Salvete! I handed in my first Latin assignment today. Woohoo! As I mentioned in passing earlier, I've joined the Atrium Latin study group organized by David Meadows of rogueclassicism fame. There are no marks or credit involved, just answers, and more importantly, structure. The answers I can get online from the publisher of Wheelock's Latin, but structure was something I had failed to generate myself so I was glad for the opportunity to join this group and get on a schedule.
The first chapter in Wheelock's Latin is on verbs, specifically present indicative and imperative active verbs of the first and second conjugations (phew!). However, it was the Introduction that got me flustered, specifically the pronunciation of vowels. In Latin, vowels are either long or short, i.e. they are sounded for a shorter or longer amount of time. In normal written Latin, the length of a vowel is not indicated; you just have to know. In textbooks, long vowels are indicated with a caret or macron over the vowel … except for when they're not.
An unmarked vowel can be long if it is followed by two or more consonants, or x (short for ks), unless it is followed by a stop (p, b, t, d, c, g) and a liquid (l, r), or by qu, ch, ph, or th, because these combinations are pronounced more or less as a single consonant. And just to make things interesting, a long vowel is shortened if, in the process of conjugation (and presumably declension, although I haven't gotten there yet), it occurs before another vowel, or before m, r, or t at the end of a word, or before nt or nd anywhere in the word. I suppose it's better than English in that there are consistent rules, but do there have to be so many of them?
The rules for accent are much simpler, but trying to say a word with an accented short vowel and unaccented long vowels is quite the exercise. I can feel the neurons growing in my Broca's area. It's quite fun, really. To hear some examples, see (and listen to) the Wheelock's Latin pronunciation guide.
Wheelock's Introduction also includes a (very) brief history of English and Latin. Latin and Anglo-Saxon are cognates, which is to say that they were derived from a common Indo-European ancestor language. English, in turn, derived from Anglo-Saxon, but it also has many words that are derived from Latin, either borrowed directly or via French. So our language contains both cognates and derivatives of Latin words, the latter making up about 60 percent of our vocabulary. I don't know how this compares to other non-Romance (especially Germanic) languages but it seems like a lot to me. By contrast, only 10-15% of our vocabulary is derived from Greek. Interesting stuff.
