.
V is always pronounced as a w – veni vidi vici is always pronounced incorrectly and it makes my skin crawl. It isn’t pronounced veney, its wheni, and veechee? Don’t get me started!
They don’t have a j. They just don’t. People always laugh when I say the word iam. Eem? I am? You say it like yaahm.
There is something called the consonantal I, which is how we get to our January or our Jupiter. So Julius Caesar must be turning in his grave every time we modern louts call him Julius Caesar! We should really call him Youlius Kaizar!
But after all this, if there is only one rule you remember, make it this:
Rule Five: the Latin makes perfect sense, and your translation must do as well.
If your English sentence turns out to be nonsensical, you have made an error somewhere – if I had a pound for every time someone said “this sentence doesn’t make sense” I would be a very wealthy woman, but alas, no one will ever pay up.
It is not that the Latin is wrong, it is that your translation doesn’t match it! I’m not saying it is easy, and I am not mocking making errors – errors are good! That’s how we learn! I’m just saying don’t give up until your sentence is actually a proper sentence. Especially in an exam or assessment! You get marks for sense – writing gobbledegook will get nothing except a chuckle or long-suffering sigh from an examiner.
I hope that this has been a helpful, if brief, overview of some basic rules to keep in mind when starting off in Latin. Tomorrow I will be going through Easy Latin Cases: helpful information about nouns in Latin and how to spot them, and actually getting stuck into some Latin grammar!
Let me know what you are most excited about learning this month, and I’ll see you tomorrow!