Two of my classes were actually canceled today, so my last day of class consisted solely of Latin, which is perfectly ok with me. The professor brought in donuts (crustulum) for us and spent the first few minutes watching funny Latin videos before reviewing for the final. Sadly he forgot to bring in How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Latin edition. I realized today how much I’m going to miss that class. The people in there are awesome and funny, and though the language is more difficult than others I’ve had, it’s also just more interesting and fun too. For instance, normally language classes teach you words like ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘please’ pretty early on. Not us, lol. We learned them on literally the last day.
Non = no
Sic = yes
Amabo te = please
Though technically those are just the English equivalents. Sic really mean ‘thus’, but is basically used as ‘yes’, and ‘amabo te’ essentially means ‘I will love you [if you….]’
Oh, and we also learned ‘shut up’ and some other choice words because my professor’s awesome.
Tace = shut up
Stercum = hehe, wouldn’t you like to now. Btw, if you’re ever in Cherry Hall and hear someone shout that, you’ll know, haha.
So instead of learning those kinds of words, we were more likely to read and translate sentences about farmers and poets, lol. Here are few examples I pulled from my workbook:
Cur ab Italia vela dabat? Nam Italia erat patria poetae.
Why did he set sail for Italy? For Italy was the country of the poet.
Servus ferrum habet, sed aurum habere optat.
The slave has iron, but he desires to have gold.
Quid est agrum bene colere? Bene arare. Quid est secundum? Arare. Quid tertium? Stercorare.
What is it to tend the field well? You must plow well. What is second? To plow. What is third? To spread manure (though if you’ll notice the similarity of stercorare and stercum, you may wish to give it…a different meaning, lol).
But today in class we focused more on conjugation of verbs for the upcoming final. So we conjugated amo, amare (to love) into every tense we’ve learned this year. We learned 9 tenses. Each tense has 6 versions for number and person. So we wrote out 56 different conjugations of amo (there are of course far more conjugations still left to learn :P)…and then proceded to chant through them because we like to let people on our floor to know what we’re learning, lol. Though we had a few hiccups because if you keep saying ama-[insert ending here] it begins to sound like “I’m a –“ in a southern redneck accent. It got particularly funny at “amabor” and once someone pointed out that amabo is Obama spelled backwards. … sigh. I’m going to miss that class. (though even if I had room for Latin 2 in my schedule, the 8:00am-ness is enough of a deterrent)
Ok, I’ve talked about Latin enough for one day. And I think we’re about to go out to eat to celebrate the end of classes. Until next time…
Vos amo,
Blitzen