Latin for Beginners (ePub)

To make the course preparatory to Cæsar at the same time systematic, thorough, clear, and interesting is the purpose of this series of lessons. The first pages are devoted to a brief discussion of the Latin language, its history, and its educational value. The body of the book, consisting of seventy-nine lessons, is divided into three parts. Part I is devoted to pronunciation, quantity, accent, and kindred introductory essentials. Part II carries the work through the first sixty lessons, and is devoted to the study of forms and vocabulary, together with some elementary constructions, a knowledge of which is necessary for the translation of the exercises and reading matter. The first few lessons have been made unusually simple, to meet the wants of pupils not well grounded in English grammar. Part III contains nineteen lessons, and is concerned primarily with the study of syntax and of subjunctive and irregular verb forms. The last three of these lessons constitute a review of all the constructions presented in the book. There is abundant easy reading matter; and, in order to secure proper concentration of effort upon syntax and translation, no new vocabularies are introduced, but the vocabularies in Part II are reviewed. It is hoped that the following features will commend themselves to teachers: The forms are presented in their natural sequence, and are given, for the most part, in the body of the book as well as in a grammatical appendix. The work on the verb is intensive in character, work in other directions being reduced to a minimum while this is going on. The forms of the subjunctive are studied in correlation with the subjunctive constructions. vi The vocabulary has been selected with the greatest care, using Lodge's "Dictionary of Secondary Latin" and Browne's "Latin Word List" as a basis. There are about six hundred words, exclusive of proper names, in the special vocabularies, and these are among the simplest and commonest words in the language.