Sepe uorat gnarus canis id quod seruat auarus

by moonface Posted on December 8, 2020

Sup all?

It’s raining. The gardening is on hold although *big* plans are now afoot (for a relatively small garden).

I have been (among other things) an automation engineer (until I suddenly and recently wasn’t), and perhaps unsuprisingly given this nugget not only do I like languages, but I also like building and automating things.

One plan that I have is to automate my greenhouse. This ticks a lot of geek boxes for me – especially now I don’t do robots ‘n stuff anymore.

However, the greenhouse is currently used as a woodshed, necessitating that I build a new wood shed before I can decant the wood from the greenhouse into the new wood shed. Unfortunately, the obvious place for the woodshed contains a shed which has more or less collapsed and needs to …

You get the picture.

Big plans … I shall probably dedicate, a secret hidden section on Surface languages to this project.

But I digress, and so, my friends if you are now suitably relaxed and sitting comfortably, it is time to parse some Latin.

Or, attempt to parse some Latin.

I admit, that prima facie, or at first blush, I don’t know what …

Sepe uorat gnarus canis id quod seruat auarus

… means.

Normally I have an idea and play with parsing because it appeals to my inner geek, but this meaning might in fact elude me.

So let’s parse this sentence and see what’s occurring.

Sepe. OK. I’m initially assuming that it is a contraction of saepe meaning often.

gnarus, a, um (having knowledge of, knowing of, acquainted with a thing)

canis, is (dog) is a third declension noun.

Let us decline canis …

canis, canis, canem, canis, cani, cane

canes, canes, canes, cranium, canibus, canibus

or something like that;)

I did that from memory. No guarantees.

By the way, this is why canis becomes canem in

cave canem (beware of the dog)

A noun following the verb in Latin (normally) takes the accusative case.

One of the reasons that I find Croatian and Croatian grammar so neat, is that all the same issues arise as with Latin but in real-time (so to speak).

While writing this my subconscious must have been buzzing along because I have now remembered, that which I had forgotten:

in Latin there was no distinction between the letters V and U (or for that matter between the letters I and J).

This is why the Latin sentence looked so strange (to me).

Uorat could be written as vorat, and having realising this I wandered over to the bookcase, and extracted my Lewis & short:-

voro, vorare, voravi, voratus (to swallow)

vorat (he swallows)

gnarus looks like a nominative to me, so declining canis earlier was not strictly necessary and this gives us (or me) the clue that gnarus canis is a nominative.

Sepe vorat granus canis often the known dog swallows …

id quod (it that)

Seruat and auaras become servat and avarus respectively when the same U to V substitution is made.

servo, servare, servavi, servatus. (protect, store, keep, guard, preserve, save)

servat is a third person singular meaning ‘he serves/protects’ etc.

avarus (miser, mean or greedy person) and is in the nominative case in the sentence, with the consequence that it is likely to be the subject.

id quod servat avaras ‘it that protects the mean person’.

And so my final translation of, Sepe uorat gnarus canis id quod seruat auarus or Sepe vorat gnarus canis id quod servat avarus becomes:-

Frequently the known dog swallows what the mean person protects.

The archaic English equivalent is :

Cats eat what hussies spare.

and which admittedly I have never heard anyone use.

Spare is used in the sense of remain or save, and hussy is well, an archaic term for a ‘lewd or brazen woman’.

I’ve never heard anyone say ‘hussie’ for realsis either.

Nuff said.

The meaning of both sayings is that what someone tries to save through meanness is likely to be wasted anyway – either by a cat or dog (or a wolf if you are Croatian).

Here is the Croatian equivalent (found on wikiquote), which involves a vuk (wolf) :

I brojne ovce vuk jede, kamoli nebrojene.

This is nothing like our previous examples, but conveys the same somewhat anxious sentiment:-

The wolf eats numerous sheep, (and I’m now guessing) let alone the uncounted (ones).

Besos and baci.

MF

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In manus tuas, Domine, commendo Spiritum meum

by moonface Posted on November 6, 2020

Sup?

It’s time to parse some Latin and on this glorious lockdown Friday, we are going to parse

In Manus tuas, Domine, commendo Spitirum meum.

But first, and assuming that you are sitting comfortably, let me tell you about my new computer.

I bought a dirt cheap (sub £200) ACEPC running Windows 10 incredibly slowly. I zapped that and installed Kali Linux.

And suddenly, I have a machine that works, and works fast.

Nuff said.

As usual, let’s start by parsing our Latin sentence word by word.

In is a preposition meaning ‘in’ (like duh) or ‘to’ (like not duh) depending on whether the related noun is in the accusative or ablative case.

The related noun often comes immediately after the preposition, and in this case it does and is manus.

Manus, us (hand) is a fourth declension feminine noun and declines like so:-

Manus, manus, manum, manus, manui, manu. (singular)

Manus, manus, manus, manuum, mamibus, manibus. (plural)

As manus must be either accusative or ablative (because of in), the only possibility is an accusative plural.

Tuus (and I know the capital looks weird) is a possessive pronoun (your), which from memory (I hope) declines like bonus (an adjective often used as a model).

The accusative feminine plural of tuus is tuas. See how neat that is?

In manus tuas must mean ‘in your hands’.

Dominus, i has various meanings, and here means Lord. It is a second declension masculine noun.

Domine is the vocative of Dominus giving us ‘O Lord’.

Commendo (I entrust) is the first person singular of commendare.

In manus tuas, Domine, commendo … (Nn your hands I entrust …)

As well as being satisfying, Latin parsing is an easy way to increase your vocabulary and remember how nouns decline.

Just saying.

Spiritus, us (soul, breath, life) is also a fourth declension masculine noun. It is in the accusative (spiritum) along with meum which is what we would expect, as the object of the sentence.

And so finally,

In your hands, O Lord, I entrust my soul.

I’m not religious, but sometimes I wish I was.

Pax, Baci and Besos.

MF

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Two years of Croatian

by moonface Posted on September 24, 2020

Sup all?

I have taken a slight liberty with this title as I haven’t quite been learning Croatian for two years.

But it’s time for an update on my progress, and I’m heading for the two year mark so if you are sitting comfortably, then I’ll begin …

Keeping a record of progress, and more to the point your thoughts on how things are going is a very useful exercise. This springs to mind as I’ve just read my previous update written five months ago, which for me was enlightening.

Some of the things I wrote still make sense to me and have been successful and others not so much (which I will come to in a minute).

In April, I (metaphorically) stuck my finger in the air and guessed that my Croatian level was a high A2. I now suspect that it was lower that that, and that I have now reached a decent A2 level or low B1. I am not doing exams so it is impossible to be sure.

A lot of Croatian grammar has ‘clicked’ over the previous five months, and my sentences now have fewer errors.

The activities that I am doing, which might or might help you if you are a similar stage to me in your Croatian journey and need to break through to the next level are:-

I have continued to study for half an hour five days a week as a minimum but often for longer) and I listen to Croatian audio a *lot*.

I (prompted by my tutor) rote learned the endings of the various so I can now decline Croatian nouns and adjective properly. I needed to be familiar enough with Croatian before I could do this, so I could (as I wrote previously) see the wood for the trees.

It would have been useful to do this earlier.

Part of my previous advice was to learn language chunks such as ovaj tjedan (this week), zadnji tjedan (last week) or svaki dan (every day). I’m going to carry on with this. It’s incredibly useful with Croatian and I suspect all slavic languages.

At this point in my Croatian journey where swathes of the grammar are making sense to me (ignoring aspects for a moment), the biggest headache is vocabulary acquisition.

Previously, I recommended making a list and only adding three words a day, and I would still recommend doing this where possible. I don’t add precisely three words each day. Some days I don’t add any, and some days rather more than three BUT I’m not adding a lot on a daily basis.

This does tend to keep the list at a manageable level.The thing about vocabulary is that you need to learn (or at least understand) lots’n’lots’n’lots in order to understand what you hear.

I have started listening to SBS Croatian. For me, the encouraging part of this, is that after two years of study, I’m listening to native speech. At some point you have to start doing this. The time felt right for me after two years with Croatian. It will be sooner for my next language – and there’s a spoiler.

I dip into Citaj Knjigu and understand bits and pieces which I’m doing to reinforce the vocabulary that I know.

All in all, I am pleased/happy/chuffed to bits with my progress, and loving the language.

It’s taken me two years to more or less reach a B1 level, and I’m guessing it will take the same again to more or less reach B2.

Yippee …

Besos, Baci i Pax.

MF.

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De noche todos los gatos son pardos

by moonface Posted on September 22, 2020

I’ve always liked this saying which has the literal meaning of ‘by night all cats are grey’.

I had assumed that it was in origin either Spanish or another romance language, as I had never heard or read of an English equivalent.

By the way pardo means dun or brownish-grey, and dun has a similar meaning: meaning dull, greyish brown, gloomy etc.

The meaning is that in the dark appearances don’t matter and that is is easy to be deceived in the dark. A slightly less literal interpretation is that in some circumstances it is easier to be fooled than in others.

In fact according to blogs.20minutos.es the cats were not in fact cats but madrileños. Madrid was apparently a hot-bed of crime and scullduggery back in the day, and presumably you had to keep your wits about you.

De noche todos los gatos son pardos was even used by Cervantes in 1615 in the Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha.

Interesting.

By chance I consulted my Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs (which belonged to my grandfather before me), and  it turned out that in 1546 John Heywood published his book of proverbs containing:

When all candels be out, all cats be grey.

This looks suspiciously like the origin of the proverb to me, or at least an earlier version than the use by Cervantes in 1615.

There is a wiki version which I’m not going to link to, as I’m pretty sure it is incorrect. It uses the american spelling of the word gray as opposed to the UK version which is in fact grey. The author was from the UK back in the 1500’s so the american spelling seems unlikely to say the least. The moral here is don’t trust everything you read on the internet kids;)

In fact, the proverb turns up all over the place, the Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (and yes I have spotted that grey is now gray):

He knew not which was which; and, as the saying is, all cats in the dark are grey.

It was also used by Benjamin Franklin in 1745 when referring to the charms of older women.

There are naturally enough versions in other languages.

The Italians have two:

Di notte tutti i gatti sono grigi.

Di notte tutti i gatti sono bigi.

Grigio is of course grey, and bigio is perhaps surprisingly also grey.

And French:

La nuit tous les chats sont gris.

And Yiddish:

Bay nakht zaynen ale ki royt

At night all cows are black.

And Polish:

W nocy wszystkie koty są czarne

At night, every cow is black.

And German:

Nachts sind alle Katzen grau

I tried to find the proverb in Croatian by making up my own Croatian version and searching for it (Noću su sve mačke … )

If you must know. It doesn’t exist in that form, but I did come across:

Noć u kojoj su sve krave crne

And so we are back to cows again krava being the Croatian for cow and krave cows .

I don’t know if it is used in the same sense in Croatian, or even if it is a ‘real’ Croatian proverb.

Besos, baci et pax,

MF.

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De minimus non curat lex

by moonface Posted on August 27, 2020

Sup?

Today is a typical west country summers day, which in essence means it is raining too hard to be outside.

And so, it’s time to parse some Latin.

I chose de minimis non curat lex, as back in the day, I was involved with the legal profession (oh yes), and not only is it a legal maxim, but also comes bundled with a handy limerick.

There was a young lawyer called lex,
 who had very small organs of sex.
 When done for exposure,
 he said with composure,
 De minimis non curat lex.

The standard meaning given is :

The law doesn’t concern itself with trifles.

So how do we get there?

De is a preposition which followed by the ablative means ‘concerning’.

Minimus, a, um is an adjective meaning smallest and can also (as is common in Latin) be used as a noun.

Declining minimus in the masculine plural (nominative-ablative) gives:-

minimi, minimi, minimos, minimorum, minimis, minimis.

showing us that the ablative of minimus is minimis.

De minimis translates as ‘of or concerning small things).

I’ve added things so that this makes sense in English, and this is legal;) where a Latin adjective is functioning as a noun.

Lex, legis (law) is a feminine noun, and declines as follows:-

Lex, lex, legem, legis, legi, lege.

Now safe in the knowledge that lex is a nominative, we can now be sure that it is the subject of the verb curat. The verb Curare has various meanings including ‘to trouble oneself about’.

It is a regular transitive verb (i.e. it takes a normal object) which conjugates in the present tense as:-

curo, curas, curat, curamos, curatis, curant. (I trouble myself about, you trouble yourself about …)

So, our final rendering is:-

Of small things the law doesn’t trouble itself.

Pax, besos i baci.

MF

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Porcus ex grege diaboli

by moonface Posted on August 20, 2020

Sup all?

It’s time to parse some Latin, and for reasons that need to remain opaque I have picked something short and sweet.

Porcus ex grege diaboli.

It translates as ‘swine from the devils flock’ and so the question as ever is how do we get this?

Porcus is pretty straight-forward, meaning a tame swine, hog or pig.

Digressing slightly (having looked this up in my Lewis & Short), porculus (the diminutive) means a young swine, pig, porker or porkling.

If you felt so inclined, you could substitute porculus in place of porcus leaving you with the slightly more vitriolic :-

Porculus ex grege diaboli.

By the way, porcus marinus, sea hog was the original Latin name for porpoise.

Ex, taking the ablative as many Latin prepositions do, gives us ‘out of, from’.

And what about grege?

Obviously, we can guess that it means ‘flock, herd’ but that isn’t parsing Latin, it is guessing at a meaning.

In fact, it is a third declension noun with a nominative of grex and genitive of gregis with various meanings.

Knowing this, allow us to decline if, and it declines something like this:-

grex, grex, gregem, gregis, gregi, grege

I say something like this, as there is the possibility that I have mis-remembered my third declension nouns, and I’m not going to check.

So be warned.

However, grex, gregis looks suspiciously like rex, regis to me, a noun which I learnt as a model back in the day.

Grege is as we had hoped an ablative, and so ex grege looks like a good match for ‘from the flock’. No guessing.

That just leaves diaboli and I will give you a clue which is that the literal translation is

Swine from the flock OF the devil.

In other words, diaboli looks at first blush to be a genitive, and a quick glance in my dictionary tells me that it is a second declension masculine noun.

It will decline like so:-

diabolus, diabole, diabolum, diaboli, diabolo, diabolo.

The noun Diaboli is in the genitive meaning ‘of the devil’ and so our final translation is as we guessed.

But we now know that it is correct.

Besos and baci.

MF

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Assimil German. Again. 1

by moonface Posted on June 8, 2020

Sup?

It’s time for an update on my ultra-slow Assimil German project.

As you may recall, I decided to spend ten minutes a day learning German using the Assimil German course, and see where it took me.

As you may also recall, I have also been spending a significant amount of time on painting, putting up fences (still to be done) and general maintaining of the fabric of the house. In my defence, there isn’t a lot else to do in the UK what with the pubs, bars, restaurants, cinemas and shops being closed and travel more or less impossible. In short, I have turned into a DIY bore which isn’t something that I ever anticipated.

Strangely perhaps, this has meant that the ultra slow language learning project has slowed further.

Slowed but not stopped.

The pleasing thing is that it turns out that this method of learning another language (and over learning a small amount of information) really suits me, and you can read about it here if you are so inclined.

Festina lente has for me never been so apt.

And finally the update which you have been waiting for :-

Words known. 93

Lesson reached. 8

Next time, I will tell you all about my Croatian progress …

Besos, baci and pax.

MF.

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Assimil German. Again. Day Zero

by moonface Posted on April 27, 2020

Sup?

Sometimes looking at the positives (instead of the many, many negatives) in any given situation helps …

So, on that note …

Pandemic life isn’t all bad. The weather has been OK. There has been an ensuing economic downturn (catastrophe might be a better word) leading me and many others to have more time.

The air is cleaner. The streets are more peaceful. You can hear the birdsong (even in the middle of a city).

My life is slower and more reflective.

I’m doing jobs that have been left for years – re-doing the kitchen, putting up a new fence in our (small) garden (not tomorrow as the forecast for the West Country is torrential rain). And then more rain …

I have more time …

I am thinking more. I hope that maybe the world can change for the better when lockdown ends. Do we need to use cars all the time? Can we buy local food more, and support local businesses more?

I’m optimistic.

This leads back to the world of language learning, where I was reflecting why in the past I’ve had so little success with further languages until I started learning Croatian.

The answer is …

… being in too much of a hurry.

Over the years, I have stopped and started with Assimil with varying degrees of success.

One of my past attempts (back in 2017 or thereabouts) was using Assimil German. I didn’t get very far, but during lockdown I have decided to give it a whirl for a second time.

You know the old saying “same approach, same results” meaning rather obviously that without changing your approach to something, your results will be the same.

This holds true for most things in life, whether it be exercise (kettle bells and callisthenics if you must know), work (sigh), relationships or language learning.

I now have a different approach for using Assimil.

If you cast a glance at my language goals for the year, you won’t see German on the list.

My primary focus is that amazingly chic language Croatian, and that isn’t changing anytime soon but I still have a hankering to learn a tad of something else.

It was going to be Polish but it turns out (which I already knew but didn’t consider) that there are  many similarities between Polish and Croatian. These were enough to confuse me, which wasn’t helping my Croatian, and once again Polish has been put on the back burner. For now. Sorry.

And so my thoughts turned towards Assimil German.

I mulled it over and thought ok, lets give this another go. but I need to set myself some learning parameters. I’ve danced this dance before with Assimil, and fallen foul of the volume of information contained in the courses.

Still, I’m older, wiser and have learned a lot about language learning over the previous 18 months with my Croatian passion.

One of the various suggestions made by Assimil is that each lesson can be completed in approximately thirty minutes.

Well, not by me sunshine, not by me.

So here is my plan or perhaps a better description would be Assimil experiment. This will kill two metaphorical birds with one stone. 

Firstly, the the itch to play with another language (metaphorical bird number 1) and secondly an experiment with ultra slow learning (metaphorical bird number 2).

Assimil requires conservatively thirty minutes per day per lesson, and more realistically in my experience over an hour per day per lesson. This my babbers is time that I don’t have.

Actually, it is time I *could* have currently due to the combination of lockdown and reduced working hours.

However, it isn’t extra time that I want to spend on languages (kitchens, gardens etc take time). I haven’t even mentioned the curtain poles, light fittings and rendering …

I do most definitely have ten minutes.

I am now on the cusp of presenting to you my plan for ultra slow language learning in ten minutes a day.

My plan can be summed up as

Festina Lente

Literally meaning ‘haste with speed’ or more commonly ‘make haste slowly’. Apparently, according to the wiki, the Grand Duke of Tuscany used this as his motto along with a sail backed tortoise as illustration. Also, which I never knew, a dolphin entwined around an anchor is the most common representation of this motto.

And this is my POA (plan of action) which is a series of rules designed to keep me on track.

  • Each day I will add no more than three words to a German word list which I am overlearning.
  • The words will come from the current lesson.
  • I will only add words which are very common or useful to me particularly. So I would not include a word like Feder (feather) for example.
  • I will add the occasional sentence when it illustrates a grammatical point. The words contained must have been already added to the list.
  • I will spend the remaining ten minutes reading the grammar notes.

Overlearning. More on this later, but for now, for me and for Assimil German, it is learning and retaining a relatively small body of words, phrases and sentences which illustrate grammatical points.

What do I hope to achieve?

Like. Duh. A complete mastery of the German language;)

OK, as above, more on this later. In essence, I hope to remember 1000 words of German over the course of a year – and be able to recall them as required.

Strictly speaking, I should end up knowing slightly more with 365 multiplied by three coming in at 1095.

But assuming the economy ever recovers, I will presumably be working longer hours at some point, so days will be missed … occasionally.

Besos, baci et Pax.

MF

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Thoughts on learning Croatian

by moonface Posted on April 15, 2020

If you have perchance glanced at my blog, you might have noticed that for the last eighteen months or thereabouts, I have been learning Croatian.

I’ve just got to put it out there that I’ve been dipping into Samuel Pepys diary. Hence the ‘perchance’. Mr Pepys lived through the bubonic plague in London back in 1665, and I was reading his entries as a way to put context into Covid 19.

His language is, to the modern ear, flowery but I am deviating (as usual) from the purpose of this post.

Let me start writing again, and imagine that I spoke this quickly, in a rush, desperate to get the word out.

I am learning Croatian and my level is probably a high A2 

Having reached these dizzy heights, I have thoughts on how to learn Croatian efficiently, and maybe some concrete advice to offer.

Follow it at your peril.

Croatian is one of the slavic languages. These languages offer certain challenges for the English speaker: cases, word order, perfective and imperfective verbs and so on. You also need to have a basic understanding of grammatical terms: nouns, adjectives, cases and so on.

Does that appeal?

Not all is doom and gloom, the pronunciation is straightforward and the verbs relatively easy to conjugate. Nothing much else springs to mind as being a metaphorical walk in the park, and it isn’t for nothing that Slavic languages can be considered difficult to learn (for us English speakers).

But, of course there are ways and means to speed up your progress, and if you are sitting comfortably then I will as Mr Pepys might have said ‘go thither’.

I never meant for Croatian to become one of my languages, originally intending to learn a few pleasantries of the type found in this site, some numbers and so on prior to a visit.

Anyway, I fell hopelessly in love with the language and it has become one of the five or six that I would like to speak well – or at least to a good B1 level.

I am eighteen months into my Croatian journey. I have found learning Croatian (thus far) to be a slow and enjoyable process with numerous twists, turns and detours and frustrations.

It’s the frustrations that I could do without, and these few breadcrumbs might help you travel through the wood.

Making a sentence!

One of the challenges of Croatian and I imagine any other slavic language is the volume of information needed to construct a basic sentence – which is more or less grammatically correct.

Here is an illustration (from the Little Prince) just to give you an idea.

Kad im pričate o nekom novom prijatelju, nikad vas ne pitaju za najbitnije.

The meaning is:-

When you talk to them about some new friend, they never ask you …

All sorts of different cases are used in what is a simple Croatian sentence.

O is a preposition meaning about and has to be followed using the locative case. In Croatian, adjectives and nouns change depending on the case required so novi (new) becomes novom, prijatelj (friend) becomes prijatelju and so on.

The word order is different from English. Kad im pričate (when they say to you) is literally ‘when to you they say’, and to make matters worse im (to you) also changes depending on the meaning required.

OK. Looking at that you might wonder how anyone manages to say anything at all in Croatian? It also begs the questions as to where to start as a beginner?

Clearly there is too much information to retain to be able start making sensible sentences of your own (other than in some limited circumstance).

At the beginning, it is more or less impossible to see the wood for the trees, so the first piece of advice is don’t worry. Chill. Relax. Chillax,

You will not be able to understand how Croatian sentences hang together at the beginning, so don’t worry about it. Unless you have a brain the size of a planet, and frankly if you do then why probably don’t need to read these words.

So, to counteract the feeling of helplessness that this fosters, I present to you dear friend and reader the second piece of advice which is to learn a few well chosen complete sentences.

Try and pick simple and short sentences which are useful (to you), and where possible which illustrate a part of Croatian grammar (which makes sense to you).

Here is an example:

Učio sam gramatiku (I have learned grammar)

It reminds me (personally) of the past tense, and it reminds me that Croatian feminine nouns change endings from a to u in the accusative.

It is useful for me, but probably not for you which is the point.

You have to make your own lists.

The third piece of advice is that you have to learn Croatian grammar but you can learn it slowly (korak po korak) without worrying about it. It might not be trendy and might not be cool to some, but absolutely ignore grammar at your peril.

I enjoy playing with Latin, and parsing Latin sentences for fun so it’s no great hardship for me. If you don’t like grammar, and find it boring release your inner geek and revel in words like pluperfect, apposition, attributive and transitive.

No? Not grabbing you? Maybe for starters, just least learn what nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and locative are about.

You don’t need to worry about ablative in Croatian 😉

The most important piece of advice (I think) for you to speak Croatian (as opposed to understand Croatian) is overlearning of a small part of the language.

I’m going to elaborate on this in a later post (as it is important) but for now small part means:

  • Sentences which are useful or illustrate some essential part of Croatian grammar.
  • Sentences which are useful to you personally.
  • Language chunks. For example, ‘last week’, ‘I went to’, ‘every day’ and so on.
  • Common words which are useful. For example, ‘animal’ might go in the list but ‘dog’ and ‘cat’ would not, or ‘black’ and ‘white’ might be included but ‘cyan’ would not.

The key to the above list is over learning. I think it is really, really important and also why Assimil can be so good if used well.

The aim is to know the words instinctively and be able to recall them without thinking.

I will elaborate on this, but for now, my suggestion would be don’t add more than three or four words a day to the list if you are using spaced repitition.

I know that sounds like heresy, but make haste slowly. I’ll explain l8r.

For what it is worth, my goal is to be at a consistent B1 or above with languages that I learn, and I think that in particular this over learning is hugely important regarding speaking at that level (and not forgetting everything).

It is also perfectly achievable with 30 minutes a day over time.

Besos, Baci and hand washing in the time of the Pandemic.

MF.

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Let’s parse some Latin:) Part. 2

by moonface Posted on April 13, 2020

Sup?

I just know that you want to parse :

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram

In these days of Covid, I hope you are all keeping all staying safe and finding ways to amuse yourselves, and what better way than playing with Latin?

And it will also help you with your Croatian;)

“In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram” is the first sentence, of the first paragraph of the first page of the Vulgate (St Jeromes translation of the bible), and basically kicks off the Old Testament. Genesis. 1. 1. to be precise.

It is also great to parse as it is simple and illustrates all sort of cool things about Latin.

The Vulgate was written to be understood, and the Latin wasn’t horribly complicated. This means it’s a great way to practice. Digressing a bit, but when I learnt Latin (back in the dark ages), we had to learn all sort or rules by heart. The idea was that this would help us to learn Latin.

Latin has nouns which fit into groups (declensions) which have similar endings, an example being Bellum.

This is an example of a second declension neuter noun) and declines like so :- bellum, bellum, bellum, belli, bello, bello in the singular. The plural is different.

Well, this kind of activity certainly kept me busy but didn’t encourage any kind of appreciation of Latin or languages for that matter.

But, we can analyse, look at and parse a small sentence such as “In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram” and start to understand why Latin is cool.

I’ve saved you the bother of looking the words up. It gave me something to do in these days of lock-down. As is traditional with Latin (and indeed with other similar languages), I’ve listed them in the nominative singular.

principium Beginning. Second declension. Neuter.

Deus. Divine being. God. Second declension. Masculine.

Caelum. Heaven. Sky. Second declension. Neuter.

Terra. Earth. First declension. Feminine.

Et. And. Conjunction.

In. In when followed by the ablative case.

Creo, are. To create

And now onto the parsing.

In principio. The Latin word ‘in‘ followed by a noun in the ablative ‘principio‘ means somewhat anticlimactically ‘in’, giving us ‘in the beginning’.

The case matters as if it was followed by a noun in the accusative, it would mean ‘to’.

Creavit. This is a verb and the ending ‘it‘ tells us it mean ‘he created’.

The subject normally does the creating, and must be in the nominative case. The only noun which fits the bill is Deus.

The object is the ‘thing’ which was created, and in this snippet we have two objects ‘caelum et terram‘.

But, I hear you wonder (petulantly if you are anything like I was), how do we know that either caelum et terram is an object?

We know because they are both in the accusative case (reserved in general for objects).

Remember my example of bellum?

Well, caelum declines in the same way, giving us caelum, caelum, caelum, caeli, caelo, caelo.

caelum is both the nominative and accusative, but it fits as an object and makes sense in the context of the sentence.

terram is the accusative of terra. I will leave this as an exercise for the interested;) reader to decline.

This gives us literally :-

In the beginning created God heaven and earth.

Latin word order is flexible and not entirely similar to English so a better translation is obviously :-

In the beginning God created heaven and earth.

BTW I’m doing this from memory so fell free to correct me (politely) in the comments if I have erred.

Remember to wash you hands …

Pax, besos and baci.

MF

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