What is simple Latin?

[Laura Gibbs]

Thanks to Bob Patrick for letting us use the LatinBestPractices wiki - that's a great space to carry on this discussion, so please just go directly to:

LatinBestPractices Wiki: Tar Heel Reader FAQs

[Laura Gibbs]

One thing I am a big believer in is the use of complete sentences! As a general rule that I will probably be following in my online libelli, I'd like to make sure that each slide contains a complete sentence. Luckily with Latin, a sentence can be a single word. That's a bit odd for students at first, because they are so used to having to state the subject in English - but if you can build a sense of confidence and expectation that every slide is a complete sentence, then they can start to realize that you can have complete sentences without the subject being explicitly stated at all! :-)

[Laura Gibbs]

VARIED WORD ORDER. One of the things I find most fascinating and beautiful about Latin is the freedom of the word order, so even with simple sentences, I like to vary the word over, S-V and also V-S, just so that students don't get lulled into the false sense that word order is grammatical in Latin because it isn't! So even in this simple libellis De Leone I juxtaposed these two sentences: Deinde bibit leo, and Leo demum dormit. I figure it is never too early to introduce students to the variety of Latin word order!

[Laura Gibbs]

Macrons, well, yes, contrary to popular belief (!), I am not opposed to all macrons... and in beginning texts like these, macrons are important. The TarHeelReader set-up is very friendly to macrons - I didn't have any trouble at all in using them in the captions, or in the title of the libellus, or in the tags, for that matter! Although in the tags for De Leone, I used both "leo" and "leō" to facilitate my own later searching and sorting.

[Neill Payne]

I am glad to see this effort. I bought two Latin translations of Dr. Seuss, hoping to be able to use them for extensive reading. Unfortunately, for me at least, they did not seem to be written at the same beginner level that a Seuss book is written. I don't regret the purchase though. I think that they are beautiful translations. Green Egg and Ham has such a wonderful cadence that my children liked me to read it out loud even though they really didn't understand it at all.

So, I would love to see books written at a child's level and perhaps the same story written at a somewhat more advanced level so that one could enjoy extensive reading as he progresses in learning Latin. This would be most helpful when teaching children. Such books would give them confidence in language acquisition at an early age.

I am happy to say that when I finished Oerberg's Lingua Latina I was able to read the Latin Harry Potter books without too much difficulty at all. It is great to have a beginner and intermediate corpus of Latin literature so that one can read a little interesting Latin every day and not be completely tied to parses, glosses, and translations. Doing word puzzles can be fun, but just being able to sit and read Latin is very enjoyable. Even Cicero is beginning to make sense to me;-)

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Neill, you are quite right about some of the children's books being surprisingly hard to read in Latin - and there are different reasons for that. With the Dr. Seuss books, the problem is really vocabulary, and nothing more than that. I'm guessing that with some good vocabulary preparation, doing the Dr. Seuss books - especially Cat in the Hat - would not be so hard... the problem is that the vocabulary which children naturally acquire and which Dr. Seuss could rely on are not the same words usually taught in Latin textbooks!

Dr. Seuss wrote the Cat in the Hat as an exercise in what is sometimes called "controlled vocabulary" - using around 200 different words. Here's an interesting note that I found online about that:

The Cat in the Hat was composed as a controlled vocabulary book with only 223 different words. Seuss created the book as a response to a 1954 article in Life magazine by John Hersey which speculated that the decline in children's reading abilities in the United States was due to the dull basal readers used in school...and suggested that children's writers, such as Seuss, might try to write a school primer. Seuss found the limited vocabulary a challenge and, after a period of frustration, simply chose the first two words that rhymed- CAT and HAT - from the list of approved words and created his most memorable character...

With other children's books, like Winnie the Pooh or Harrius Potter, we're not really dealing with children's books in terms of the style - the themes are for children, but the writing is by no means easy in English to begin with.

As for the Cat and the Hat, I would be really glad if we could see some real group efforts in vocabulary development among Latin teachers. There are some frequently lists driven by the standard authors like Vergil and Caesar... but I'd much more prefer to see some alternative vocabulary lists based on everyday objects and experiences, the kinds of basic vocabulary lists used in the teaching of living languages. You will not get a lot of cats and hats in Vergil or Caesar, but it's definitely good vocabulary to have! :-)

[Neill Payne]

Laura: My daughter (10) and son (8) had a great time Friday reading your Bestiarium Latinum Friday.
The pictures are great! I loved the simple repetitive formula. When we got to the "quid vides" page I would have Caroline tell me what the answer should be and then we would go to the next page and check. We did a lot of good language practice and had fun. My eight year old, Austin, just watched and listened this time, but enjoyed the game too and got to hear a lot of Latin. Thanks.

[Laura Gibbs]

FABULOUS - I am so glad to hear it. Did you see how the manuscript has titles that are actually very easy to read...? Usually the manuscripts are not so clear! If you look at the elephant manuscript page, for example, you can read clearly "DE ELEFANTO" - that's why I picked that spelling; usually in Latin elephantus is spelled the Greek way, with 'ph' instead of 'f' - but I wanted to match the manuscript. I had so much fun putting that together, and I am really glad you enjoyed it! :-)