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"You Really Expect me to read all that Latin!" - Strategies for Reading Latin Texts
by Caroline Kelly, Covenant Day School, NC
PRE-READING EXERCISES FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL AND BEYOND
I. Introduction
The primary long-term goal for most Latin teachers is to enable their students to read long passages of Latin. That is why a reading text like Ecce Romani introduces long passages early. When students are faced with such passages, their natural tendency is to assume with that the major issue is vocabulary: if they only knew all the vocabulary they feel they would be able to handle everything. The purpose of this series of presentations at ACL was to show that there are all kinds of other factors to be considered by both student and teacher. The first factor is that of prior knowledge that the student may—or may not—bring to the reading experience.
II. "You really expect me to read that!"
We can simulate the experience of our students by making ourselves see how much we can in fact handle of the reading below. As you look at it, you may well have the same reaction regularly heard about Latin in your classroom, "It's all Greek to me" actually, this time: Russian.
Is there even a starting point to build on? Let us remind ourselves just how much prior knowledge we really have at our disposal to give us at least some understanding.
- We can look at the form, and tell that this is…a poem.
- Counting the lines, we can even say it is a sonnet.
- We can tell that the author is…Pushkin, for even if we don’t know the Russian alphabet, we can recognize ‘pi—Π’ and the K, and the vowels-especially if we have already some knowledge of the Greek alphabet.
- We can tell that the poem rhymes by noting the repetition of shapes of syllables at the end of succeeding lines.
- Based on the date, and the literary form, we can even predict something about the content, or at least preclude some options: it is not a computer handbook, nor about airplane travel.
- In fact, we can even find other clues as to content. For example, there is one word in the poem that is not in the Cyrillic alphabet: vale, (l. 6).
- Since this paper is designed for Latin teachers, there is a higher probability that this is vale meaning, “Goodbye”, and not the poetic English word for a valley—even though it is in a poem.
- Now, if we look at the rhyming patterns, and notice that it is possible that vale rhymes with the previous line, we have another clue. We can deduce the Cyrillic letter for ‘L’, (l.5).
- If we combine this information with the inclusion of a Latin word in the poem, we can arrive at both the possible topic of the poem, and, indeed, transliterate if not actually translate the first word of the poem itself: Latin.
- When we know the topic of a passage, we can begin to make predictions about content, and thus vocabulary that might be included. For example, a poet who is writing a brief poem on Latin, might include items of history and literature. Can we predict the most likely historical figures or writings he might mention?
- Why not Romulus…and, there he is: from Greek we can identify the first three letter of his name in line 13 , remembering that ‘R’, is actually ‘R’.
- Why not the Aeneid? This is harder to identify, but we can recognize something similar to the Greek D in the middle of the second word on line 8.
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