Lesson 1: pronunciation | cognate vocabulary | noun cases
Lesson 2: long and short vowels, syllable stress | the eight parts of (Latin) speech with grammar overview | comments on vocabulary and first vocab list
Lesson 3: first-declension nouns | noun exercises/examples | vocab
Learning a Language with Authentic Texts
A good way to ensure that you don’t get bogged down in a too-thick layer of grammar, with Latin as with any other acquired language, is to regularly spend time with authentic texts. An “authentic” text is just any instance of the target language as it exists in the real world, that is, as a mode of communication providing some sort of connection between thinking, feeling human beings. Recent theory surrounding SLA (second-language acquisition) values authentic texts as a crucial supplement to the prefabricated language found in textbooks. We don’t want to go too far with this—textbooks and their methods are effective in their own way, and authentic texts come with difficulties. I think it’s true, though, that textbooks often deaden a language by insulating learners from its cultural richness and real-world vitality. Authentic texts help us to remember that we’re learning a language (with great effort, by the way) not just to pass a test or accumulate knowledge, but rather to participate in the useful, beautiful, meaningful things that languages bring into people’s lives.
We focused on a specific grammatical topic last week, so this week let’s take a step back and work with an authentic text. I want to start with something that is heard frequently in the traditional Latin Mass and Office: the Gloria Patri. We’re going to discuss this text in some detail, but I want to be clear about my objectives here: I am not implying that you need to know or understand all of these details in order to adequately comprehend the text; on the contrary, I’m sure that some of you can already translate this text quite accurately even if you don’t have much Latin proficiency yet. Rather, my objective is to demonstrate the interplay of grammar and meaning in a Latin sentence. There’s a lot of grammar going on in Latin; active knowledge of this grammar is beneficial and useful, and you will need to gradually develop this knowledge to make steady progress, but unknown grammar is not always an obstacle between you and the meaning. This analysis of the Gloria Patri will show how much grammar you could know, and maybe will know someday, but it also will indicate how much meaning you can get without knowing the grammar.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Via Mediaevalis to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.