Aesop's Fables... in Latin!
Ning Diary: Dec. 24 - more on simple Latin
As a result of the Boston Globe article that I posted about here yesterday, there has been some discussion at the LatinTeach listserve about easy Latin, and a new Latin teacher (someone who is teaching some Latin to her English students in China - how cool!), asked about easy reading Latin texts. Below is the message I sent around to the list in response to her question - I'm hoping I will learn about some other good easy Latin materials online as a result of the discussion.
~~~
The "recommended for easy Latin" discussion comes up periodically on this list, and it's always interesting to see what Latin treasures people have discovered online for easy reading purposes. GoogleBooks has been a godsend for that, since the old textbooks are usually full of wonderful adapted reading that is specifically intended for beginning Latin students. My own interest is in Aesop's fables, and there's usually a nice section of fables included in those beginner's books, along with mythology, tales from ancient history, and so on. Anyway, here is a list of some of the easy Latin that I have enjoyed reading with my students:
Aesop's Fables (of course) - I've now got links to over 4000 Aesop's fables in Latin here - aesopus.pbwiki.com - and they range from easy (adapted prose) to hard (poetry). The easiest ones are Odo of Cheriton (AWESOME medieval fables) and the adapted modern readers for Latin students, like Jacobs & Doering or Via Latina. For my soon-to-be-issued edition of Barlow's Aesop, I'm preparing "simplified" versions of the texts to use as a pre-reading exercise - you can see a sample of that here: aesopus.pbwiki.com/barlow002 (I should have all the simplified versions done by the time the book ships in January, whoo-hoo!).
Proverbs - Proverbs are fantastic in terms of the amount of meaning you get in exchange for the number of words you have to manage! Plus, proverbs are easy to memorize, apply in daily life, etc. I gave my students 10 proverbs a day when I was teaching Latin, and I compiled a book of proverbs organized by grammatical categories to make it easy to choose proverbs to match whatever grammar topics someone might be focusing on, either as a student or as a teacher: LatinViaProverbs.pbwiki.com (I also did a book of Bible verses organized by the same principles, but I know many public school teachers especially are shy about teaching the Bible; you can find the contents of the Bible book at that same address).
Gesta Romanorum - Of all the medieval story collections, the Gesta Romanorum is my absolute favorite, and there is a fantastic online version here: thanks to Claude Pavur! http://tinyurl.com/qfzsj (you can find all kinds of great stories in here - and it's just part of a larger tradition of medieval story collections, like the Dialogus Miraculorum of Caesarius, the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, etc. etc. - but for an already digitized, ready-to-read version, this online Gesta is the best).
There is much much more besides - as seems to happen periodically on this list, perhaps we can have a round-up of the easy Latin everybody enjoys the most. This little list is the sort of stuff that reflects my own personal interests, since my training is as a folklorist, and I love showing students how learning Latin gives them the key to a vast collection of folktales and proverbs, far larger than the corpus of classical Latin writers in the Loeb Library. :-)
~~~
The "recommended for easy Latin" discussion comes up periodically on this list, and it's always interesting to see what Latin treasures people have discovered online for easy reading purposes. GoogleBooks has been a godsend for that, since the old textbooks are usually full of wonderful adapted reading that is specifically intended for beginning Latin students. My own interest is in Aesop's fables, and there's usually a nice section of fables included in those beginner's books, along with mythology, tales from ancient history, and so on. Anyway, here is a list of some of the easy Latin that I have enjoyed reading with my students:
Aesop's Fables (of course) - I've now got links to over 4000 Aesop's fables in Latin here - aesopus.pbwiki.com - and they range from easy (adapted prose) to hard (poetry). The easiest ones are Odo of Cheriton (AWESOME medieval fables) and the adapted modern readers for Latin students, like Jacobs & Doering or Via Latina. For my soon-to-be-issued edition of Barlow's Aesop, I'm preparing "simplified" versions of the texts to use as a pre-reading exercise - you can see a sample of that here: aesopus.pbwiki.com/barlow002 (I should have all the simplified versions done by the time the book ships in January, whoo-hoo!).
Proverbs - Proverbs are fantastic in terms of the amount of meaning you get in exchange for the number of words you have to manage! Plus, proverbs are easy to memorize, apply in daily life, etc. I gave my students 10 proverbs a day when I was teaching Latin, and I compiled a book of proverbs organized by grammatical categories to make it easy to choose proverbs to match whatever grammar topics someone might be focusing on, either as a student or as a teacher: LatinViaProverbs.pbwiki.com (I also did a book of Bible verses organized by the same principles, but I know many public school teachers especially are shy about teaching the Bible; you can find the contents of the Bible book at that same address).
Gesta Romanorum - Of all the medieval story collections, the Gesta Romanorum is my absolute favorite, and there is a fantastic online version here: thanks to Claude Pavur! http://tinyurl.com/qfzsj (you can find all kinds of great stories in here - and it's just part of a larger tradition of medieval story collections, like the Dialogus Miraculorum of Caesarius, the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, etc. etc. - but for an already digitized, ready-to-read version, this online Gesta is the best).
There is much much more besides - as seems to happen periodically on this list, perhaps we can have a round-up of the easy Latin everybody enjoys the most. This little list is the sort of stuff that reflects my own personal interests, since my training is as a folklorist, and I love showing students how learning Latin gives them the key to a vast collection of folktales and proverbs, far larger than the corpus of classical Latin writers in the Loeb Library. :-)
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