Language of the Catholic Church and Western Civilization
Links are tucked away in the dozens and dozen of posts on this blog. And since sometimes I update old posts months later with related new finds, even if you have read every post here from the beginning, you may find something you hadn't seen in the below new list!
"Church Latin" is the informal, snappier-sounding term for the more scholarly phrase Ecclesiastical Latin, or the occasionally-used Medieval Latin. All of these terms are used to denote something different from "Classical Latin"--the Latin used by, say, Julius Caesar. Church Latin was (and is!) the Latin used by the Catholic Church for two thousand years--thus, where... Continue Reading →
Salvete, Omnes! For those of you starting out on the grand old road of Latin study with Fr. William Most and his excellent Latin by the Natural Method as your guide, I present recordings of the Latin texts in the first four chapters of the textbook. (Eventually I hope to have the whole book recorded,... Continue Reading →
Q: What is meant by "case"? (Any why doesn't it matter which way words are arranged in a Latin sentence?)
Here are some places to find Latin words for new things you may need to talk about, such as best-sellers and mountain bikes.
Courtesy of the Teacher's Manual to Latin by the Natural Method, I learned a mnemonic for remembering the gender of many of the Latin nouns in 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th declensions. (3rd has many of each gender, so those are a different story!) I have made a PDF of the "Hand Rule" to illustrate... Continue Reading →
Sometimes it’s just painful. As an autodidact, you have taken responsibility for learning Latin by your own disciplined efforts. The first two days, it was fantastic, wasn't it? Full of exuberance and excitement, you put in the time eagerly. And then...reality hit. After a short time, you met a wall. And that is when you... Continue Reading →
These are wide enough to be useful in a big textbook--if you're using Scanlon...well, hopefully you'll still find them nice!
I recently wrote these stories for the students in my Latin I class. They should be enjoyed after a student has worked through the lessons marked.
It's another anthology that should be very useful to Church Latinists. The short introduction is excellent: a helpful summary of Church Latin's history, vocabulary, forms, syntax, and metric. Each author has a paragraph or two of interesting introductory material, and lots of photographs and reproductions of art and artifacts are nicely tucked in throughout.
Besides study of the Latin language in general, Sacred Music in Latin is one of my favorite hobbies. Due to digging around for a few years, I have found a lot of good sites for learning the music of all this Church Latin. I hope that you find some good stuff here that will help... Continue Reading →
More goodness from J. E. Lowe's "Church Latin for Beginners" that all Catholics and Church Latinists should know.
