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Jul. 5th, 2010 01:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
suckmy12inchI've been very up and down this week in terms of ~emotions~ so I've decided to write a post that cannot fail to make me happy: all about ~*~*~*~LATIN~*~*~*~
So I first came into proper contact with Latin back in Year 7, along with a whole host of other new and shiny things. Like French and German. Previous to that, Latin was basically 'that one language with "us" everywhere that they only speak in church'. I don't remember if I saw anything of it at the Open Evening and I don't remember if I quite saw the point of learning Latin back then, but I do remember getting 98/100 on the end of year test, I remember getting told off because my first piece of homework was an absolute mess (all correct, but my brother had been distracting me and I'd had to cross things out a thousand times). I even remember the one time I got taken ill for some reason during a lesson and had to leave, mildly pissed off that I'd be missing the rest of Latin. And I also remember the very first lines we had to translate:
ecce! in pictura est puella, nomine Cornelia.
Even just 'ecce' summons up warm fuzzy feelings for me. We used the Ecce Romani course, from a Scottish classics group, I think. Year 7, 8 and 9 passed in a vague blur of noun declensions, verb conjugations, the mysterious fifth declension in particular, and getting stuck in a ditch for months on end. The books followed a family, the Cornelians, and at the end of the first book, they set off for Rome. And then at the beginning of the second book, the carriage crashed into a ditch and remained there. They did eventually make it and I think a lot of us were seriously looking forward to seeing Cornelia get married and Titus die of a broken foot. But, alas, we never got that far, because it was time for GCSE.
That seems like a blur now, too. I can't even remember which teacher I had - I'm half convinced I had the same teacher for Years 10 AND 11 but I'm half convinced the other way too. In any case, GCSE meant our introduction to vocab lists (learn the meaning, the principal parts, the group, the declension, the comparatives, etc etc and THEN you'll be set), the subjunctive (nightmare at first to most, stupidly simple once you get the hang of it), and real Latin literature. No more translating specially written passages about Cornelia and Flavia being harrassed by a wolf, now we worked with adapted passages and discovered 'unseens'. Unseens simply being a piece of Latin you hadn't seen before and would have to translate in the exam, so what we'd done before but now it had a name.
Then we came up against real, non-adapted Latin writing, totally new if you weren't doing Classics too. That would have been about when the Scottish teacher, Mrs McF made her undying love for Vergil (I refuse to spell it Virgil) clear. Back then, it was hard to see the appeal - faced with twelve sheets of Book 4 of the Aeneid to learn by heart, I think it's safe to say we were all just a little bit daunted. Most of us wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. Well, actually, probably just me and Bethany since we much preferred straight translation off the bat to this sheet learning, because as well as learning it by heart, you had to be able to answer questions on Virgil's technique and so on. At the time, it did seem very pointless.
As well as the Aeneid, we also had to look at prose. Specifically, we learned some bits by Cicero and... I think it was Tacitus. The bit from Cicero was taken from one of his speeches, in defence of some Roman whose name escapes me, as his mistress had accused him of trying to poison her. Mrs S, the other Latin teacher, entertained everyone by apparently getting flustered when trying to explain some of the words meaning 'libido' and 'lust' to Year 10s. We all loved it, of course.
Aaaaand then there were the letters of Pliny the Younger: specifically, the one detailing his uncle's death. We got a good laugh out of that one, what with Pliny the Elder running around with pillows on his head. We kind of rushed that part, after spending most of the time learning Virgil to death. By the end, I think everyone, not just Bethany and me, was sick of translating about Dido's burning passion and Aeneas's hair standing on end.
That was Latin for five years. For those five years, I did pretty damn well and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I made a point of blasting through the set work so that the teachers would let me have a go at translating harder pieces, or from English into Latin, I fell asleep during Virgil lessons because I could learn the sheets by heart without any trouble. I loved it and now I think about it, I sort of think I missed the point a little - but, you know, I didn't get much of a chance to do otherwise until A-level anyway.
So, Latin A-level. Just finished it, of course, and AS-level seems so bloody far away already. AS meant we were faced with an even bigger vocab list, even more tenses of the subjunctive to deal with, future infinitives, future everything, more grammar you could shake a stick at, mild crushes on the adorable new Latin teacher and then more literature. We learned from Book 8 of Ovid's Metamorphoses (or I think so, anyway) and had a good laugh at Scylla throwing her tantrums and then felt sorry for Daedalus and Icarus and answered questions about how Ovid emphasised Icarus's innocence in this passage, Scylla's rage in this one.
We ran into Cicero again, this time reading one of his speeches against Catiline. The best part of that was when we got out the togas, went down to the amphitheatre and declaimed to the rest of the class (fifteen in most) about how Catiline ought to have been put to death, how he'd been leading young men astray, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. No, really, there was a LOT of "and the rest" to get through. And I still remember the bit that I was given to learn for our little performance - probably will for a very long time.
Something like that, anyway.
AS was more of an expansion of GCSE than anything else, nothing particularly challenging which made A-level that much more of a shock. Because we weren't given simple adapted passages, reworked specially for us, oh no, we found ourselves suddenly tackling Ovid without any help at all, trying to get into his mindset and let me tell you, that's far easier said than done. Especially when you're translating his advice about picking up girls at chariot races - he suggests something like touching her leg and getting a cushion for her. And in another poem, he tells women to GET OUT THERE and look for their man! Because the she-wolf tends many sheep in case one is the right prey. Or. Something. Translating Ovid meant I was suddenly faced with my one Latin bane - scansion. Latin verse written in hexameter follows certain rules about the length of each syllable in a line. Ovid being Ovid, he had to be awkward and write alternately in hexameter and pentameter. This wasn't even much of a problem, really, and I understood the rules well enough but applying them never came very easily. Still doesn't and I always find myself falling back on 'strawberry jampot': hexameter lines always end with a dactyl followed by a spondee, two feet, one comprised of long-short-short, the second long-long. It was just everything else in between that stumped me. I would hhve very much liked to completely ignore scanning forever and ever, but sadly, the exam asked for two lines to be scanned and scansion was sometimes necessary to determine the case of a noun ending in 'a' - short for nominative, long for ablative. It was a right bloody pain.
So we had the Ovid to practise, since we'd be given something by him to translate, and the other verse we needed to learn was almost the whole of Book 1 of the Aeneid. Just like in Year 10, I really didn't appreciate Virgil at all, though towards the end of the year... it sort of fell into place. Slogging through the Latin and translating it mostly by ourselves with very vauge hints from Mrs McF wasn't the most fun, but now, forced to look at the style, the use of language, sound and so on more closely than I had at GCSE, I discovered that it was quite beautifully written. It took me four years to see but it really was a masterpiece. Is a masterpiece and it's a good thing Virgil's final wishes were ignored and his writings weren't destroyed as he'd requested because losing the Aeneid would have been a crying shame. So it was around then that I started to see another point to Latin, other than being good at it and enjoying the logic of it. I'd always proclaimed to dislike the literature side of it, because it never really appealed, but it was beginning to fall into place, sort of. You can read a translation of the Aeneid, sure, and I enjoyed the copy I borrowed from my friend briefly, but no matter how good it is, something's lost - you can't help but lose parts of Virgil's style, you can't quite convey the way he crafted pretty much every line perfectly. You'll lose that and trying to keep it is a good reason for knowing Latin. Or so I think.
That was the verse, Virgil and Ovid alternately every lesson with Mrs McF. We also had prose to study with Mrs S: Tacitus and Caesar - yep, Julius Caesar. Tacitus was to be translated, learned, analysed and giggled at when the historian talked about how Agripina was 'ready for incest' with her son. It was Annals XIV and I found that I'd been slightly off the mark for years: I was sure that I'd read in a Horrible Histories book that Agrippina's female companion, Acerronia pretended to be the intended target and was killed, but apparently Acerronia was just trying to save herself when the ship all fell apart (and yes I am assuming you know the whole story). Tacitus was all right - a bit dry at times, annoying to try and analyse and entirely too long.
Then there was Caesar.
Oh, Caesar. We would have to translate an unseen passage by him in the exam and at the beginning of the year, we were in despair. His ablative absolutes and stupidly convoluted sentences left us all in despair. Even by the end of the year we found ourselves not quite able to navigate his subjunctives and participles one hundred per cent of the time, but then again, we came close and in the end it was a matter of what we happened to be translating. We read things from two of his books (I say 'he wrote', 'his books', I wouldn't be at all surprised if he just dictated or got someone else entirely to write), The Civil War and the Gallic Wars. Both books were confusing for various reasons. The Civil War because he was talking about Romans fighting Romans and it was bloody impossible to work out who was on whose side and apparently there were at least two Scipios - or that's what I figured. Still, it was preferable to get a passage describing a battle because you knew where you were then. With the Gallic War, Caesar sometimes liked to give descriptions of the places he visited. My personal favourite was when he wrote about the ancient Britons and expressed what seems to have been shock at their custom of shaving all their hair off, except beards, and having 'communal wives' as he put it. Thing is, because you couldn't be sure how right he was, you couldn't always be sure how right you were. Caesar became something we generally dreaded. We also had to answer questions about the technicalities of the language, something I did enjoy. When I got it right, that is. Trying to explain why this verb was in the subjunctive and why this noun was ablative could sometimes be a bit hit and miss.
In addition to the learning, I threw myself into teaching too. For several months, I taught some basic Latin to a small group of Year 6s at the nearby primary school with the help of the gir who was worst at Latin in my class. I loved teaching those kids - mostly, anyway, I did snap at them now and then when they lost their focus which happened depressingly often, so we'd resort to telling them myths instead of actually teaching the language. I'll be seeing some of them soon at Lighthouse, so we'll see if they remember anything. I also helped in the Year 8 and 10 lessons. It was through all this teaching that I really came to realise just how much I love Latin. Helping to pass it on, maybe transferring a little of your own passion, that's what I tried to achieve and it's what I want to achieve when I, with luck, actually become a teacher. Speaking of, I think I have Mrs McF to thank for helping nurture my own love of the language.
And it's not just Latin now. I took up Classical Greek this year, and did the GCSE exam with the rest of my A-levels. It was like being back in Year7, discovering this language that you sort of brush by in English now and then. Having to learn a new alphabet helped with that feeling of being a Year 7, faed with simple sentences that were so bloody difficult to decipher. The Greek helped me refind that really pure, simple pleasure you get when you translate a sentence and you know t's right, you know it's perfect. And it's probably the feeling that other people get when the do well at maths but either way, nothing quite compares, somehow.
Still, while I love the feeling, that's not what the languages are all about and it's taken me seven years to see that. I guess it's understanding for yourself something that's several centuries old - you dont realise it but when you read something like the Aeneid, you're sort of... looking at the mind of someone long dead but still with us. It's really quite fascinating.
...But, you know, at the end of the day, I just really like being right and in Latin, that's when the feeling is the best for me.
Plus, I sound really clever when I quote Latin rubbish B)
So I first came into proper contact with Latin back in Year 7, along with a whole host of other new and shiny things. Like French and German. Previous to that, Latin was basically 'that one language with "us" everywhere that they only speak in church'. I don't remember if I saw anything of it at the Open Evening and I don't remember if I quite saw the point of learning Latin back then, but I do remember getting 98/100 on the end of year test, I remember getting told off because my first piece of homework was an absolute mess (all correct, but my brother had been distracting me and I'd had to cross things out a thousand times). I even remember the one time I got taken ill for some reason during a lesson and had to leave, mildly pissed off that I'd be missing the rest of Latin. And I also remember the very first lines we had to translate:
ecce! in pictura est puella, nomine Cornelia.
Even just 'ecce' summons up warm fuzzy feelings for me. We used the Ecce Romani course, from a Scottish classics group, I think. Year 7, 8 and 9 passed in a vague blur of noun declensions, verb conjugations, the mysterious fifth declension in particular, and getting stuck in a ditch for months on end. The books followed a family, the Cornelians, and at the end of the first book, they set off for Rome. And then at the beginning of the second book, the carriage crashed into a ditch and remained there. They did eventually make it and I think a lot of us were seriously looking forward to seeing Cornelia get married and Titus die of a broken foot. But, alas, we never got that far, because it was time for GCSE.
That seems like a blur now, too. I can't even remember which teacher I had - I'm half convinced I had the same teacher for Years 10 AND 11 but I'm half convinced the other way too. In any case, GCSE meant our introduction to vocab lists (learn the meaning, the principal parts, the group, the declension, the comparatives, etc etc and THEN you'll be set), the subjunctive (nightmare at first to most, stupidly simple once you get the hang of it), and real Latin literature. No more translating specially written passages about Cornelia and Flavia being harrassed by a wolf, now we worked with adapted passages and discovered 'unseens'. Unseens simply being a piece of Latin you hadn't seen before and would have to translate in the exam, so what we'd done before but now it had a name.
Then we came up against real, non-adapted Latin writing, totally new if you weren't doing Classics too. That would have been about when the Scottish teacher, Mrs McF made her undying love for Vergil (I refuse to spell it Virgil) clear. Back then, it was hard to see the appeal - faced with twelve sheets of Book 4 of the Aeneid to learn by heart, I think it's safe to say we were all just a little bit daunted. Most of us wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. Well, actually, probably just me and Bethany since we much preferred straight translation off the bat to this sheet learning, because as well as learning it by heart, you had to be able to answer questions on Virgil's technique and so on. At the time, it did seem very pointless.
As well as the Aeneid, we also had to look at prose. Specifically, we learned some bits by Cicero and... I think it was Tacitus. The bit from Cicero was taken from one of his speeches, in defence of some Roman whose name escapes me, as his mistress had accused him of trying to poison her. Mrs S, the other Latin teacher, entertained everyone by apparently getting flustered when trying to explain some of the words meaning 'libido' and 'lust' to Year 10s. We all loved it, of course.
Aaaaand then there were the letters of Pliny the Younger: specifically, the one detailing his uncle's death. We got a good laugh out of that one, what with Pliny the Elder running around with pillows on his head. We kind of rushed that part, after spending most of the time learning Virgil to death. By the end, I think everyone, not just Bethany and me, was sick of translating about Dido's burning passion and Aeneas's hair standing on end.
That was Latin for five years. For those five years, I did pretty damn well and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I made a point of blasting through the set work so that the teachers would let me have a go at translating harder pieces, or from English into Latin, I fell asleep during Virgil lessons because I could learn the sheets by heart without any trouble. I loved it and now I think about it, I sort of think I missed the point a little - but, you know, I didn't get much of a chance to do otherwise until A-level anyway.
So, Latin A-level. Just finished it, of course, and AS-level seems so bloody far away already. AS meant we were faced with an even bigger vocab list, even more tenses of the subjunctive to deal with, future infinitives, future everything, more grammar you could shake a stick at, mild crushes on the adorable new Latin teacher and then more literature. We learned from Book 8 of Ovid's Metamorphoses (or I think so, anyway) and had a good laugh at Scylla throwing her tantrums and then felt sorry for Daedalus and Icarus and answered questions about how Ovid emphasised Icarus's innocence in this passage, Scylla's rage in this one.
We ran into Cicero again, this time reading one of his speeches against Catiline. The best part of that was when we got out the togas, went down to the amphitheatre and declaimed to the rest of the class (fifteen in most) about how Catiline ought to have been put to death, how he'd been leading young men astray, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. No, really, there was a LOT of "and the rest" to get through. And I still remember the bit that I was given to learn for our little performance - probably will for a very long time.
What times, what conduct! The senate understands this, the consul sees it; yet this man lives. He lives? Why, he even comes into our senate, he takes part in public meetings, he marks and singles out with his eyes each one of use for slaughter. Yet we, brave men that we are, seem to do enough if we can avoid the weapons and madness of that man. You ought to have been killed on the order of the consul, Catiline, that destruction you were plotting ought to have been brought against you.
Something like that, anyway.
AS was more of an expansion of GCSE than anything else, nothing particularly challenging which made A-level that much more of a shock. Because we weren't given simple adapted passages, reworked specially for us, oh no, we found ourselves suddenly tackling Ovid without any help at all, trying to get into his mindset and let me tell you, that's far easier said than done. Especially when you're translating his advice about picking up girls at chariot races - he suggests something like touching her leg and getting a cushion for her. And in another poem, he tells women to GET OUT THERE and look for their man! Because the she-wolf tends many sheep in case one is the right prey. Or. Something. Translating Ovid meant I was suddenly faced with my one Latin bane - scansion. Latin verse written in hexameter follows certain rules about the length of each syllable in a line. Ovid being Ovid, he had to be awkward and write alternately in hexameter and pentameter. This wasn't even much of a problem, really, and I understood the rules well enough but applying them never came very easily. Still doesn't and I always find myself falling back on 'strawberry jampot': hexameter lines always end with a dactyl followed by a spondee, two feet, one comprised of long-short-short, the second long-long. It was just everything else in between that stumped me. I would hhve very much liked to completely ignore scanning forever and ever, but sadly, the exam asked for two lines to be scanned and scansion was sometimes necessary to determine the case of a noun ending in 'a' - short for nominative, long for ablative. It was a right bloody pain.
So we had the Ovid to practise, since we'd be given something by him to translate, and the other verse we needed to learn was almost the whole of Book 1 of the Aeneid. Just like in Year 10, I really didn't appreciate Virgil at all, though towards the end of the year... it sort of fell into place. Slogging through the Latin and translating it mostly by ourselves with very vauge hints from Mrs McF wasn't the most fun, but now, forced to look at the style, the use of language, sound and so on more closely than I had at GCSE, I discovered that it was quite beautifully written. It took me four years to see but it really was a masterpiece. Is a masterpiece and it's a good thing Virgil's final wishes were ignored and his writings weren't destroyed as he'd requested because losing the Aeneid would have been a crying shame. So it was around then that I started to see another point to Latin, other than being good at it and enjoying the logic of it. I'd always proclaimed to dislike the literature side of it, because it never really appealed, but it was beginning to fall into place, sort of. You can read a translation of the Aeneid, sure, and I enjoyed the copy I borrowed from my friend briefly, but no matter how good it is, something's lost - you can't help but lose parts of Virgil's style, you can't quite convey the way he crafted pretty much every line perfectly. You'll lose that and trying to keep it is a good reason for knowing Latin. Or so I think.
That was the verse, Virgil and Ovid alternately every lesson with Mrs McF. We also had prose to study with Mrs S: Tacitus and Caesar - yep, Julius Caesar. Tacitus was to be translated, learned, analysed and giggled at when the historian talked about how Agripina was 'ready for incest' with her son. It was Annals XIV and I found that I'd been slightly off the mark for years: I was sure that I'd read in a Horrible Histories book that Agrippina's female companion, Acerronia pretended to be the intended target and was killed, but apparently Acerronia was just trying to save herself when the ship all fell apart (and yes I am assuming you know the whole story). Tacitus was all right - a bit dry at times, annoying to try and analyse and entirely too long.
Then there was Caesar.
Oh, Caesar. We would have to translate an unseen passage by him in the exam and at the beginning of the year, we were in despair. His ablative absolutes and stupidly convoluted sentences left us all in despair. Even by the end of the year we found ourselves not quite able to navigate his subjunctives and participles one hundred per cent of the time, but then again, we came close and in the end it was a matter of what we happened to be translating. We read things from two of his books (I say 'he wrote', 'his books', I wouldn't be at all surprised if he just dictated or got someone else entirely to write), The Civil War and the Gallic Wars. Both books were confusing for various reasons. The Civil War because he was talking about Romans fighting Romans and it was bloody impossible to work out who was on whose side and apparently there were at least two Scipios - or that's what I figured. Still, it was preferable to get a passage describing a battle because you knew where you were then. With the Gallic War, Caesar sometimes liked to give descriptions of the places he visited. My personal favourite was when he wrote about the ancient Britons and expressed what seems to have been shock at their custom of shaving all their hair off, except beards, and having 'communal wives' as he put it. Thing is, because you couldn't be sure how right he was, you couldn't always be sure how right you were. Caesar became something we generally dreaded. We also had to answer questions about the technicalities of the language, something I did enjoy. When I got it right, that is. Trying to explain why this verb was in the subjunctive and why this noun was ablative could sometimes be a bit hit and miss.
In addition to the learning, I threw myself into teaching too. For several months, I taught some basic Latin to a small group of Year 6s at the nearby primary school with the help of the gir who was worst at Latin in my class. I loved teaching those kids - mostly, anyway, I did snap at them now and then when they lost their focus which happened depressingly often, so we'd resort to telling them myths instead of actually teaching the language. I'll be seeing some of them soon at Lighthouse, so we'll see if they remember anything. I also helped in the Year 8 and 10 lessons. It was through all this teaching that I really came to realise just how much I love Latin. Helping to pass it on, maybe transferring a little of your own passion, that's what I tried to achieve and it's what I want to achieve when I, with luck, actually become a teacher. Speaking of, I think I have Mrs McF to thank for helping nurture my own love of the language.
And it's not just Latin now. I took up Classical Greek this year, and did the GCSE exam with the rest of my A-levels. It was like being back in Year7, discovering this language that you sort of brush by in English now and then. Having to learn a new alphabet helped with that feeling of being a Year 7, faed with simple sentences that were so bloody difficult to decipher. The Greek helped me refind that really pure, simple pleasure you get when you translate a sentence and you know t's right, you know it's perfect. And it's probably the feeling that other people get when the do well at maths but either way, nothing quite compares, somehow.
Still, while I love the feeling, that's not what the languages are all about and it's taken me seven years to see that. I guess it's understanding for yourself something that's several centuries old - you dont realise it but when you read something like the Aeneid, you're sort of... looking at the mind of someone long dead but still with us. It's really quite fascinating.
...But, you know, at the end of the day, I just really like being right and in Latin, that's when the feeling is the best for me.
Plus, I sound really clever when I quote Latin rubbish B)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 03:50 am (UTC)Unfortunately I've been saddled with not having it come naturally. English gave me problems all through school, and I still don't know the first thing about sentence structure. The 'rules' are completely lost on me, and considering what an important foundation those are in any language, I'm kind of handicapped when it comes to learning anything besides the one I'm fluent in already. (doesn't stop me from trying, but progress is painfully slow and at times incredibly depressing.)
At any rate! Just wanted to throw my two cents in there. A love for language is a beautiful thing, so good on you for finding/sticking with a healthy appreciation that I wish more people had. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 09:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 04:40 am (UTC)but Latin, oh, Latin. I love it and I hate it at the same time. WHY, LATIN POETRY, WHY ARE YOU SO MEAN TO ME.
and ohmygod scansion I remember that. half the time it'd be ridiculously easy and the other half of the time it'd be like trying to nail Jell-o to a wall. what the hell.
but the Aeneid really is a gorgeous piece of work, aaah. my teacher was so in love with Virgil, he'd always say stuff like "if I could write a paragraph like that I'd die a happy man" etc. xD ♥
damn but I miss Latin class. :| translating drives me up a wall but the masochistic part of me just can't let it go. I've written way more "why Latin is fucking awesome" essays for school than is probably healthy.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 10:01 pm (UTC)Nailing Jell-o to a wall is a very good analogy for scansion. I hate it so much, I have to redo every line like a million times.
Sounds like my own Latin teacher XD And man, I wish I'd had excuses to write essays on why Latin is amazing at school, and shoved it in the faces of everyone who's always all BUT WHAT'S THE POINT.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 10:50 pm (UTC)it's so mean because you start with the easy, normal prose stuff that you can scan in about two seconds and you feel all good about yourself, and THEN all of a sudden it's like "let's get rid of all the macrons and make it all poetric and break all the rules haha!" so much pain.
I think Latin teachers are required to be ridiculous and/or a little crazy. and I got to write an essay about Latin for an English class and for a freshman seminar type class last year, haha. I almost WISH someone would tell me Latin is a stupid language to learn just so I could make them read them. xD
(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 08:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-05 09:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-06 09:09 am (UTC)Now you too can learn Portuguese with this masterfully done phrasebook!