There are two sentences in the video which refers to an aspect of Latin grammar that’s very important and occurs a lot in the literature.
Et vidētur frāter
meus illīc. │ And my brother is seen over there.
Mox ōrdinābitur.
│ Soon he will be ordained.
[Image #1]: I deliberately
created that word cloud because I sometimes like to share my own experiences of
learning Latin.
Maybe the word cloud looks
“nice”, but it can also look frightening.
And I chose it for this
feature of Latin because, when I first saw all of these – and many, many more –
all on the same page, my reaction was “that’s too high a hill to climb.”
Unfortunately, most
textbooks – especially the older ones - will give you a long list of all the
passive verbs in every form with a subliminal “good luck with that” message.
And then I got a hold of
“Teach Yourself Beginners Latin” by Sharpley, and Sharpley explained a major
part of it in one sentence.
So here’s how I went about
it.
Step #1: What is
the passive? Get the explanation first. With respect, some
people like to refer to grammatical terms because they know
them, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that anybody else does. If there is
ever a grammatical term referred to in the group, and you're not sure what it
means, then simply ask.
[1] The soldier killed the
king.
We call this the active voice;
it was the soldier who did the killing. Whenever we say “I often buy cakes”,
“You were not telling me the truth”, “John will organise that”, that is the
active voice because ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘John’ are performing the actions.
[2] The king was
killed by the soldier.
This is the passive voice;
the king did not do anything but, rather, something happened to him.
“Cakes are sold in
that shop”, “The man was being threatened by the burglar”,
“The email will be sent later today”; the cakes, the man and
the email aren’t doing anything, but something is being done to them.
Stage #2: build on what you
already know
If you can’t run 100 metres,
you can’t run 200.
The four conjugations of the
verbs in the three tenses covered so far in the group need to be known first.
If you have to look at some or all of that, then use the information in the
group or in the files, or any other resources you have. And, as always, use the
group to ask questions.
Stage #3: You don’t have to
do everything at once.
The Sharpley book only
focused on one part the passive i.e. when you are talking about another person
/ thing (3rd person singular in grammar) or other people / things (3rd person
plural in grammar) in the three tenses already discussed in the group. He made
no reference to any other part of the passive. Sure, there are other aspects of
this further down the road, but, for me, a step-by-step approach worked.
Present active
portat: he / she / it
carries
portant: they carry
Present passive
[Image #2]: the Sharpley
sentence; all you do is add -ur
portātur: he / she
/ it is (being) carried
portantur:
they are (being) carried
From the video:
Et vidētur frāter meus illīc
│ And my brother is seen over there.
videt: he / she / it sees
> vidētur: he / she /
it is seen
And we can rework it into a
more common English way of saying it:
Et vidētur frāter meus
illīc. │ And you can see my brother over there.
And that’s the same for the
other tenses covered so far:
Imperfect
portābat: he / she / was
carrying
portābant: they were
carrying
> portābātur: he /
she / it was (being) carried
> portābantur:
they were (being) carried
future
portābit: he / she / it will
carry
portābunt: they will carry
> portābitur: he /
she / it will be carried
> portābuntur:
they will be carried
From the video:
ōrdinābit: he / she will
ordain; appoint to office
> ōrdinābitur: he / she
will be ordained
Of course, Sharpley then
goes on to look at other parts of this, but the point is that he recognises
that we don’t acquire language in enormous truckloads all at the same time, any
more than we did when we were learning our own language as children.
[Image #3]: I still have the
book!
No comments:
Post a Comment