Latin of the Vulgate

Latin Learning Latin
1

Are there any books or grammars you would recommend focusing specifically on the Latin of the Vulgate?

I admit I am out of practice in reading Latin, but after a long hiatus I have started reading the Proverbs and while some sentences seem simple and clear, there are others I am really having trouble deciphering. Sometimes I think this may be because of certain stylistic conventions that I am not familiar with; others, I think it may because the use of grammar departs from the classical grammar I learned.

Now and then the words seem to have somewhat less common meanings. Translators will choose an English word which makes perfect sense in context but which I cannot find in Whitaker (the digital dictionary I use most of the time). An example of this is the word “frustra” which often seems to be used to mean “for no reason/for no cause” rather than “in vain.” This meaning does not appear in Whitaker though I was able to find it in my old Cassell dictionary. Another example is the word “sermocinatio” used to mean “conversation” - which does not appear in Whitaker at all. Maybe I need to change the default dictionary I’m using? Though it seems hard to find anything but Whitaker for digital use.

Let me say I am by no means advanced in Latin, so my incomprehension may just be a result of my ignorance! I have been highlighting passages that have given me trouble which I’m hoping some of you more skilled in deciphering Latin might be able to elucidate or shed light on grammatically.

“Ne paveas repentino terrore, et irruentes tibi potentias impiorum”

“Ne” seems to be used often at the beginning of a sentence as a negative command, whereas I am more used to seeing it used at the beginning of a new clause to mean “lest.”
Here the “et” really threw me off. It is translated as “nor” whereas I am used to seeing “nec” or “neque” for “nor.” I tried to make sense of the second clause as a positive statement, although it didn’t make sense, simply because I didn’t understand the grammar.
I also find myself having a lot of trouble with participles like “irruentes” as I read - any suggestions for the best grammar to consult for me to brush up on these? I think I have a fairly decent understanding of how participles work, but nevertheless I find myself often perplexed by what precisely they are doing when I read the Vulgate.
I also don’t understand why you is in the dative here “tibi” - and this is the experience I sometimes have while reading these proverbs: even when I know all the words, the meaning seems totally obscure to me. Once I read the translation it seems obvious, yet the translation also seems to depart from the grammar at those very times when it seems most obscure in Latin.

“Noli prohibere benefacere eum qui potest: si vales, et ipse benefac.”

“si vales” here is translated “if you are able” – which is, in fact, what makes the most sense - but I have not been able to find “able” as a meaning for “valeo.”

another thing I often find myself getting thrown off by is the use of “ipse” used as a pronoun. Although I have often encountered it in the meaning of “himself/itself” I have not often seen it used to simply to refer to an otherwise undefined subject like “you” as is the case here.

I have many other questions - but I will start with these, and save others for a later thread. Anyone who can clarify some of these points for me or point me toward the best resources - I thank you in advance!

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For a good, and freely available, survey of the Latin as used in the Vulgate, you can check Nunn’s An Introduction to Ecclesiastical Latin.

Page 44, for instance, covers prohibitions and addresses your question about ne:

Prohibitions are expressed in prose:

  1. by > noli > or > nolite > followed by an Inf.
  2. by > ne > (or > non > in Ecc. L.) followed by the Perfect Subj.
  3. by > ne > or > non > followed by the Present Subj.
  4. by > vide > followed by a negative and the Present or Perfect Subj.

The first two methods are regularly used in Cl[assical] prose. The last two are often found in Ecc. L.

This explanation is followed by a couple of examples for each construction.

As for dictionaries, Whitaker is only useful for students who want a parsing tool when they are beginning Latin. Lewis & Short is a real dictionary and will be more useful. See for instance the entry for frustra or valeo.
It is mainly a Classical Latin dictionary but it sometimes also includes later words, meanings, and uses. As for a dictionary specifically aimed at Later Latin, there are a number of useful tools (Blaise, Niermeyer, Du Cange,…) but they don’t really deal with the Vulgate. Maybe Stelten’s Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin would do, but I haven’t used it.

As for you other questions, I think you’ll get answers either by reading Nunn and Lewis & Short or simply by getting more familiar with Latin in general:

  1. irruentes tibi potentias, litt. “the powers that are rushing to you”
  2. ipse is not limited to 3rd person (“himself”). In itself, it has no person and can emphasize any person. Here are three sentences taken from Cicero’s letters with ipse in the nominative, so it’s only when you reach the verb that you can know who is meant by ipse:
  • et ipse adfui primis temporibus tui consulatus (1st p., “I was there myself”)
  • velim ita et ipse ad me scribas (2nd p., “I’d like you to write me”)
  • et ipse opinione celerius venturus esse dicitur (3rd p., “and it is said that he himself will come earlier than was thought”).

Edit. Just thought that you may be interested in working through W. Most’s Latin by the Natural Method. He introduces Ecclesiastical Latin forms (and vocab) alongside more Classical ones and provides you with a lot of reading material. The texts in Volume 1 are about Roman History and then the Old Testament; volume 2 picks up where vol. 1 stopped (De murmuratione populi in deserto), then texts from the Missal, then St. Cyprian’s De Oratione Dominica, and finally bits of Sallust; vol. 3 has you reading St. Augustine, Cicero and Seneca.

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Collatinus is an analog to Whitaker’s Words. Also, here is a collection of free Latin dictionaries.

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  1. Upgrading our Latin skills might be for the best. Have you completed a beginning Latin grammar? Having a good, basic grasp of standard grammar and syntax is absolutely foundational.

  2. Proverbs is not always the easiest text even in Hebrew. You might want to start with narrative, such as the gospels.

  3. You need a better dictionary. Lewis and Short actually includes definitions for usages in the Vulgate (it covers Latin up to 476 CE), and is available for free online and for download.

“Ne paveas repentino terrore, et irruentes tibi potentias impiorum”

“Ne” seems to be used often at the beginning of a sentence as a negative command, whereas I am more used to seeing it used at the beginning of a new clause to mean “lest.”

Even in Classical Latin, ne + subjunctive is occasionally used of prohibitions. See Will’s post above.

Here the “et” really threw me off. It is translated as “nor” whereas I am used to seeing “nec” or “neque” for “nor.” I tried to make sense of the second clause as a positive statement, although it didn’t make sense, simply because I didn’t understand the grammar.

Your translation is the Douay-Rheims? The Vulgate literally translates the Hebrew, but “and” would also work in English.

I also find myself having a lot of trouble with participles like “irruentes” as I read - any suggestions for the best grammar to consult for me to brush up on these? I think I have a fairly decent understanding of how participles work, but nevertheless I find myself often perplexed by what precisely they are doing when I read the Vulgate.

Here, it modifiies the direct object of paveas, understood from the previous clause. [Do not fear] the powers of the wicked rushing upon you.

I also don’t understand why you is in the dative here “tibi” - and this is the experience I sometimes have while reading these proverbs: even when I know all the words, the meaning seems totally obscure to me. Once I read the translation it seems obvious, yet the translation also seems to depart from the grammar at those very times when it seems most obscure in Latin.

It’s a dative with a compound verb, again a fairly common construction in Latin.

“Noli prohibere benefacere eum qui potest: si vales, et ipse benefac.”

“si vales” here is translated “if you are able” – which is, in fact, what makes the most sense - but I have not been able to find “able” as a meaning for “valeo.”

Seel L&S. “2. To be strong in or for something, to have the power or strength, be in condition to do something, etc. a. Of personal subjects…”

Lewis, C. T., & Short, C. (1891). Harpers’ Latin Dictionary (p. 1953). New York; Oxford: Harper & Brothers; Clarendon Press.

I have many other questions - but I will start with these, and save others for a later thread. Anyone who can clarify some of these points for me or point me toward the best resources - I thank you in advance!

“Many other questions” may be answered learning the basics systematically.

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Thank you both for your replies, clarifications and book suggestions.

My experience with the proverbs is that some of them I read through easily with full comprehension, others I get completely stuck and can’t decipher the meaning. Without consulting the translation I doubt I’d ever figure them out! I am using the Douay-Rheims translation. I will start using Lewis and Short, which seems likely to help in that regard. I have dipped into the Gospels before and did find the Latin much easier. I know that would be less challenging for me now, but I have a particular interest in the proverbs.

To answer your questions about my previous Latin learning: I have gone through several Latin grammars, though I did most of this work over two decades ago.

I started with Wheelock, then did the Oxford series soon after it came out, did the first volume of Latin per se illustrata, and also went through all the usual beginning Latin “simple story” readers. However I never attained fluency in reading classical Latin and through lack of practice I know my grammatical knowledge has suffered.

The issue I encountered when I was studying more intensively is that I never actually attained the ability to read the classical Latin texts fluently, which I found frustrating because that was my reason for studying. In some grammars I reached a point where I felt there was a sudden leap in difficulty and what I had learned previously had not prepared me for what was being introduced. So, for example, I went through the first two volumes of the Oxford series easily, but I stalled out during the third (I think about the point they introduced Virgil) because the difficulty level seemed to far exceed the knowledge I had acquired up until that point.

Now and then I have picked up Wheelock again with the intention of reviewing all grammar points, but I never get through it because the level of the material seems too easy and I lose interest.

For the most part I tend to have no problem reading texts prepared for modern readers, such as those presented in various grammars and readers; but I find it a lot more difficult grappling with actual Latin texts. So it seems like where I am stuck is making the transition between the two. Are there any books you particularly recommend for helping a learner make this transition?

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You’re welcome, alexp!

I think, as Barry mentioned, that Proverbs is going to be rougher reading than a narrative. A narrative means context, and that helps a lot; with isolated sentences, you start from scratch each time you tackle a new proverb. If you want to read more of the Bible, books like Ruth, Esther, Judith or Tobias are short and interesting. Genesis, Samuel, or the Gospels can provide you with longer texts should you wish so.

On the matter of transitioning from textbook Latin to “real” texts, I can only describe what I did. It may or may not be useful to you :smiley:

After I completed a two-volume textbook, and had a rather good mastery of the material, I embarked upon reading authentic Classical Latin texts. That didn’t go too well…I spent a lot of time trying to read very little. In retrospect, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise: even if I had mastered (more or less…) the textbook’s content, I had nowhere near enough vocabulary and experience with the often convoluted syntax of Classical Latin.

digression
No textbook can teach a language in full, so I don’t blame them. Rather, I think the fault lies with the way Latin is taught/approached nowadays: Cicero or Cesar are thrown at pupils who have studied Latin 3h/week for a year or two. That’s because the goal is to have them (painfully) “translate”, not read, Latin. This approach permeates textbooks and reaches even self learners. My goal for instance has never been to translate Latin, but even then I picked the idea that it would be possible and normal to read Cicero after completing a textbook.

Now, if you frequent language learning forums, you quickly realise that people learning German or French are not able to read Grass or Sartre right after they’ve finished working through Assimil. The number of pages needed to reach a confortable reading level in a foreign language is very high (and that’s for languages you can listen to or speak all day!). For historical reasons, Latin pedagogy in recent decades has “forgotten” this. I remember seeing people thinking they had read a lot of Latin during their 5-year course, when all in all what they had read was barely a couple hundred pages of Latin.
end of digression

What I did to overcome this was basically to consider that nothing was beneath me. That meant two things:

  1. working through a textbook quickly, once a year approximately, to refresh my knowledge of basic vocab and grammar. The goal there wasn’t so much to learn new stuff per se (although there’s always a couple of things) but to make this knowledge second nature.
    When reading something that is not too difficult, it is easy to rely purely on context and not realise you have gaps in your knowledge. Things you only half-know occur once in a while but your mind is able to fill in the gaps and still make sense of the text. The thing is that when you read a more difficult author, or even just one sentence, these half-known things can appear all at once and your reading grinds to a halt because the combination of one unknown word, one half-remembered word and one vaguely familiar syntax point just is too much to handle

  2. reading a lot of easy Latin. Again, nothing was beneath me. I used textbooks with lengthy made-up Latin texts (so, not Wheelock) like Most’s Latin by the Natural Method. Then, I also used the plethora of readers now digitised and available at archive.org. Medieval Latin was also a saving grace because it provided me with many interesting and not too hard texts. If a text was slightly too hard, I had no qualms in getting something easier: the goal was always to be able to read almost as fast as I could read any other language (Sometimes I indulged in reading “real” authors, because it can be motivating to tackle the real stuff, but that was only a small part of my reading time).
    That’s important because I realised later that “reading Latin” meants radically different things to different people. Because of this it is hard to gauge the difficulty of a text by relying one someone else’s experience: some will say that they found Nepos “rather easy” after a year of Latin, but this may well mean they read it with a dictionary, a translation and a commentary at hand, and spent 1 hour on each paragraph. I’m not judging or criticising this, it’s just not my definition of “reading” and “being easy”.

Because of this approach I read a lot, working my way up, but it still took me a long time before I could just sit there reading Classical prose with any kind of ease (and I don’t think there’s an end to the process).

Edit. So, if I were to give you some advice, based on what you posted and my experience as described above, I’d say you could do worse than getting a textbook you enjoy, with plenty of reading material. Thus, you’ll be able to combine grammar/vocab review with patching the holes in your knowledge and getting more reading practice.
Let’s say you take Most and start reading the first lesson. It’s ridiculously easy? Good! It means you can read the text (maybe even twice), skim through the grammar section to make sure you don’t overlook anything, do the exercises, and then move on to the next lesson immediately. You may be able to tackle the first 5, 10 or even 20 lessons in one or two days, which means you won’t really have time to get bored with the material being too easy. At some point, I guess you’ll notice that your reading speed decreases, that you are more and more stumped by some words or sentences, have to stop and reread bits to make sure you got them, etc. Then you can slow down, maybe even go back a bit, and tackle lessons one by one. This will also give you (and us!) a better feel for the level of the texts you could use for reading more on the side.

Sorry for the novel-length post! Feel free to pick up ideas or disregard all of it :smiley: Learning is very much a personal journey I feel, and it’s not always easy or useful to give, or indeed receive, advice.

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Due to the length of the preceding replies I’m not quoting here. Considering your background, Alex, reading Latin texts is the best way to go, using your grammars for reference. I’ll add one suggestion to Shenoute’s. Reading “easy” Latin has its advantages for building vocabulary and comprehension, but take some time for more challenging Latin as well. You don’t have to do a lot, but even a few lines a day will help greatly.

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I’ll offer a resources for the Vulgate, which may or may not be useful to you.

The University of Bergin in Norway has a treebank of the Vulgatge New Testiment at their CLARINO project:

http://clarino.uib.no/iness/landing-page?resource=lat-latin-nt-dep&view=short

The PROIEL project data, which includes the Vulgate, is also available at Github:

https://proiel.github.io/


Wikipedia describes treebanking: In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure.

More good info here (https://wiki.digitalclassicist.org/Treebanking). "“Treebanking” is the shorthand term for grammatically parsing digital texts of Ancient Greek, Latin and a number of other languages, and the creation of annotated morpho-syntactic trees.


A dependency treebank in an inflected language (Latin) is faint analogy to the way we diagram sentences in our analytic (English) language.

A treebank can be funny to look at it until you get used to it. Treebanks are great for illustrating graphically the rules of governance and concord.

Latin treebanks of many works, Including the Vulgate, are available here:

https://github.com/PerseusDL/treebank_data/tree/master/v2.1/Latin

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You can also get a Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Latin by Leo Stelten as a book, or a kindle book.

A Latin Grammar for the reading of the Missal and the Breviar
by Scanlon and Scanlon (traditional translation type text) book or Kindle book
A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin by John F. Collins (again traditional translation type Text)

But I think that Latin by the Natural Method by William Most is much better than these two. Continuous readings (not just isolated sentences to translate). And it includes classical and later Latin

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Shenoute, I appreciate your sharing your experience at such length - hearing about what you found effective helps give me more ideas for how to improve my own Latin skills. I am now going through Most’s natural Latin. Most has a good sense of humor and it sometimes comes out in his remarks - this is refreshing and something I have rarely found in a grammar. I am also reading Genesis and Ruth and have found the Latin relatively easy reading, which has made it clear to me that undertaking Proverbs was premature - I was diving into the deep end! I think I will read all the texts you guys have recommended first, and then try Proverbs again afterwards. It probably helps that I already know Genesis well in English but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. By the way I am wondering if there is book equivalent to Most’s natural method for learning Ancient Greek?

Barry, if you have any suggestions for more challenging texts to undertake alongside Genesis, Ruth, etc., please let me know. I think Proverbs might be a little too challenging at the moment, but I am open to any material, Biblical or otherwise that would be more challenging, yet not overly frustrating!

HumiliusAuditor, I am somewhat familiar with parsed texts and have gone through a few in the past, though not the ones you link to. I did download a file full of these treebanked texts, but I must admit that I am totally baffled by the technical aspects and can’t figure out how I’m supposed to read them. Is there some kind of freeware program available into which these texts can be loaded for reading?

Thanks also to everyone who has offered other suggestions for dictionaries or reading materials; you have made me aware of many things that look useful that I was not familiar with before - I am currently looking into all of them as time allows!

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Alexp,

The best (or is it the only?) environment for reading Latin treeebanked texts is the arethusa environment at perseids. See here for an example:

https://www.perseids.org/tools/arethusa/app/#/perseids?chunk=1&doc=28345


Useful documentation for understanding treebanks can be found in Prof. Harrington’s handouts at the bottom of this page:

https://perseids-publications.github.io/harrington-trees/

“The handouts linked below are the materials that are given to the students in courses at Tufts that have treebanking as a component of their syllabus.”

Good luck.