VR: Lesson - Fabricated Latin vs. Authentic Latin

Image: a picture showing the interior of a Latin dictionary, highlighting random Latin words Fabricated Latin vs. Authentic Latin

The story you read for this course, Caedes Foedissima, was created by modern Latinists to help guide your skills as readers of Latin and to improve your understanding of the grammatical concepts of Latin II. While every effort was made to create an authentic Latin experience, it was still not authentic Latin. Authentic Latin means writings from actual Romans - native speakers who wrote stories, histories, plays and poems. Consider the difference between fabricated Latin and authentic Latin to be similar to the difference between a rulebook written about baseball and actually watching a game of baseball. One could feasibly set up and run a baseball game, having only read the rulebook, but to authentically experience what baseball is requires viewing it in action.

This image of a page from a Latin dictionary reminds us that we have worked out a series of resources to help us in learning Latin, and in so doing, we have fit those resources into a modern system of understanding. The way Latin is displayed in a dictionary is useful for those who do not speak Latin, as a resource arranged in an alphabetized system to meet the needs of the learner. What would a Latin dictionary produced for a native speaker look like? How would it be different? (These are, of course, rhetorical questions - just something to get you thinking about how we teach Latin in modern schools.)

Authentic Texts

Image: a picture of actual Latin text. The letters are all capital and there are no spaces or punctuation. This image demonstrates what Latin really looked like, especially when engraved. Note the general lack of punctuation and the use of all capital letters without spacing between words or line breaks.

The rest of this module will give you some experience working with actual, authentic Latin passages. You will notice almost at once that the language is much more complex: rules are bent and extended, word order is less rigidly followed, idioms and common expressions of the time period are utilized. It is not uncommon for idioms and expressions to be very contextualized, in other words: they are often wrapped up in something that was currently understood, but that we might not immediately recognize.

Basically, it is a big step up. However, everything you've learned so far has been designed to get you to this point - even though it is harder, it should be something you can handle at this point in your Latin career. Congratulations are in order! You can now begin to read authentic Latin written by ancient Romans. Reading authentic Latin allows you to experience the ancient world firsthand from the author's perspective. As you read, think about what you can learn from their writing.