TLM Sunday Gospels, Color-Coded

I have been doing this for my Latin students during our classes for some time, and I thought it might be useful to share this with the whole internet world.

Update: Curious about the grammatical workings that you see in the Gospels below, such as “quid” sometimes being used for “why“? (See paragraph 101 on pg. 73) This book, A grammar of the Vulgate, being an introduction to the study of the latinity of the Vulgate Bible, by W. E. Plater and H. J. White, will answer those questions!

Update 2 (June ’23): I’ve gone through a whole Liturgical Year now–so we are right back where we started with the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost. I will no longer update this post, but I will collect all the Gospels I have rendered in color and soon put them up as a downloadable PDF.

All those busy Latin nouns out there, doing their jobs, using their endings, are often hard to keep track of all at once. To help show the various jobs nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are doing in each phrase, clause, and sentence, I assign a color to each case to visually reinforce what the specific case endings are telling us. (You can see examples of this over here too.)

Blue: Nominative case, for subjects

Orange: Accusative/Objective case, for direct objects and with prepositions that take the acc./obj.

Gray: Ablative case, with prepositions taking the ablative

Green: Genitive/Possessive case

Purple: Dative Case, for indirect objects and with some verbs

Red: Vocative case, for direct address

See below to observe them applied to recent Gospel readings from the TLM:

Gospel: Palm Sunday

_______________End of Church Year 2021-2022____________________

You may have noticed that some words had all letters in color, some had only case endings in color. The nouns or main pronouns or substantives I generally color all of, and modifiers (adjectives and pronouns) will get their particular case ending colored, to keep modifiers distinct and also prevent visual overload.

I hope this helps to make some of the grammar behind these Latin readings clearer, and reading comprehension overall a little simpler. Let me know what you think!