The Syllable in Latin Poetry and Prose

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A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO THE READING OF LATIN PROSE AND POETRY.

Evan Millner, London, August 2007.

On Syllables:

Poetry in Latin is quantitative.  This means that it depends for its effect on the length of syllables relative to one another, and only secondarily, if at all, on actual word stress. By contrast, English poetry depends for its effect almost exclusively on word stress.

There are two types of syllables in Latin, those that end in a vowel, and those that do not. A “third group” may be one or the other, depending on the need of the poet, and these either-or syllables are called ‘common’.

Those that end in a vowel are called open syllables.

Those that end in a consonant are called closed syllables.

How are such syllables formed?

 The Romans, when speaking, ‘opened’ a syllable if the vowel was followed by only one consonant. This consonant was allowed to detach itself from the vowel, and join the following syllable. The result was an open syllable:

i.e. păt-er  →  pă -ter

This also could also occur if a vowel were followed by a mute in combination with l or r (l and r belong to a class of consonants called liquids).

The mutes

V, B, P, F (labials) G, C, K, Qu (gutturals) D, T (linguals)

A syllable that ends in a vowel, and that has a short vowel in it, is going to be shorter than an otherwise identical  syllable that ends in a consonant, by the simple virtue that it has fewer letters.

pă  is shorter than păt

It is then important to pronounce the syllable with the correct vowel length. If the vowel length is wrong, then the syllable is mangled from a long to a short, and vice versa.

This would be sufficient to destroy a poetical reading, or indeed the intended sound of a passage in prose that relies for its effect on the syllabic structure of the sentence or turn of phrase.

So much for open syllables.

As mentioned above, two syllables with short vowels that differ only in that one has a consonant at the end, and the other does not, share a fundamental, and blindingly evident difference: one is physically short, and the other is, by comparison, physically long. (i.e. it has more letters, so as an object, it is longer than if it had two letters.). As a consequence, the syllable also sounds longer.

pă  versus păr

It is vital that the entirety of the syllable is fully pronounced. If the r on par were not pronounced distinctly, the long syllable could easily come to sound like a short one. This is a reason why readers of Restored Classical pronunciation take care to trill their r’s.

When does a syllable become long when reading Latin?

An open  syllable automatically becomes long when followed by two consonants. (Except a mute + liquid, in which case this is optional.)

How does it get longer?

The first of the following consonants sticks to it. The open syllable then becomes long, simply because it now has more letters in it – it is physically longer, and it must be pronounced fully.

tem/pe/←stā/ti/bus  this gives us:  tem/pes/tā/ti/bus

note: pe is short, and open, pes is  physically longer, and closed. Because it has more letters in it, it takes longer to say.

 a/spér/sus     a/←spérsus   as/pér/sus

This syllable is now called ‘long by position’. One way to understand this is that you have positioned an extra consonant against it, and so it has become longer.

Here are some more examples:

Before (short)	After (long by position)
s t i /←r p ĭ s	s t i r/ p ĭ s
d i s/ c é /←s s ĭ t	d i s/ c é s /s ĭ t
m ŏ/ d é /←s t ŭ s	m ŏ/ d é s/ t ŭ s
ē /d u/←c t ŭ s	ē /d ú c/ t ŭ s

Double consonants – double trouble

It is not a mere fancy when we are told that the Romans pronounced their double consonants as two distinct sounds. They did, but they did so because each letter of the double consonant ended up in its own syllable, according to the rule we have just discussed.

a/ppa/rā/bat is how we would pronounce it if we did not know any better. However, this is what happens to the double consonant pp:

a/←ppa/rā/bat    which becomes ap/pa/rā/bat

When reading Latin, getting the syllabic structure correct is therefore vitally important, otherwise it is impossible to read Latin verse with any degree of authenticity. You need to nurse these habits when reading prose as well, otherwise the transition to reading verse will be a hard and arduous one.

The Third syllable type – Common Syllables.

What is a common syllable?

Common syllables only occur when a short vowel is followed by a mute + a liquid (l or r).

In the ordinary course of things, a mute+liquid behaves like two Siamese twins joined together, and functions as though it were a unit “joined at the hip”.

The  poet has the option of performing an operation, and separating the two. Once they are separated, they behave like any two consonants. One of them moves, in the same way we saw above, and closes (and thereby physically lengthens) the syllable immediately in front of the two consonants. The first consonant from the separated mute-liquid moves to the syllable in front of it.

pătrem   pă/trem 

If tr were a NORMAL consonant cluster, we would expect the t to move to the first syllable, like this:

pă/←trem     resulting in păt/rem

This rule would be the same rule as that we saw above, for a short vowel followed by two consonants, and a poet can chose to apply it to a mute + liquid combination if he wishes to.

 However, because the consonant cluster is a mute-liquid combination, if he does not perform the operation on the twinned mute-liquid cluster, then things stay as they are, and this results in

pă/trem 

How do we know which of the two the poet has chosen?

We need to read the verse aloud that contains a word with a common syllable. It should be apparent which way the poet has divided the word, depending on whether he needs the common syllable to be physically long or short to complete the rhythmic patterning of long and short syllables.  Only one reading should sound right. This is a matter of developing your ear. It never will develop if you are not always careful about quantity when reading both prose and poetry.

    SYLLABLE QUANTITY

A source of much confusion is the use of the macron and breve to mark out syllable quantity. This may be fine for a speaker with native level fluency, (and to be frank, who speaks Latin with that level of fluency?) who has an instinctive knowledge of the true lengths of the vowels the words would have in ordinary conversation. For a modern second language Latin speaker, this system of marking the syllable long by position with a macron above its vowel spells disaster, and adds unnecessary complications.

While it is true that Latin versification depends on syllable quantity, the underlying vowel quantities of the words remain unchanged.

Syllables with short vowels are either physically long, or physically short. 

Syllables with long vowels, are needless to say, always long, as their vowels are long, even if the syllable is physically a short one:  pā  is long, and so is pāb

Such a vowel that is naturally long, is called ‘long by nature’. Even in a physically short syllable, (one that that has fewer letters) it is still long.

However, with syllables that have short vowels,

pă is ‘physically’ short, and păd is ‘physically’ long. Placing a macron above the a, pād to show it is physically long, invites the reader to mispronounce the syllable and lengthen the vowel, when it is the syllable, not the vowel, that is long. Even worse, it leads people to think that ‘long by position’ means that the vowel is lengthened. This is a not uncommon error, but it is a very serious one.

The use of the macron above the vowel of a syllable that is long by position, gives rise to much confusion, as the same notation is also used for vowel length.

It is not the case that a syllable that is long by position, i.e. one containing a short vowel that is followed by two consonants, has its vowel lengthened. Marking it with a macron only gives rise to confusion, especially in a student reader who does not have an instinctive appreciation for vowel length, but who rather relies on the macrons. Macrons should be used to mark long vowels, and long vowels only, and not be used to serve another purpose.

To avoid this difficulty, some educators have proposed a super- macron, which would be extended over the entire syllable. The vowel length notations would remaining in place below it – however, standard computer word processing software does not allow for this, and nor does html coding.

PROPOSAL:

In order to keep the actual vowel quantities marked, another method needs to be found to show syllable quality that does not interfere with the true vowel markings. This method needs to make use of standard word processing tools that are also available on standard web editing packages. It also needs to be easy to apply when marking up a printed text for reading aloud, or, for that matter, for writing out with pen and ink.

A simple and elegant solution is proposed – that the macron for a long syllable should be placedunderneath the entire lengthened syllable cluster, as an underline. The original vowel quantities can still remain marked in their places above the line, as per usual.

a m a v i  

Marking short or light syllables might also need an intervention that will not interfere with the usual markings; However, it it not really necessary to mark the short syllables, if the long ones are marked. Should, for educational reasons, or otherwise for reasons of clarity be necessary to distinguish them in a positive manner, it is proposed that short syllables be italicised, rendering them visually light, with all the letters in the cluster being italicised. legĕrĕ

The advantages:

This system has the advantage that a syllable that is long by position will not lose its actual vowel length markings, which would be retained in the superscript:

b ô  b ŭ s

c ŏ n  c ĭ d o

Another advantage, is the ease with which a printed text can be marked up for recital. This system is also easy to apply using handwriting.

         

It could be argued that  italicising the light syllables might be excessive – and indeed, is largely unnecessary if the subscript macron is used, as the correct vowel quantities are then clearly visible in their correct locations above.

In monosyllables, vowels that are long take the circumflex, and vowels that are short take the acute.

árs	flôs
fáx	spês
párs	môns

Polysyllables take the circumflex accent when the penult is long by nature (This simply means that it has a long vowel, see above), and the final vowel is short. A circumflex can only appear over a syllable with a long vowel.

jûrĭs lûcĕ mûsă spînă

The circumflex accent is thought to have has a slight up-down tone, the acute a straightforward upwards tone. Final unaccented syllables had a slight falling tone. (This is called the grave accent, but this is not written, it is simply understood to be there.)

These accents were applied by the Romans in imitation of the Greeks, and may have been used when reciting poetry and during orations.

Evan Millner

London

August 22 2007 

       The resulting ‘ter’syllable on the end is closed. You’ve heard it said that the Romans trilled their r’s. They certainly sounded them one way or another, otherwise,’ter’, if pronounced with an English ‘r’, would be an open syllable as well.

          Advice: Trill those r’s.

While counting letters is a simple and efficient way to get the point across, it may be misleading if you look into the matter more carefully, for it begs the question: ‘Is “sti” longer than “i”, since it has more letters?’ In fact,  only the vowel and what follows it is relevant. Technically speaking, the beginning part of any syllable is irrelevant for Latin syllable quantity.

       If we take the word, say, carmen, the proper syllabification is car-men. Then it is not the case that the first syllable is “followed by two consonants”, as it is not an open syllable.  The vowel of the first syllable, for the syllable “car” is followed by only one consonant.

The Tonal Accent in Latin

W.S. Allen, in his “Vox Latina”, dismisses the idea that Latin had a pitch accent, despite the description of this accent in great detail by a number of Roman grammarians writing prior to the fourth century AD. Allen states that the accent is “a minor detail of the Greek”. This would be like saying that the musical accent of Italian was “ a minor detail of Italian”. In fact, the survival of the pitch accent, albeit in modified form, in Italian, and the survival of tonality in the five main Romance languages descended from Latin. provides evidence that educated Romans adopted it into their Latin. Cicero himself speaks of the musicality of Latin, likening Spoken Latin to a form of singing. Further evidence exists in the adoption of the tonal accent into Hebrew recitation. Indeed, the Jews adopted the Greek system, including the method for manually marking the tones. (Manuum variis motibus altitudinem, depressionem, flexus vocis significabant) Talmudic texts were published with accents for this tonal singing, until well into the mediaeval period. This accent has similarities to the Greek accent , and probably developed in imitation of the Greek recitation of the Laws to a chanted tune.

Edgar H. Sturtevant, "The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin" University of Chicago Press, 1920, gives a much more developed analysis of the accent than Allen does, and he reaches the opposite conclusion. In paragraph 214 of The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin, Sturtevant sets forth the summary of his argument:

"214. The evidence compels us to conclude that in the period of the classical and post-classical literature the Latin accent involved both stress and high pitch upon the same syllables. For stress we have abundant evidence also for both the pre-classical and the latest periods; but we learn directly of the Latin pitch only for the period from about 100 B.C. to about 300 A.D. It is probable, however, that it existed both earlier and later. In fact, it is not unlikely that the considerable element of pitch in the modern Italian accent is a direct inheritance from Latin."

Bennett, along with David (see below), both of whom I regard as authoritative on this matter, come down in favour of the "Greek" accent. Herman and Wright in “Vulgar Latin” also hold the view that the accent in Classical times was a tone accent (pg 36).

One major plank of the argument regarding Classical Latin and tone versus stress, (Vulgar Latin, J Herman) is defeated by Hungarian, which “has a very strong stress accent involving intensity, while at the same time a whole operating system of vowels based on distinctions in length”.

In other words, a clear strong stress accent and a vowel system based on phonological length distinctions are not ipso facto incompatible. Yet one hears this recited again and again by Classicists, educated linguists and laymen alike, so often has this notion been repeated, that is has taken on authority simply by dint of repetition. I am not sure with which linguists this canard arose – for canard it surely is. There is no empirical scientific evidence for this opinion, only evidence that weighs against. Indeed, as Bennett notes, no human language has either an exclusive tonal accent or an exclusive loud-soft or stress accent. Some languages lean more towards the stress accent than the tonal accent, and others vice versa but the only human speech that would be devoid of tonal variations would be a totally monotone language, which, as far as one may suppose, does not exist, except in the minds of some misguided Latinists.

Classical Latin had both a stress accent, with tonal differentiation, and vowel length distinctions. Earlier Roman Grammarians assert quite explicitly that Latin used a tonal accent, similar to the Greek, and only from the fourth century onward to Roman grammarians talk about relative loudness, as opposed to pitch. (pg 36 Vulgar Latin, J. Herman & R. Wright, 2000, Penn State Press.)

The question of the nature of the Classical Latin accent was initially argued for cogently in English by Abbott, in his paper “The Accent in Vulgar and Formal Latin” (Classical Philology, II ppp 444 ff). Abbott held the view that the accent of the common people continued to be one of stress, but educated Romans developed an accent in which pitch predominated. This view is reasonable enough, when we consider to what extent Roman literature is based on the Greek. Also, educated Romans spoke Greek, with its pitch accent. This view is also supported by R.G. Kent ( Transactions of the American Philological Association, LI, pp19 ff), and Turner (Classical Review, 1912, pp147 ff).

Kent writes “In the middle of the second century BC the Greek teachers of the Roman youth set a fashion of speaking Latin with a pitch accent, for as Greeks they kept this peculiarity of their mother tongue when they learned Latin. From that time on, Latin was spoken with a pitch accent by the highly educated class, while the general populace retained the stress accent” (quoted on pg 55 of “Accentual Change and Language Contact” J. Salmons, 1992, Routledge.

Another recent study in support of the Pitch accent, is “The Non-European and Semitic Languages”, Saul Levin, SUNY Press, pg 236 ff

“ The ancient grammarians say clearly that the accent of Latin is either acute or circumflex, and they describe it just like Greek. In many details the distributions of acute and circumflex [between the Latin and Greek] agrees remarkably.”.

Levin continues to say “ Some in modern times have wrongly doubted, or rejected altogether, the testimony of the Roman Grammarians about accent. But since Latin literature conforms to the syllabification and vowel quantity of Greek, the literary language of Rome can hardly have failed to employ a pitch accent compatible with such versification and prose rhythm.” He then says even more emphatically, “ It will not do to dismiss the Latin pitch accent as an artificial imitation of Greek. The most classical Latin, the kind most thoroughly described in our sources, is the most thoroughly Hellenized. If Latin was ever free from Greek influence in some prehistoric time, that Latin is unknown to us, and to reconstruct it, be peeling off what we may label the literary, Hellenizing features, is a fantasy……..Admitting that there was a raised pitch does not conflict with the stress which undoubtedly was present in early Latin.”

See also the seminal work of J. Vendryes, “recherches sur l’histoire et les effets de l’intensite initiale en latin” (Paris 1902), which is quoted by Bennett.

“New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin” Andrew Sihler 1995, OUP , pg 241 also argues in favour of the pitched accent.

“ Roman Grammarians, down to the 4th C AD, describe the Latin accent in terms only appropriate for a pitch accent. Scholars have been wary as taking this as cogent, however, as not only is the terminology of Roman Grammarians taken over entire from Greek, their statements are often cribbed from Greek sources. Some scholars protest, however, that ancient authorities could hardly have thus identified Greek and Latin accent had there not been at least an appreciable element of pitch in the latter….The familiarity of educated Romans with Greek accent in both practice and theory probably would not have caused them to adopt an element of accent wholly irrelevant for their natural speech, but could have made them more aware of an existing element of pitch, and even to a studied enhancement of it – Latin with a Greek accent, if you will, in oratory or recitations of poetry”



Pulgram 1975, pg 116, quoted in “From Latin to Spanish”, Paul M Lloyd, Diane Publishing, 1987, argues that speakers of Classical Latin adopted the Greek pitch accent, and certainly made an effort to adopt it on formal occasions, if not in general speech.



“A New Theory of the Greek Accent” A.P. David, Oxford University Press, 2006 pg 76-7 is the most recent, and authoritative of the new school of scholars who promote the view that the original statements of Quintillian, etc, are accurate descriptions of Latin as it was spoken. Here is Davis' argument:

“It is also possible that Greek forms with an acute on the antepenult are a product of the reflex described in Vendryes’ Law, if the Latin penult in these words was heard to be pronounced with a circumflex.

Might there have been such a contonation in Latin? A simple synchronic picture, which accords with the traditional account, emerges if we assume a contonation. We are informed by a recent commentator that “ Roman Grammarians, down to the 4th century, describe L[atin] accent in terms appropriate only for a pitch accent” (quoting A.Sihler, see above, pg 241).

Modern scholars, however, tend to see a sort of ‘Greek envy’ in this native description and to be dismissive. But if we frame the new rule for Latin in terms of a recessive contonation, where the voice was required where possible to rise two morae before the ultima – without, in the case of this language, any stipulation as to the quantity of the ultima – the traditional stress rules for polysyllabic words in Latin automatically follow, if the combination of pitch and quantity worked in the way that I have described for Greek. A long penult, with two morae, containing the rise combined with the Latin version of the svarita, would produce a circumflex on the penult (amIcus); [circumflex on the capitalised I] while a short penult (of one mora) would cause the rise to revert back to one mora to the antepenult, producing the Latin acute with a deemphasised svarita (facilis).

In making an authoritative correction, Quintillian actually points to this recessive rule. Discussing errors in accentuation, he cites CethEgus [circumflex on the capitalised E] as properly having a flex on the penult (Institutio Oratorio 1.5):the common error was to pronounce the penult grave in this word instead of circumflex, which apparently rendered the penult short. (A circumflex requires two morae). He implies that this change in the quantity of the penult necessitates an acute first syllable (Cethegus) [with acute on the first e] – an erroneous pronunciation, but one which conforms to the proposed rule. The Latin accent was a recessive contonation, a rise and fall, where the rise occurred, wherever possible, on the second mora before the ultima.”

This is sound reasoning for dismissing W.S. Allen’s view.

As a final point, I would like to note, that one reason why one seldom hears Latin declaimed with this accent, is that one seldom hears Classical Greek spoken with it, even though there is not even a sliver of doubt that Classical Greek was spoken with a pitch accent. Current practice, however, is not necessarily a guide to good practice, and I would advocate the use of the tonal accent, for purely pedagogical reasons – it makes Latin more intelligible, and also makes clearer distinctions between stressed and unstressed, unaccented and accented syllables, and long and short vowels.

_____________________________________________________________________________________
Notes:
In monosyllables, vowels that are long take the circumflex, and vowels that are short take the acute.
árs
flôs
fáx


spês
párs
môns

Polysyllables take the circumflex accent when the penult is long by nature (This simply means that it has a long vowel, see above), and the final vowel is short. A circumflex can only appear over a syllable with a long vowel.

jûrĭs lûcĕ mûsă spînă

The circumflex accent is thought to have has a slight up-down tone, the acute a straightforward upwards tone. Final unaccented syllables had a slight falling tone. (This is called the grave accent, but this is not written, it is simply understood to be there.)

These accents were applied by the Romans in imitation of the Greeks, and may have been used when reciting poetry and during orations.

Mnemonics for Latin

Mnemonics for Latin

Using the Method of Loci to Memorise the Verb Table.

The use of mnemonics can help speed up the learning of various elements of Latin Grammar. Methods like this were used successfully by Roman Orators, and studying how to apply mnemonics formed an important part of the curriculum, as one of the tools needed for rhetoric. The method comes down to us through a work in Latin by an unknown author. The piece, called Rhetorica ad Herennium, is estimated to have been written around 85 BC, though it is unlikely that it was original with this author. The author of this textbook of rhetoric examines each of the five parts of rhetoric, including as the fourth part memoria in which he explains the method of loci. It is the only complete source from the classical world to survive, although there are brief references to the method by others, including Cicero and Quintilian, the chief teachers of rhetoric in the ancient and medieval worlds, and later in the Renaissance.

NOTE - not everyone can 'see' images in their mind's eye - I can't - at least -  not clearly, yet the system can still work well for me. I can remember the shape and texture of objects very clearly, so, instead of 'visualising' them in the boxes, I imagine running my hands over them to feel them - very odd it is indeed, running my hand over an imaginary eyeball with an arm growing out of it - but I can then 'see' - for want of a better word, the object very clearly. I don't really 'see' it, but I know exactly what shape it has, and where it is. So the method of loci is still a powerful system for me, even though I can't imagine pictures. If you have an auditory memory, you could do the same thing, but with sound.

A Verb Room using the Method of Loci.

The curious diagram you see here, is very useful, as it is a systematic method for the loci, developed by Fenaigle in the early 1800's. When combined with Gouraud's perfection of the mnemonic system, (which Grey had attempted to base on the Ancient Hebrew mnemonic system of acrostics, known in Classical texts as 'Simanim'. ) we end up with a very powerful artificial memory system.  All this sounds very arcane, but has a beautiful simplicity to it.


Step One:
Get comfortable. Sit with your back to the fireplace, or to a wall of your room.
Imagine the floor is divided into 9 squares, 3 squares per row.
Number them:
1-2-3
4-5-6
7-8-9

These 9 are represented in the diagram above, by the 9 squares in the middle.

On your left, is the first wall. Divide this, too into nine squares. Number them, starting from the top left
1-2-3
4-5-6
7-8-9

Now, compare your floor with your wall. None the consistency? This,however, is the FIRST wall, so each of the numbers has a ONE in front of it.
11-12-13
14-15-16
17-18-19

However, don't remember them like this, just as plain single digits.

Place the number TEN just above this wall, on the ceiling.

Then, do the same for the remaining two walls. The second wall will be the numbers 21,22,23 etc, and the third, 31,32,33, and the wall behind your back, 41,42,43 etc

Now, examine, the diagram above. If you cut it out, and folded it up, with the numbers on the INSIDE, you will have your room.

Take some time to get this pattern firmly into your head - I would spend a good 10 minutes, running over it in your mind's eye.  The method for constructing this memory room is outlined very clearly is this little books by S.Sams 
Ignore everything in the book, except for his very clear description of how to imagine the memory room.
You can put one of these memory rooms in every room and closet in your home. The first room would be for numbers 1 - 50, and the second for 50 -100 and so on.

Setting this system up in your head requires a small investment in time. Once you have it, you'll have it with you for life. Getting a large sheet of card, and drawing out the diagram above, and constructing the cube, can also  be of assistance.


NOW, for memorising the verbs using the method of loci:


Turn to page 191 of Sam's Book, (i.e. the last 4 pages or so) where he sets out his system for using the memory cube for learning the Latin verbs. I used the system very successfully myself, so it appears to work for me. It might work for you as well. Sams does not give all forms in his example, you can supply the passive and deponents yourself on the remaining 2 walls of your first room, and place irregulars in another room  - or put them alongside the regulars in the same boxes, once you have learned the regulars - remember to keep the tenses in the same loci, even in a new room.
IGNORE the number-word equivalent system given by Sams. If you want to play with this acrostic system, use the more advanced system developed by Gouraud:

Here is the floor of your room:

FIRSTLY, memorise the positions of these in their boxes. You may make up stories, visualise them. ( See the declension tower for examples of how to do this)

The first step is to be able to quickly recognise the forms. The second step, is to be able to give them over.

Here is a simplified set-up. We will learn it, then flesh it out with the full forms of the four paradigms for each tense. Aids to memory are in parentheses - feel free to make up your own ones)

1 I DO Am-o  ( note how it resembles i do)	2 I DID am-abam (I did fall on my bum)	3 I HAVE am-avi (note the resemblance avi - have)
4 I HAD am-averam (I had Avraham over for dinner)	5 I WILL am-abo (I will be about to arrive)	6 I MAY am-em (am-em, I may)
7 I MIGHT OR COULD am-arem ( I might visit a hareem)	8 I SHOULD HAVE am-averim	9 I SHALL HAVE am-avero

Note - all forms on the diagonal ( in green) from amo, end in o - i.e. amo, amabo, amavero. 

The form 'I should have' (red) is almost identical to the form of I shall have.

You can think of your won mnemonics for the forms I have not given.

So, sit in your armchair, and imagine these arrrayed on the floor, in their boxes. Be as vivid as you can, make your images as concrete as you can.

Once you know exactly where the words fall, and which words are in which box, add the rest of the forms of the paradigms of each verb to each box. I would draw up a plan of the floor, and write out the tables in each square, as per the instructions in S.Sam's book.

An hour or so of effort should have you remembering where the things are.

Remember, make use of the objects in your room that happen by chance to fall in the squares. For example, in my room, the top right corner had a table with a top hat on it, so I thought up the line ' I have a top hat', and so immediately recalled that that square was occupied by 'I have'

Now we leave the floor, and turn our imagination to the wall on our left, which we divide into nine squares:

1  I WOULD HAVE (I would have missed him) am-avissem	2 TO DO (the standard infinitives, amare, monere,regere etc) TO HAVE ...'D (To have missed the 'm; that fell off amavissem was really irresponsible!) amavisse ( with no final m)	3 TO BE ABOUT TO To be about to put a suppository up your recturum esse
4 DOING amandi IN DOING amando TO DO amandum (a giant eatingalmonds, while chanting fee fi fo fum)	5 TO DO (To do: to lose some weight from my tummy) amatum TO BE DONE ( To be done, now that its gone, to keep it off) amatu ( the tum has gone!)	6 DOING amans What am I doing? I'm eating almonds! (amans) What am I about to do? I'm about to give some almonds to this tourist! ABOUT TO DO amaturus
7 DO! ama!	8 SHALL DO! am-ato	9  DONE amatus TO BE DONE amandus (This is the last square and we're all done, but there is still more to be done)

If you have a reasonably good visual or spatial memory, you should be able to get all of this memorised in about one hour. Add all the other forms, as given in Sam's book at the very end. review it regularly...the first attempt will be really hard. Then it will get easier. You will find, even after one hour of this, that your comprehension of texts will jump, as you will recognise verb forms, and be able to relate them to their locations.

Learn to Speak Latin

The Latinum Latin Language Course is a successful free online audio course, devoted to teaching the Latin Language. The course functions as a “Latin Language Outreach Program”, and has an international user base. Several thousand audio files are downloaded from the course website every day. The Latinum Course is supported by resource materials for vocabulary learning, located on Schola,  with images and Latin words, but no other language. Users are encouraged to use their newly acquired language skills on the growing Latin-only Social website, Schola.

The Latinum Course uses modern language methods to teach Latin, based around an intensive oral system that would be too time intensive to implement in a classroom situation, but which is very well suited to distribution via the internet and iTunes, for use through the medium of a computer or personal stereo.

Apart from offering lessons in Classical Latin, Latinum also hosts a growing range of readings from Classical Texts and the Roman Poets, recorded by a number of contributors worldwide, some of whom are famous for their delivery of Latin prose. Thus, Latinum attracts both new students of the language, and also those who may have been studying for many years.

The Latinum Course is unique, in that it focuses on Latin as a living, spoken language. The course is aimed at giving its users a high level of fluency in spoken Classical Latin. This has not generally been a goal of courses in Latin since the Renaissance. The premise of the course is that the fastest road to an all round complete knowledge of the language, is to treat it as a modern language, and to learn it using the techniques that have successfully been applied to teaching English as a second language. A user who can speak Latin with some fluency, can then read the language as a fluent speaker. They should be able to think in the language, and not perpetually translate every sentence into their mother tongue in their heads. A fluent speaker will have a fast reading speed, and will be able to read and enjoy more aspects the vast and varied literature that has been written in Latin over the past 2300 years. It is the goal of the Latinum Course to assist in producing such students, a new generation of fluent Latinists, who will be able to use their Latin practically as a means of active communication, indeed a generation of Latinists such as the world has not seen for over 400 years.

to learn a language successfully, you need to expose yourself to it - the studying you do in class is really only ever going to be a very small part of the effort needed. Latinum is designed to help fill a gaping hole in Latin study - the lack of enough immersion material. 

The U.S. State Department groups languages for the diplomatic service according to learning difficulty.:

Category 1. The “easiest” languages for speakers of English, requiring 600 hours of classwork for minimal proficiency: the Latin and Germanic languages. However, German itself requires a bit more time, 750 hours, because of its complex grammar.

Category 2. Medium, requiring 1100 hours of classwork: Slavic languages, Turkic languages, other Indo-Europeans such as Persian and Hindi, and some non-Indo-Europeans such as Georgian, Hebrew and many African languages. Swahili is ranked easier than the rest, at 900 hours.. 

Category 3. Difficult, requiring 2200 hours of study: Arabic, Japanese, Korean and the Chinese languages. Classical Latin falls into this group

Will you get a chance to practice Latin? This is the thorny problem with Latin - partially solved by the internet, and access to Schola  and the growing number of Latin Speaking clubs around the world. If you had been learning latin 300 years ago, you wouldn't have this problem - there would be enough Latin speakers around.

To be a successful learner of any language you need the chance to hear, read and speak the language in a natural environment. Language learning takes an enormous amount of concentration and repetition, which cannot be done entirely in the classroom. Will you have access to the language where you live, work and travel? 

The Latinum Course uses as its base text the comprehensive textbook for Spoken Latin, written by the famed 19th century linguist, G.J.Adler, called " A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language".

The map above shows red dots, representing clusters of ten users, showing the location of the user base of the Latinum Course for learning how to speak Classical Latin, over the months of May - July 2008. Larger dots are clusters of 10-99.  During this period, over 12 700 individual users accessed the Course website. Over 2 million audio files will have been downloaded from the Latinum Course since the program came online in the first quarter of 2007 through to the end of July 2008. 

Why Study Latin?

Why Study Latin? 
by Molendinarius, December 8 2009.

"Today, every laptop with an internet connection contains more information than the Great Library of Alexandria. At its peak, that library contained 700,000 books, until the Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered it burned down; today, Google Books has over seven million – and that's before you count everything else online. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short story imagining a "total library" containing all written information. Seventy years later, it exists." Johann Hari, The Guardian, 8 December 2009.
The implications of Google books, and the availability of the vast universe of literature written in Latin, previously hidden - even, in many instances, to specialists, should be sending a shudder through your world.
For once, you have an honest answer to give, an answer you can shout from the rooftops - to the perennial question, "Of what use is Latin". 

The answer lies behind your search box on google books. Type in 'haec est" and a torrent of literature will pour forth to assault you. The cultural production of two thousand years, written in Latin, unread, unknown, there for the picking and reading.
What do we have? Novels - both Roman remains, and Renaissance fiction - science fiction even! Poetry - more than you could imagine. Dialogues. Plays. Stories and Fables, Philosophy, Science, Mathematics.....the vast bulk of the intellectual production of Europe, from Roman times, until the early 1800's, was written in Latin. The most renowned poets in Europe, wrote in Latin to continental acclaim.
Due to an ever shrinking pool of readers over the course of the 20th Century, this material is nowadays largely unknown, a vast terra incognita - even largely uncatalogued. The Latin works of Milton and Addison, Buchanan and Locke, go unread.  There is also a vast, unread mountain of material in manuscript, some of it only now being published for the first time.
As one blogger online remarked recently, because of the wonderful thing that is Google, having thrown open the world's libraries -  "we starve amidst a banquet". Never before in history, has anyone had access to the breadth and depth of Latin literature, that you personally have access to now, at the click of a mouse. The volume of material on Google increases by the day.

We see some signs of adjustment to this shift taking place in the teaching profession - "Latin for the New Millenium" - but old habits and old ideas persist. Teachers are reverting to renaissance teaching methods, that stressed an ability to read quickly, to speak and write Latin. Philological, pedantic methods of teaching, that will not equip our students to delve into this world, persist. For these books, there are no English translations. To read this material, you need fluency and command of the language - fluency to peruse quickly, and find the gold nuggets in the dross. Fluency to simply cover ground. Even if you pick a tiny area of knowledge, you could not hope to read all the texts written on the subject in Latin.

Some scholars claim they are only interested in reading 'Classical Latin', written by the very Romans themselves. These scholars cut themselves off from the 2000 years of literary criticism and commenting on Latin texts, written in Latin. The vast bulk of scholarship on Latin original texts, is only available in Latin. Most of this material is terra incognita, and professors of Latin have not yet adjusted to the paradigm shift that must necessarily take place. Most spend their time publishing in English, French and German, and reading the work of other scholars in English, French and German. Small surprise, then, that their skill in Latin remains stunted. 

For a Classicist to ignore works written in Neo-Latin that discuss the poetics of Virgil, for instance, while happily reading modern critical material in Italian or German, is surpassing strange. Yet, that is our reality - as many of these pre-modern critical texts are unknown, and have sat on bookshelves, in vast repositories, unopened for centuries. Even their titles are often unrecorded in the literature, let alone discussion of their contents. 

Now, more than ever, Latin teachers, and students of Latin,  need to focus on fluency and an ability to read with fluidity - to give our students the tools to enter this sacrum sacrorum loaded with the wisdom of millenia. They need to show their students this vast depository, to demonstrate the usefulness of having a skill in reading this language.

If we do not transmit our wonder and amazement at this turn of events - then we will have failed to grasp an opportunity that no generation has ever had before.

The momentousness of this change is such, that it can be compared to the shift that took place in the world of letters after the invention of printing - leading to the wide dissemination of Classical texts, and to a burst of improved standards of Latin literacy. Once the preserve of a few monks in cloisters, anyone could now own Cicero, Vergil, and use these texts to improve their Latin. The result, the Neo-Latin Renaissance, that really only took off after the invention of printing.

Now, we face another paradigm shift - for us, as readers of Latin, we were more akin to the monks, with access to only a few valued tomes - the vast production of the renaissance was unavailable to us, even to the specialist - now, the floodgates have opened. 
How will we respond?

Audio Visual Latin

The Cursum Latinum  is currently in development. At the time or writing, over 200 lessons are available , with new material being uploaded to the dedicated YouTube channel on almost a daily  basis - the complete course, which will cover all the fundamentals of Latin, and a great amount of more advanced material, will comprise well over 1000 lessons. 

This is a course designed for the serious student of Latin, who wishes to be able to read texts which do not have translations (i.e. the vast bulk of material ever written in Latin in the past 2000, most of which remains untranslated). Due to its unique structure, the Cursum Latinum can be used by both adults and children. Even advanced students of Latin can benefit enormously from this course.

The Cursum Latinum is designed to train students to read and think in Latin. It is not a translation course. The goal is to reach a high level of reading fluency.

The methodology is very traditional, and uses a methodology that has documented origins in Roman times.

At present, the Cursum Latinum is only available (for free) on YouTube. It is the only course of its type in existence. There are a small number of teachers around the world, who teach Latin in Latin, but at present, the Cursum Latinum is the only example of such a course openly accessible, outside the confines of the University of Kentucky's Latin department, the Vivarium Novum, and a handful of classrooms around the world. 

Unlike a book-based course, the Cursum Latinum offers you a teacher. As the course follows Adler's text, "A Practical Grammar of the Latin Language for Speaking and Writing Latin", it is possible to use Adler (available on Google Books) to move along with the course, although the exact match to pages in Adler is not explicit, as the course uses other material, notably the educational materials for teaching Latin in Latin developed byJohn Amos Comenius in the mid seventeenth century, and materials developed by der Millner himself.

As the course is entirely in Latin, it can be used by students internationally. It also has the distinct advantage in that it will not date, as Latin is immutable, but the vernacular languages shift over time.

The foundational methodology of the Cursum Latinum is that developed by Jean Manesca in the late 1700's for teaching language orally, using conversation. This method was subsequently adopted by Henri Ollendorff, who wrote a textbook for teaching Latin using this method in the early 1840's. George Adler, a noted German-American linguist, re-wrote this text, and published it in 1856, the year before his death.

The text then sank into oblivion, to be rediscovered by der Millner in 2007.

Initially, the text was serialised as an audio course along with the English explanations, on the now defunct Latinum podcast.