THE: Lesson - Latin Composition - An Introduction

An old fashioned ink pen is used to compose on parchment.Latin Composition - An Introduction

For as long as you've been taking Latin, you have been focused on changing words and phrases from Latin to English. We call this reading or translation, depending on the intensity of the effort (reading is the art of gathering an understanding, whereas translation is trying to turn Latin text into English text). In this process, you have focused on Latin grammar and vocabulary as a way to make sense of what you are reading or translating.

Latin composition takes this idea and turns it on its head: instead of taking Latin and turning it into English, we will start with English and attempt to create Latin!

Why Focus on Latin Composition?

Because of our focus on translation (and reading), we've learned a lot of Latin grammar. But how much of it has really stuck with you? If we asked you to get out a piece of paper and write out all the conjugated forms of a Latin verb, would you be able to do it? Quite possibly not, and especially not without some support.

One way to review and improve your Latin grammar is to learn how to take an English construction and turn it into Latin. This forces you to focus on the way English grammar differs from Latin and to focus especially on how to create the forms you need in Latin. It becomes far more necessary for you to know your verb endings if you have to select the correct verb ending for a given situation, based on trying to match up what is happening in English.

So, the short answer to "why do this?" is easy: to get better at Latin! Call it reverse engineering or extreme review - whatever you want, but if you put forth the time and effort on these extra lessons in composition, you will find yourself more readily recognizing not only the basic endings when reading Latin, but you might even notice yourself getting better at noticing particular structures.

Where to begin?

Let's start with a basic concept: word order.

If you recall from when you first started out, one of the first things you learned was that Latin does not require a particular word order. Since it is an inflected language (one that uses endings), for the most part, any given word can go anywhere in the sentence. However, in practical use, there are common patterns, which you should adopt when attempting to compose a sentence in Latin:

  1. Place the verb at the end of the clause. This one is pretty much the gold standard of "Latin word order." Follow this rule and you're at least halfway to having your sentence composed correctly.
    • Exceptions:
      • The verb esse is a free agent. Its forms tend to go "where we would expect" in English.
        • The boy is tall = Puer est altus.
      • if creating a question, using -ne, the verb is often placed first to take the -ne.
        • Are the girls coming to school? = Veniuntne puellae ad scholam?
      • Imperatives are placed first (most often), both regular and subjunctive.
  2. Place the main focus first in a clause. This is most commonly the subject (nominative form), but can also be a prepositional phrase or a relative pronoun.
  3. Place an indirect object (dative case) before a direct object (accusative case).
  4. Place an adjective after the noun it is modifying (most of the time).
  5. An adverb is usually placed immediately before the verb or adjective it modifies.
  6. Place a preposition immediately before the noun it governs.
  7. Latin doesn't use helping verbs or articles.

Practice Activity

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