In previous posts, I’ve written about the idea of stems and its importance for Latin. Simply put, the stem of a Latin noun, adjective or verb is an intermediate stage between the root (the meaningful part of the word) and the grammatical endings that make the word complete. In the second of the two piecesContinue reading “Re-Reduplication in La-Latin”
Author Archives: dannylbate
Latin Stems: Part II
Verbs and Verbal Stems A Recap In part one, I introduced at the idea of stems and how it works in Latin nouns and adjectives. We saw that Latin nouns and adjectives can be broken into three parts. root + stem vowel + case-number affix By “root”, we meet the meaningful part of any word,Continue reading “Latin Stems: Part II”
Latin Stems!
An Invaluable Tool for a Latinist’s Toolkit If there is one thing that I urge all Latin learners to get to grips with, it is the concept of stems. My passion for this topic is so great that I have structured my own Latin course around it, including and using it from the outset. IContinue reading “Latin Stems!”
Walloons, Wales and Cornish Walnuts
The Wonderful World of *walha– Reading time: 10-15 minutes This article is an adaptation of one first written for the brilliant interdisciplinary magazine Porridge, which you can find out more about at porridgemagazine.com. Note that an asterisk * is used for historically undocumented and therefore hypothetical words. I’d like to tell you the tale ofContinue reading “Walloons, Wales and Cornish Walnuts”
The Wonderful World of Verb Second
So, we all love German grammar, right? Infinitives, auxiliaries and participles, putting verbs at the end of the sentence, inversion of the subject and the verb – these are the concepts you have to get to grips with if you want to learn the language. To most outsiders, German grammar seems very new and strange.Continue reading “The Wonderful World of Verb Second”
Learning Czech – My Top Ten Terrors
It is a truth widely acknowledged that the Czech language is a bit tricky to learn. Naturally, ‘difficulty’ and ‘ease’ in second-language acquisition are inexact and unscientific concepts – a native Slovak speaker, for example, will have a far better time picking up Czech than someone like me, doomed to speak English. However, there areContinue reading “Learning Czech – My Top Ten Terrors”
La Joie de Joret
A Quick Guide to the Joret Line What is the Joret line? And why should I care about it? So, to begin, a definition: isogloss noun /ˈaɪsəɡlɒs/ /ˈaɪsəɡlɑːs/ (linguistics)a line on a map that separates places where a particular feature of a language is different The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary Named after the French historian and linguistContinue reading “La Joie de Joret”
Rhotacism and How It Can Help Your Latin
If you have studied a little Latin, you may have come across an important, yet rather annoying group of nouns. They belong to the third declension, are neuter in gender and end in -us in the nominative singular. They include words like tempus ‘time’, corpus ‘body’ and pectus ‘chest’. They look like nice second-declension nouns,Continue reading “Rhotacism and How It Can Help Your Latin”
The Economic Sandwiches of York
The Adventures of Proto-Indo-European *weiḱ- What links sandwiches to Vikings, and York to Czech villages? Why, etymology of course! One reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word has enjoyed enormous success in its subsequent, post-PIE life, in part thanks to its useful meaning, in part to the prestige of the languages that inherited it. This word is *weiḱ– andContinue reading “The Economic Sandwiches of York”
The Neuter Gender – A Very Useful Rule!
A Bit of Background The Indo-European family is a big group of languages that are spoken all over the world. There’s a good chance that, if you are learning a foreign language at the moment, it belongs to this family. Indo-European languages are united in their descent from a single, prehistoric language, which we callContinue reading “The Neuter Gender – A Very Useful Rule!”
Danny L. Bate 