Latin Lesson

I saw a great website for learning Latin in an easy way.  This website by C. J. Cherryh seems to develop a fun way to learning Latin.

Here are some of Cherryh’s  lessons worth noting.

1. Latin has sentence construction that proceeds this way: <ACTOR/ACTED-UPON> <ACTION>.

2. The person or thing that is acted upon (i.e. the actee) has -m appended: for example, if we wish to say “Brutus saw Caesar”, it’ll be something like

<Brutus/ Caeserem> <saw>.

Well, its not always “em” thats appended. For instance, if Brutus is the actee, we’ll get “Brutum”.

3.  What about the verbs?

We know Brutus killed Caesar; due to my knowledge of only simple present tense, we shall convert it to “Brutus kills Caesar”.

Latin translation: <Brutus /Caesarem> <occidit>.

Now for “Caesar sees Brutus”. Latin: <Caesar/ Brutum> <videt>.

It seems Caesar and Brutus are favorites among the teachers of Latin (going by the number of references to them in online Latin courses.) So, here’s another sentence with these 2 protagonists.

“Brutus slays Caesar”; Latin translation: <Brutus /Caesarem> <necat>.

Some other verbs:

” Caesar loves Brutus”  <Caesar/Brutum> <amat>.

“Woman catches Brutus”   <Femina/ Brutum> <capit>.

4. One thing you might have observed with the verbs mentioned: they end in -at, -et, or -it. Cherryh provides some clarification on which verbs end up which way.

Well, I myself don’t know much more of Latin, and have essentially put together this material from the first two lessons on Cherryh’s website. Have fun reading that.

Here’s a site that gives links to linguistics  courses (in many languages including Latin) : http://www.word2word.com/coursead.html#latin.