His field guide to the different “orders,” or styles, of classical columns illuminates an inheritance from ancient architecture that will be both familiar and mysterious to most readers. Some of them are amusing and even useful. Mount cushions his lessons with a hodgepodge of anecdotes, puns (“Latin’s tense future,” goes the title of his conclusion), historical trivia, quotations from “Monty Python” and other diversions. you should be able to negotiate all Latin sentences.” Mount promises to whisk the reader on “a pleasurable breeze through the main principles of Latin,” yet he claims that if you “take in what follows. Translating a Latin sentence is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, and despite Mount’s blithe assurance that would-be armchair Latinists “don’t have to work that hard,” you can’t begin to see how the pieces fit together until you’ve done a fair amount of rote memorization. ( Me dedo! Quaeso, noli iacere tela ballista!: “I surrender! Please do not fire your catapult!”) “Carpe Diem,” on the other hand, focuses on the language’s raw materials, especially the noun and verb endings that correspond to the various grammatical roles a word can play. Stone’s “Latin for the Illiterati”) or jocular (like Henry Beard’s “X-Treme Latin”), tend to be little more than lists of pre-fab phrases.
It’s hard to imagine anyone ambivalent about adjectives tackling a book on Latin, but if one does, he’ll be reassured.īooks for the Latin hobbyist, whether serious (like Jon R. So you might think from the tone of rueful apology that Harry Mount sometimes adopts in “Carpe Diem,” his chatty Latin primer: “The annoying thing is that there’s no real way round needing to know adjectives,” he writes, before hitting the reader with some “pretty relentless” tables of declensions. Not only does Latin train the mind it also polishes the manners.
0 kommentar(er)
