Latin Links

  This is not going to be your typical links page, but more of a combination of links and short reviews of various Latin educational sites I've stumbled across in my online perambulations.

An absolutely fabulous site, is the Tar Heel Reader, where a range of illustrated books written in Latin  for beginners have been written, and can be downloaded or read online , all for free.

Of use to a learner of spoken Latin, is the  Latin video site started up in March 2008 at the University of Kentucky. Here you can watch snippets of conversation in spoken Latin. If you have reached around lesson 40 in Adler, you should be able to get the gist of what is being said pretty well. This site is constantly being added to, and should prove very useful to users of Latinum. The main differences you will note is that some speakers are not clear with vowel quantity in their spoken Latin, others are excellent, and the circumflex accent (rising and falling tone on a long penultimate) that I use in Latinum, is not used by these speakers, so their Latin sounds 'flatter'. These speakers represent the best speakers presently on the planet, so you can assess your own progress against these speakers.  There are at present only a handful of people on earth who can speak as fluently as Terentius or Milena. With over 3 000 regular users of the Latinum podcast as of 2008, this situation will hopefully change over the next few years, as users of the podcast aquire familiarity with the spoken language.

 One advantage, to my mind, of using correct vowel length (and the circumflex) is that it gives you time to slow down, and draw out a word when you need time to think, so that your speech becomes more flowing.


Textkit has a lively forum, most of the posting is in English, some posters use Latin. Textkit is the effective  'user form' for the Latinum podcast, for when you have a grammar question.  Eclassics is a new and fast growing site, where you can set up a user profile with a photo or avatar, keep a blog, and in addition share videos and photos with other students and teachers of Latin. The site is growing fast. I'm a member! Please do join.

Looking around online, I have found almost no-where where it is comfortable to write publicly in Latin, without the fear that someone will come along and correct you. This fear of being corrected, and indeed, being corrected, is, I think, counterproductive when learning a language. One has to produce it, lots of it. errors resolve themselves through further study and reading. Given the numbers of people studying Latin around the world, there is a paucity of writing in Latin itself.  Schola provides a space where all the writing must be in Latin, and where correcting or commenting on other member's Latin is prohibited.

Radiophonica Finnica had the most  active Latin language forum on the internet before Schola came along, it is called Colloquia Latina. There is also an active Latin language discussion forum on Google groups.  There is another active Latin Forum, with a different group of users to the textkit crowd, called Latin Forum. Another Forum, only in Latin, is Fora Latina. For non English speakers, (French/Spanish/German etc) the Latin Forum on Wordreference might be of more  interest. Germans can chat about Latin on the Latein Forum. Polish people can chat on their own Forum Latinum.   If you want to try and write to someone in Latin on paper, then the Commericum Epistularum Latinum can set you up with a penpal.

For those interested in Spoken Latin, Johan Winge maintains possibly the best set of links for this topic, besides also offering some of his own recordings of Classical Texts read in very accurate restored classical Latin. Johan also has a presence on YouTube, and you can watch him declaiming Vergil.  L. Amadevs Ranierivs has his own site in Latin, with a small but growing collection of recordings. It is good to see the sudden growth in the amount of high quality audio Latin online. His is a nice, well designed website. Well worth a look around.Seumas MacDonald's Lingua Latina et Graeca  is another new podcast based site, that contains useful material for learning Greek, using Kendrick's Ollendorff text - i.e. using the same methodology used by Adler. Well worth a visit. Seumas has also started to develop his own Latin learning textbook, with accompanying mp3 files, which is published on the same site. Vox Romana is a relatively new Latin podcast, very well worth visiting and listening to, a sort of Ancient Roman Variety Show.


Williams  wrote a handy vocabulary list for spoken Latin, arranged by topic. This is a bit old (1829), so many of the words describe professions we no longer have - however, these old words are still useful for talking or writing about historical matters and times past. There are lists of clothing, body parts, metals, professions, etc. Much is very useful and practical.

If you are looking for things to read then  bibliography of over 26, 000  online texts in Latin written since the Renaissance, may be of interest.
Birmingham University hosts a collection of neo-Latin texts written in England.
The Bibliotheca Augustana is also well worth a visit.
Camena at Mannheim University also hosts a collection of texts in Neo-Latin, as does the Heinsius Collection in the Netherlands. Work is now underway to put together a list of Latin authors who were active in Ireland. The Latin Library also hosts a selection of Neo_Latin texts to read. A selection of neo-Latin works published in Italy can be found at a site run by four Italian Universities. The Society of Neo-Latin scholars also has a website.
New as of February 2009, is the Catalogue of Mediaeval Digitised Manuscripts.
A growing number of these are being digitised, and placed online. Many have not been published. As time goes on this will doubtless grow into an enormous resource, wherre the edicated amateur latinist would be in a position to actually make a contribution to scholarship.

 Imaginum Vocabularium Latinum has a growing repository of over 3000 pictures matched to Latin Vocabulary, with no intermediary language, just the image and the Latin word for it. Suitable for Children.  Sigrid Albert wrote a dictionary "Imaginum Vocabularium Latinum" with the same title, published in 1998, which can be obtained directly from the publisher. It costs around 17 Euro, and this is a very useful text. You can't get it on Amazon etc, only from here. I highly recommend it. If flashcards work for you, then the online Latin flashcards made by Bob Patrick are where you should head to. The  Thesaurus Eroticus Linguae Latinae has words not found elsewhere.   I think the idea of learning a language to the extent possible without the intermediary of another language is useful....which is what the imaginum vocabularium is all about.  Diederich's work on the frequency of words in Latin is useful.


 
John Piazza's website is always an inspiration. John is working with Bob Patrick, another teacher who uses spoken Latin intensively in his classroom, on  materials to help with the study of Latin as a living, breathing language.   If you ever wanted to type in Latin, using macrons and other specialised characters used by the Romans, the  list of unicode codes for the various marks is useful, and can be found in this list complied by David Perry. A useful site for teachers and students is the elatin  site where I keep a blog. There is a useful collection of learning materials at Saint Louis University. This site was built up by Claude Pavur. Claude's reading accelerating machine is something worth trying out sometime. Claude also has some entertaining flash animations for teaching grammatical concepts, and a selection of mp3 readings from Seneca. A site close to my heart is this one - a program to introduce Latin to inner London schools.

    Scrinium Latinum is one of the best sites in English about Latin. I have personally been influenced in my approach to Latin study by the essays on this site, written by Dr Harris, Emeritus Professor of Classics at Middlebury. The collection of Latin plays written by Anthony Hodson is really special. Visit this site, read the plays. Enjoy. There  is a very interesting video, produced in 2007, on the Latin Immersion programme at Lexington. This programme has also acted as an inspiration for developing the immersion methodology used on the Latinum Podcast. While I'm on the topic of educational institutions, the Classical Journal has a pretty good list of places where you can go and take a degree in classics.