After having read Augustine for quite a while, I’m looping back to Cicero, de natura deorum, for a second reading. I read about half of City of God, and most of the the Confessions.
My goal this time is more consistently to follow Dexter Hoyos’s 10 rules ( Google will find them for you). I believe I have been trying to guess sentence structure from dictionary work on the unknown words, word-by-word. Hoyos wants you to analyse the sentence before looking up unknown words.
Is there a Hoyos-like set of rules for Latin verse?
Aren’t the rules meant to apply to verse as well as to prose?
You could apply them to Greek too, and in Greek prose things tend to be packaged more neatly than in Latin, thanks to the definite article, which makes it easier to recognize word-groups.
I hadn’t seen them before. The advice is basically sound (and far from novel), at least for inexperienced readers. An important message is Don’t translate until you understand the structure and the meaning of the whole passage. Ideally you won’t need to translate at all.