Yesterday I learned a new Latin word

Crustulum -- cookie or small cake/pastry,  as in 'Mater puellae crustulum dat.' :)  I never came across that in school,  and I had five semesters of Classical Latin and one of Mediaeval Latin.  But it was buried in an exercise in Wheelock's.  I learned Latin from five of the books in the Ecce Romani  series, which starts you out with simple readings of composed Latin and builds vocabulary before learning the nuances of grammar, much as we learn language as children. My friends learned from the Oxford Latin series,  which follows Horace as a boy,  and which had more genuine Latin writings.  Wheelock's Latin  is a more traditional method,  starting strongly with grammar and memorisation. But it is the classic method of learning the language,  and is very useful for my review. I have the sixth edition on my Kindle, and while where are a few errors in that format,  I know the language well enough that I recognise them.  I have an older edition in paperback,  too.  I thought I had the accompanying reader,  but apparently not.   Anyway,  I was happy to come across a new word.  I an such a language geek.

A slow day

But now it's over.  Work was kind of slow,  but tomorrow will be busy because I'm back in scheduling.  Same goes for Wednesday.  Today after work I took a friend to physical therapy,  but I didn't have it because I've transitioned out for now.  I practiced my Latin while I waited,  making it through four chapters of Wheelock's Latin,  plus another couple from Ecce Romani!   I'm trying to review some every day as part of keeping my fluency and exercising my brain.  I also did several crosswords on my phone.

Yesterday I did my laundry and helped with the Sunday chores over at my friends',  but one of them sat me down and told me it was high time I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off,  which I missed thirty years ago when it came out. I liked it a lot,  and it was nice to see landmarks of Chicago I recognised.

Tonight after we got in we watched 'Ugly Betty',  visited,  and somehow it was midnight when I got home,  so I'm headed to bed.  Good night!

Reading

By the way,  if you have an Android phone or tablet or a Kindle Fire,  go to the Amazon store and pick up today's free application,  a narrated,  animated version of the story (in English)  that is normally $4.99. It'll probably be free till about 3 am EST,  or Midnight Pacific time.

Every student's favourite

from the Carmina Burana.



Here's another version, with several views of various (unrelated) manuscripts:



For the Latin and translation, you may click on this Carmina Burana website. Many of the rest of the songs are there as well.

For more on the Goliards read:

Books
The Wandering Scholars, by Hellen Waddell, a classic
Wine, Women, and Song by John Addington Symonds
The Goliard Poets: Medieval Songs and Satires in New Verse Translations by George F. Whicher (a treasure I found in a used bookstore in Louisville)

Websites
Wikipedia, Goliard
Goliards by Melissa Snell at About.com.

What can I say? I was trained as a mediaevalist and I'm a Latin Geek. :)

Oh, this is wonderful!

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources project nears completion

A huge number of students ranging from linguists to those studying coins and family ancestry are benefiting from a 100 year project to compile the world’s most comprehensive dictionary of Medieval Latin.

Work started on the unique Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources 50 years ago but experts began collecting material early in the 20th century.

Now the initiative is nearing completion and Professor Tobias Reinhardt, Corpus Christi Professor of the Latin Language and Literature at Oxford University is responsible for seeing it through.

And it will be available online, with the target date of 2014. Yay! It will include words of late Antiquity up through the 16th century. This is truly a remarkable resource.

Reinhardt is quoted as saying, 'People will be able to search for words online when they have an internet connection, using their iPhones and of course laptops. As a medieval Latin dictionary it is the leading publication in its field.'

I am so excited. This would have made my life in grad school ever so much easier.

Thanks to Bill for sharing this on Facebook with me in mind. I get the feed from this blog, but I've been so busy (tonight, for example, I went over to my friends' house and fixed the computer and phone service) that I haven't caught up on my feeds.

I am total geek when it comes to Latin language and the ancient/mediaeval world

For 99 cents I just downloaded Boethius' Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy, which are presented in both English and Latin text. This was accompanied by a sound somewhere between a cackle of glee and the mu-ha-ha of Dr Horrible when an experiment has gone right.

It's after 4 am. I must sleep before I download anything else.

This is me closing Amazon's browsing tab.

This is me signing off.

Good night.

I'm such a classics geek

I found this funny from In Rebus' Latin Quotes, Sayings, Tattoos, Phrases & Mottos

Toyota has people voting on the plural form of Prius.

The options include prius, priuses, prii, prium and prien. Sic!, Sic! and Sic!

Oddly, the actual correct Latin masc. and fem. plural for prius - priores is not even in the running!

Shouldn't corporate hijacking of Latin grammar cause some sort of public outrage?

I so agree.

Interested in learning Latin?

Evan der Milner has been podcasting Latin lessons for quite some time, but now he has a channel on YouTube that includes videos which start out slowly and provide viewers with oral Latin lessons. Check it out at:

http://www.youtube.com/user/evan1965

The course is provided for free, but you can also support Evan's work with donations, as well as tap into his other resources at his website.

Here's his description of the course:

Suitable for beginners, this unique course teaches Latin slowly from the ground up, using spoken Latin, while keeping a firm grip on grammar. The first 2 lessons have some English. The rest are only in Latin. You will need to study the course in sequence, as each lesson follows the preceding one in a progressive order.
As the course is taught totally in Latin, you need no other language.
The course will teach you to read and write and speak Latin.
Dictation and writing exercises will be introduced later on in the course.

Please visit latinum.mypodcast.com, for the audio only version of this course (with English.)

This course largely follows Adler's "Practical Grammar of the Latin Language" (1856), and various Renaissance grammar texts, such as Comenius (1656). These may profitably be consulted by the student (see Latinum for links).

Here's the first lesson, where he goes over questions involving a pen, a ribbon, and a hat, and whether he or the viewer has each item:

A bit of Latin humour to start off your day...

One of my contacts on Facebook posted this joke:

Did you hear about the Roman centurion who went into a bar and ordered a Martinus? The bartender said,"You mean a martini" and the centurion said, "If I wanted two I would have asked for them!"

To which I replied:

I knew there was a reason for me to pursue a Classical education. All those Great Books courses and Latin paid off in the end. :)

I suck at telling jokes, but I dearly appreciate them. Especially Latin ones. :) Okay, off to work I go!

But first

Great quote for me to remember, from Ovid's 'Epistulae ex Ponto':

Nemo leditur nisi a seipso
Nobody suffers except by his own doing

Of course, YKWIA's been telling me this for years. It just sounds better in Latin. :) :) :)

(Please don't kill me, YKWIA. I know, I would have listened to you ever so much earlier if only you'd had a British accent. And there's no sense in beating your head into the table, either.)

Anyway, it's one I need to take to heart. I found it on the Latin Quotes page's discussion of Casanova's mottoes (he, too, was a librarian, you know).

Hahahahaha

Okay, it helps to be a geek who majored in classical civilisation, but here you go...

Latin Tattoos gone awry

Thanks to In Rebus for the link, as well as this gem of weirdness:

Lectio Equaria Palaestra
From the blog post:

This is just too bizarre not to mention here. Alexandr Nevzorov, a Russian film-maker well-known for his eccentricity and right wing inclinations (as well as genuine love for horses), has released a new movie entitled "Lectio Equaria Palaestra." This Latin phrase can be translated as "Equine reading in the arena." In the movie, Nevzorov claims that as a follower of an Ancient school of equestrian training he is able to teach horses how to read (Masons and Knights Templar are, of course, mentioned indiscriminately). That's right, folks. Horses can read! But wait! They can read IN LATIN. Supposedly, these intelligent creatures can even communicate back using large cardboard letters, randomly arranged in front of the horses' eyes.

Since it's the middle of the night and I still have Latin on the brain

Enjoy...

Going to bed

I spent the last hour folding the rest of the laundry (I really need an iron) and then did five chapters from the first Ecce, Romani! book. (They're short chapters, about 22 pages in all tonight.) I had Classical guitar in the background, which was nice, and the whole bedroom smells like the lavender and sandalwood scent of my softener.

I was going to do a bit of reading and then go to bed, but it occurs to me that it's my night to go out and give a libation to Hekate. I think I'll take an actual bath rather than a shower, with some lavender salts. I probably won't blog any more tonight. Good night.

Okay, I'm pooped

I've talked to most of the people in my life today on the phone. I've cleaned. I've had a little fun. But mostly I've cleaned. The kitchen and living rooms may just have to wait until tomorrow morning. Plus I'm cleaning someone else's house tomorrow after work and a doctor's appointment. I've folded most of the laundry. I think I'll just read and do a little Latin before bed. But first I'm putting some lotion on my feet and hands; they're awfully dry. I'll take out the trash tomorrow morning, too.

I found an interesting blog

called Voyages Extraordinaires. Here is their description:

Voyages Extraordinaires is a weblog for people of intelligence and good breeding who enjoy Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romances and Retro-Futurism, Victoriana and Neo-Victorianism, Voyages Extraordinaires and Imperialist Romances, Gothic Horror, Pulp Fiction, the Golden Ages of Hollywood and of Travel, silent and early films, points suprêmes and real life adventures into places exotic and historic.

That website also led me to the Guild of Scientific Troubadours, Frankensteinia: the Frankenstein Blog, and Curious Expeditions. All piqued my interest.

I've been expanding my news reader subscriptions beyond library/tech/news to include history, primary sources in European history, and Latin language (I'm rusty in my Latin; I found a podcast series of readings of Latin lessons from a public domain book).

Anyway, that's what I've been doing for the last hour or so; checking up on my reader and finding new subscriptions. I liked the Voyages Extraordinaires blog so much I'm 'following' it through Blogger's system.

Now I'm going to go to bed. I have to get up early to work on game notes and then I'm looking at possibly a 12-hour workday, since no one was scheduled as a second person for tomorrow night and our truck was delayed to Saturday. I'm going in tomorrow at 10 am. I was supposed to leave at 6 pm, but I said I'd stay as long as I could. Depending on how I feel, that might be as late as 10 pm. Then there's grocery shopping of doom to do, followed by more work on notes. Sunday morning will come early, and then the game (yay!) I don't know if I mentioned that we started back up last weekend after a hiatus for remodelling, but we did. I really enjoyed being back together and the campaign continues. My character is badly hurt and I don't know if I'll be able to continue the adventure per se. I'm a little low on characters now. One is on maternity leave with a month-old baby, one is in the belly of Yog Sothoth (don't ask how that happened--it was sheer stupidity), one is away at training, and the rest are in a bubble reality technically not on earth, unable to leave without great danger. My last character created before the one on this mission sacrificed himself to save the world on the Antarctica campaign. Whew!

Speaking of Antarctica, did you see that an ice shelf is about to break away from Antarctica? There's a nice time-elapsed slideshow in that article.

In the slightly-Cthulhoid-or-at-least-vampiric-sci-fi/horror-medicine category, there's also something I came across in the general news, but it was also commented upon by the Guild of Scientific Troubadours. A biotech team in Canada have created a yeast-powered fuel cell that feeds on human blood. Now, the thing is, it was a story that 'broke' on April 1st, and one of the researchers is named Chin-Pang-Billy Siu, which seemed a bit improbable (no offence meant), but the story is apparently legit. This could help power implants in humans eventually.

Speaking of implants, there is also an interesting story regarding a telescopic eye implant the size of a pencil eraser that can help people with macular degeneration see. (Thanks to ScuttleMonkey on Slashdot for the link.)

Listening to

Carl Orff's 'O, Fortuna!' from the Carmina Burana



This video provides the words and a translation into English. I've always found it brooding yet stirring.

Fun :)

A song inspired by Eric Clapton's 'Layla' and Catullus...in Latin.

'Clodia'


Okay, the pronunciation is not the best by any stretch of the imagination, but it was it was done in good spirits. Be sure to look at the notes for lyrics and references to Catullus' poetry.

And even if you're not a classics geek, here's another song for you:

'The Addams Family Sing-a-long'

So maybe only a classics major can truly appreciate this...

but it's my favourite part of Monty Python's Life of Brian

'Romanus Eunt Domus'


(Thanks YKWIA for showing this to me tonight.)