I’ve become extremely frustrated with the grammatical tables in the backs of the textbooks I’ve been using; often they have too little information or too much, or are badly typeset and thus a bit hard to read. The biggest issue for me, though, is that our classes use the British sequence for declensions (nom/acc/gen/dat/abl), but our textbooks are American, and so use the nom/gen/dat/acc/abl order. So, in an attempt to remedy the situation, I made up my own set of tables (based especially on Wheelock’s Latin and Sharpley’s Essential Latin). Hope someone else finds these useful.
(By the way, please do e-mail me if you find any mistakes, or see anything that should be improved. If you want the original, it’s in Apple Pages format.)
I’d recommend either using all the macrons or none at all. It seems a little odd with some long vowels marked (-os, -orum, -is in 2nd decl. pl) with others not (-as, -arum, -is in 1st decl. pl, -a in 1st decl. sing., etc). For verbs you put none at all. I’m not the world’s biggest macron fan, but it seems haphazard the way are they are right now.
I do have a question about the “British declension sequence:” What method do you use when you memorize noun vocabulary? The dictionaries usually list nom. then genitive, which for the “American” (I guess) system matches the way one would list the forms anyway. Do you prefer having the mismatch?
Those look pretty good and they’re very readable on screen even when I view an entire page at a time.
I agree with edonnelly that it’s a bit strange that there are no macrons on the verbs, although I’d say in paradigms I prefer to see them just so I can eventually learn where the long vowels are. Another thing is that there are no subjunctive forms, but I don’t know if your tables are finished yet or not. And a really minor thing is that my brain sees you as having put vinum as a third declension noun, even if it realizes the headings just aren’t centered.
As for the order of cases, I personally prefer the nom., acc. , … order mostly because there’s so much syncretism between the two cases and it’s nice to see the forms that look the same together (plus in my head, I think of the acc. as the “second case”). I’ve always wondered about the practice of dictionaries of using the genitive, which I understand is to indicate the declension, but wouldn’t it be better to just write (1) or (IV) or something since using the genitive is not unambiguous between say dux and civis?
And an off-topic technical question, since I like creating pdfs for my own use. How did you make the pdf know that you have a vowel with a macron since I can copy and paste your tables with no problem, but when I do it the vowel + macron in my pdfs gets copied as a bunch of space plus some weird symbol? (I also have this problem when putting Greek characters in a pdf, but I haven’t found a pdf without this problem yet.)
The genitive gives not only the declension, but also the base. Look at your example, dux. If the dictionary gave only dux (3) that wouldn’t be much help to you when it comes to forming the other cases, because you need to know that the base from which the other cases are formed is duc- The accusative won’t work, because the accusative is always the same as the nominative for neuter nouns, and thus may not always contain the base (e.g., corpus).
You’re right. I guess you could always just give the stem when it’s not predictable from the nominative, e.g. corpus (corpor-) (3), since the only case form that seems to distinguish the declensions unambiguously and show the stem is the plural genitive, and that would seem like an odd choice. (This all comes from when I learned Latin, where I remember having problems telling whether a 3rd declension noun followed dux or civis – I think I was given rules but they never seemed to help me.)
First declension should be fixed now. Basically, though, I had this idea that I would learn how macrons really worked this summer, as my classes almost never looked at them this year, and so started to put them on. I’m thinking now that I’ll probably just drop them altogether.
I still memorize the nominative and genitive, for the reasons you outline. I don’t really find it too difficult, myself, to skip down to the third line to get the genitive. My profs’ arguments for doing this basically centred around the fact that nominative and accusative go together very nicely for teaching purposes, and also that the dative and ablative are often identical.
I use the Latin keyboard layout for Mac OS X to get the macrons, then use the built-in PDF maker. If you’re using Windows, it could be that you’re using a program or font somewhere that isn’t Unicode-aware, but I’m not entirely sure what exactly would be causing it. For Greek, it would be interesting to see if this PDF file works.
The absence of the subjunctive can be attributed to my laziness, since I just haven’t done a lot of work with it. I’ll definitely be adding it, though.
You’re Greek text copies correctly. Oh well. I use LaTeX to make my pdfs (so it shouldn’t be an issue that I’m on Windows), and I input everything in unicode, but I guess something happens a long the way and the output’s not unicode.
I will never understand why people still learn the nominative as the base form of the third declension. In what seems to me like a great majority of cases, the nom. is perfectly predictable and regular if you know the stem, but not vice versa, so if I learn duc- (or ducis if you want an actually extant form), the nominative is regular by addition of -s which seems to happen with the vast majority of velar-final 3rd declensions (though obviously there are irregular cases like the r/s alternation where the nom. simply has to be learned).
Similarly it’s possible to learn the entire regular Latin verbal system without a single full paradigm of a tense; why people insist in rattling through full paradigms rather than learning the regular sets of endings and the rules of tense-stem formation, and then putting them together by a quasi-agglutinative process, I’ll never know. Traditional teaching methods I suppose, but it makes everything so much harder than it needs to be.
I’ve now updated this to get rid of the macrons, and also added the subjunctive for regular verbs. I’ve also corrected a few mistakes I noticed in the bolding.
As for the order of cases, I like the fact that the Romans and even the Greeks employed the system N, G, D, Ac, V, Ab, the “American” way named above — I see no reason to stray from tradition.
The macra, it is worth noting, are essential to the language. I realize that it’s painfully hard to learn Latin in most schools, since the professors don’t have a clue what language even is much less the Latin language, nor anything of its proper pronunciation. The matter is that the distinction between long and short vowels (a distinction merely of length and having little to do with differing quality) is as essential to the language as the cases; they go together, in fact, as you’ve seen. Give them not up, and know them well; to understand poetry and even to appreciate the beauty of prose, they will be necessary as the past tense itself.
I recommend a couple good resources: Vox Latina by Allen and Lingua Latina.
Interesting, that. I had actually assumed that the tables were all an invention of relatively modern times. Ah, Canadian propaganda.
Our professors, admittedly, freely admit that they’re not pronouncing the words properly. (“The Romans are all dead, so it doesn’t really matter.”) I don’t think this attitude is due to a lack of knowledge of the language, though; these are people who have published translations of Latin (and Greek) authors for some major publishers. Still, though, why is it that many (most?) publishers leave them out except for grammatical purposes?
Still, though, why is it that many (most?) publishers leave them out except for grammatical purposes?
Most dictionaries will certainly indicate macrons. Take it from someone who also thought macrons were annoying and redundant when i first started to study latin - they are very imporant and you will find that you have a gap in your knowledge that will continue to be an impediment to you until you learn them. Better to learn them from the start, then having to back to paradigms when you (joyiously) thought you were past that stage.
In addition, I would recommend not to spend too much time on paradigms. Write them all out 50 times and start reading and writing. You will learn them and their uses much better by actually using them.
My guess is that it is a big task to do. Classical texts in latin aren’t exactly NYT best-sellers, so probably most publishers don’t want to throw the resources into not only putting all those macrons (macra, Lucus?) all over the place, but also proofing the whole thing to make sure they are all correct and none are missing.
To write all the macra is indeed a big task; still, once you get deep into the language, they really aren’t necessary anymore, since you already know exactly where all of them are from practice — from pronouncing all of them outloud.
μακ?όν is a Greek adjective meaning “long,” “broad,” “high,” or “large,” similar to Latin “magnum.” The plural neuter, similar also to Latin, is μακ?ά. I use both “macra” and “macrons” in the plural.
Chrysogone, when I took elementary ancient Greek in Florence, I can’t count the number of times that the professor said, “This is dead language, so we’re not concerned with how it was pronounced, and so we pronounce it this way for our convenience.” I find that attitude fundamentally dispicable. Especially when we do know how the language is pronounced; I know many well educated Latinists who speak Latin with near perfect pronunciation, far better than most Italians can speak English, that Greek professor included, who is a great student of our tongue. The fact is, to understand these languages, we must needs pronounce them correctly. The alternative is to sing for ever off key.
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