Image #1: “Deep Sea World” describes piranhas as the world’s most misunderstood fish. Below is an image of some Latin piranhas that are often misunderstood – but we’ll catch them slowly.
This topic deals
with what we can broadly call indefinites, the equivalent of, for
example:
Somebody told me that.
I don’t know anybody
who can help me.
Whoever said that doesn’t know anything
about it,
I’ll come and see
you sometime, wherever you are.
I begin with what
I shouldn’t begin with – an anecdote, but one which, I feel, really hammers
home a crucial feature of dealing with Latin.
I once had to sit
through a dull as ditchwater speech from a so-called expert on public speaking
who stressed that he did not like information presented to him stage by stage:
he wanted the “big picture”.
Image #2: Alright,
if that’s what you want, here’s my “big picture” … and, rest assured, it could be
far bigger -but my word cloud creator would probably explode! The image shows forty
words, sort of lined up in battle formation against the Carthaginians.
Image #3: from
Bennett’s “A New Latin Grammar”
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/15665/pg15665-images.html#sect91
Bennett’s Grammar
is thorough, but a grammar book does what it says on the tin: it presents the
language (in tabular form or in lists), provides some (usually) limited
information and even more limited examples and practice. Moreover, every word
has to be in a “pigeon hole”: it’s an adjective or a pronoun or a substantive or
an adverb or a “determiner”.
Image #4: the
image says it all … in fact, it says way too much
You will come
across information of biblical proportions, complex linguistic terms, together
with “Cicero uses this but Plautus doesn’t” and “sometimes” it’s this, but it’s
usually something else … and on and on and on.
It's very easy to
become disheartened, to see these monolithic blocks of information and to be
tempted to take up golf instead. There is a difference – a big difference –
between people writing (sometimes rather pretentiously) about what they personally
know, as opposed to explaining something to a learner.
This was how I
approached it all.
[1] Some aspects
of a language are more “important” than others; a car can run without an
air-con, but it won’t run without an engine! If you don’t know the case endings
of, for example, nouns and adjectives and you cannot recognise verb tenses then,
even with some simple “schoolbook” sentences, it will be a struggle to know
who’s doing what and when!
[2] The words
covered in this topic, while not “unimportant”, require less attention. It
really depends on how deeply you want to explore. Given that members of the
group are at different levels of Latin, and some want to explore a topic more
thoroughly than others, the posts here are organised in the following way.
[i] Take a look at
image #5: each of the words have “markers” i.e. seven indeclinable suffixes,
one is a prefix (ali-) and a few repeat (e.g. quōquō, quicquid):
ali-; -dam;
-piam; -vīs; -que; -cumque; -libet; -quam; quicquid; quōquō
These convey certain
meanings. At the most basic level, being able to recognise those markers
is enough. By way of example, all the words that begin with ali- create
an indefinite idea of ‘some’:
quis: who > aliquis:
somebody
quid: what > aliquid:
something
All of them prefixed with ali- convey
that idea and so it isn’t really a question of learning endless new words, but
being familiar with the meaning of that particular prefix. English translations
do not always convey the, at times, subtle differences between them, but –
broadly – you can hold on to one specific meaning for each one.
[ii] Tables are
given for reference; a table will give you all forms, but some of those
forms are very rare. Reading the language regularly is crucial because you will
gradually “pick up” the more frequent ones. What you will notice is that they
all follow a pattern i.e. they have all been constructed in the same way.
[iii] Examples are
given from the authors to show them in context.
[iv] Exercises
allow you, if you want, to be more precise, to identify case endings and to use
the table.
[v] Some of these words can function both as pronouns e.g. “Somebody told me that” and adjectives e.g. “Some soldier told me that”; I am not going to spend too much time on the differences (I never did) since they are very slight and always comprehensible in context. In these posts I am going to use a very general heading of “indefinites” rather than being overly analytical. The examples will make it clear what “job” they are doing in a sentence.
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