lectio-linguarum

[lectio-linguarum]

hectograph - a machine for making copies of a writing or drawing produced on a gelatin surface

“The First Class was under the bright eye of the headmaster, Robert Cary Gilson, a remarkable man with a neat pointed beard who was an amateur inventor and an accomplished scientist as well as a skilled teacher of the classics; among his inventions were a windmill that charged batteries to provide electric light for his house, a species of hectograph which duplicated the school exam papers (illegibly, said the boys), and a small gun that could shoot gold balls.” - Humphrey Carpenter - J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

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kraal - a village of southern African natives

Adventures started for Tolkien at a very early age: a black servant called Isaak took the baby Tolkien home to his kraal to show the people there, with some pleasure, what a white baby looked like.” - Robert S. Blackham - The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany

[lectio-linguarum]

tendentious - marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view

“Even as late as the nineteenth century, the respectable English pundit Herbert Spencer... propagated this utterly tendentious and absurd idea that there is really only one parent: the father.” - Walter James Miller - “The Future of Frankenstein”

[lectio-linguarum]

brocade - a fabric characterized by raised designs

“Swampmuck rarely had visitors of any kind, as it was not the sort of place people wanted to visit, and it had certainly never had visitors like these: two men and a lady dressed head to toe in lush brocaded silk, riding on the back of three fine Arabian horses.” - Ransom Riggs - Tales of the Peculiar, “The Splendid Cannibals.”

[lectio-linguarum]

crosier - a staff resembling a shepherd’s crook carried by bishops and abbots as a symbol of office

“His [Dubric] crozier is said to be at St David’s” - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - footnote in “The Coming of Arthur” in the Norton Critical Edition of Tennyson’s Poetry

[lectio-linguarum]

rick - a stack (as of hay) in the open air

“And all the land from roof and rick, / In drifts of smoke before a rolling wind, / Stream’d to the peak, and mingled with the haze / And made it thicker.” - Alfred, Lord Tennyson - “The Coming of Arthur,” lines 432-435

[lectio-linguarum]

cogent - appealing forcibly to the mind or reason: convincing

“As James Rieger and [Anne] Mellor have made clear to us with cogent evidence, Percy [Shelley] also edited her text, changing some of Mary’s simple prose [in Frankenstein] to more elaborate and often stilted ‘literary’ English.” - Walter James Miller - “Foreword: The Future of Frankenstein”

[lectio-linguarum]

This project of translating my German textbook into Latin is much more difficult than I thought it would be, so because of that and because literally no one is following this blog (which I’m assuming means no one cares about that project), I’m giving up on it.  For now, I’m going to continue this blog and post various language things, but I’m not sure how long that’ll last either if I still have no followers.  I’ll give it a couple months and see what happens.

[lectio-linguarum]

I started Italian in June 2014, and I’ve been practicing it daily since March this year.  I had only three skills left, so I just finished those off over the last two days.  I need to practice about half the skills again to make them all gold, but I’m also going to add Dutch (the language I started after Italian) to those I practice daily, so that’ll be the next skill tree I finished.  (My goal is to do it before August next year, which is probably too easy of a goal.)

This is the third skill tree I’ve completed on Duolingo (German and French are the others), but this is significant because I didn’t have any prior knowledge of Italian.  I took German and French classes in school, but I learned Italian solely through Duolingo.

[lectio-linguarum]

dream-hole - a slit or opening in an external wall of a building

[lectio-linguarum]

Der Apfel ist grün; pomum est viride; the apple is green.

I’ve been avoiding third declension adjectives when I could by choosing different words that mean the same thing, but for green, my Latin-English dictionary gives me only viridis, so I had to review third declension adjectives.  I really can’t tell if viridis is an adjective of one, two, or three endings (and my knowledge of those is dim anyway), but most of the nominative neuter forms for third declension adjectives end in -e, and since pomum is a neuter noun, I went with viride.

[lectio-linguarum]

Das Fräulein kauft nichts; feminola emet nihil; the (little) lady buys nothing.

I skipt a lot of sentences to get to this one.  The last one in dates has “Montag,” and - like I mentioned before - my Latin-English dictionary doesn’t have the days of the week.  The next whole section is plants, and I started the first sentence only to find that my Latin-English dictionary doesn’t have words like lemon and orange.  The next section is modern geography, and after that was names of metals.  I didn’t think either of those would be in my dictionary.  The next section is a review section, so it’ll probably be hit and miss over the next few days.

I remembered feminola from about a week ago, and I remembered nihil from Latin class (I also remembered that it’s indeclinable, so I didn’t have to worry about the inflection).  Emere (to buy) was the only word I had to look up.  I kept thinking vendere, but that’s to sell.

[lectio-linguarum]

I finally got the email that Greek Duolingo launched!  I’m going to wait until the mobile version is available because - as I learned with Hebrew - it’s practically impossible to type in a non-Latin alphabet on my computer.

[lectio-linguarum]

Der Dezember und der Januar sind Wintermonate; December et Iānuārius sunt hībernī mēnses; December and January are winter months.

Although I had a similar sentence with summer months last week, I didn’t remember the Latin word for month.  Aside from et and sunt, I had to look up the other words too.

[lectio-linguarum]

Here’s a thing I noticed about a couple of the self-tutorial exercises in my Latin book recently.

They’ve been giving me a sentence with (a) different tense(s) of the verb in parentheses.  Yester-day’s sentence* was “Hunc librum dē aliō bellō scrībimus (scrībēmus).”  So I parse all of the words (I still have to look things up constantly) and translate this (with not-so-smooth word order) as “This book about another war will we write (we do write).”  I thought the emphatic “do” would help make the inversion less confusing.

So then I check my answer, and I find: “We are writing (shall write) this book about another war.”  My translation is accurate (if choppy), but the book’s answer switches what verb is in parentheses!  The future tense scrībimus is in the sentence proper in the list of self-tutorial exercises, but the future tense translation (“shall write”) is in parentheses in the answers.  And the present tense scrībēmus is in parentheses in the self-tutorial exercises, but its translation (“we are writing”) is in the sentence proper in the answers.

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*Just for the record: Wheelock’s Latin, 7th edition, Capvt IX Self-Tutorial Exercies (pp. 418-419), #10

[lectio-linguarum]

Der Winter ist eine kalte Jahreszeit; hiems est gelidus annī tempus; winter is a cold season.

The only Latin word I had to look up for this is hiems.  I did double-check gelidus, but I knew it because it's where the English word gelid (extremely cold) comes from (also, I just happened to have glanced at it on Monday).  I remembered annī tempus from when I had a similar sentence about summer about a week ago, so maybe this project is starting to work.

[lectio-linguarum]

Der Norden ist flach; septentriōnēs est aequī; the north is flat.

According to my Latin-English dictionary, septentriōnēs is a masculine plural noun, hence the -ī ending on aequī.  I had to look up both of those.