We're using the Oxford Latin Course, and we've gotten pretty far into Book III already. It's about the life of Horace, and has already included a few of his poems, which our professor thankfully didn't force us to by ourselves translate. I'm surprised at how such an insightful and sensitive man would glorify Cleopatra's suicide, and how he and Virgil could so passionately and unquestioningly buy into the ideas of the nation-state, death before dishonor, and a Roman Manifest Destiny. I guess no one is really immune to the influence of their society and I would gain little by examining people based on my modern preconceptions...
Anyways, I had been a bit lazy in retaining grammar and so now I'm holding on for dear life as the textbook throws every single verb form at us with their minuscule differentiations in appearance as we go about learning about the different usages of the subjunctive... X_X; Anyways, next fall, if my schedule allows me to take a 3rd semester, I will be reading Cupid And Psyche... And as far as I can tell, there is no prose-writing planned for us at all in the 4-semester beginer/intermediate Latin track. Am I missing out? Should I go about writing prose myself?
In any case, I am somewhat upset with my professor for disparaging Modern English as an imprecise and illogical language, compared to Classical Latin. You will probably already know the arguments for such a stance, so I won't repeat them here. But as a linguist who looks at languages and language change objectively, it offends me that he views only literary dialects as the true forms of their language, and he views Standard American English as heavily polluted and deviant. He also thinks that English should never have a split infinitive or a double negative, even though these proscriptions were introduced relatively late to the language. He also disagreed with my claim that every language is more apt in some aspect of communication than others, but now I'm just ranting so I'll stop.
(Oh, I would also like to make it known that Chocobo's genitive is Chocobonis, just cuz I said so
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