---
title: Reading Latin
date: 2012-05-01
techne: :wip
episteme: :speculation
---

So you want to learn how to read Latin. Sure, no probs. Let me channel [Khatzu of the Moto clan][AJATT] for a second... ahem...

Here's the deal: *you can already read Latin*.

That's right, I'm claiming you already have the ability to read Latin. That software is already installed, my friend.

You can read, presumably. (P-zombies who only pretend to read, go away!) The mechanism to read stuff is there. You aren't a chimpanzee who's totally puzzled by this "reading" thing everyone seems to be doing. (If you are, please don't conquer our planet and enslave all of humanity?)

"But", you might say, "I can read *English*, not *Latin*". That's not entirely correct. Look here:

> Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.

That's a sentence with seven words, right? You see that? So your Latin module is working just fine.

"But I don't know what 'omnis' means!" Oh, so you're saying your software has some *bugs*. Seems someone shipped an early beta. It happens. Your database is missing a word. 'omnis' means 'all of'.

"But I don't know what 'Gallia' means, either!" Another bug. That's 'Gaul', the place where Asterix lives.

I'm not gonna lie to you. There may be a few more bugs in your software. The developer has a history of being kinda sloppy.

But that's no big deal because you can patch everything. You just have to run your software, feed it some input, and see if you get any breakage. "I don't understand that!", that's what a bug feels like. Then you just install the relevant patch, fill that gap in your knowledge, and that's it.

Nothing more to it than that. You still remember what 'omnis' means? It never gets harder than that.

Learning one word is a trivially easy task. You've just done it twice, with no effort. (I presume. If you're totally exhausted at this point, my apologies! Also, suck it.)

So you're telling me, "I want to know what that sentence means!". Sure thing. Seven words, remember? So we do it 5 more times. Heck, I'm sure you can already guess some of them.

Like 'in'. You totally know what 'in' means, dude. And 'partes'. Yeah, 'parts'. That's really tricky. 'est' is just 'is'. 'tres', think un, dos, tres - right, it's 'three'. One last word, 'divisa', which obviously is 'divided'.

So that sentence means 'All of Gaul is divided into three parts'.

Yeah, the word order is a bit weird, I know. If it confuses you, that's another bug. The sentence sub-module can be a bit tricky. It's an ancient hack, ok? Serious legacy code. But it's pretty small, so it's easy to fix the occasional bugs.

"But muflax", you ask, "how did *you* know what 'omnis' meant?". Good question, you handsome narrative device!

I looked it up. Not everyone knows this, but people aren't actually born speaking a language. There are no "native" languages at all. (I was shocked too!) Those damned kids who later go around claiming Latin, or Japanese, or whatever new-fangled thing they speak these days, they claim this thing is their "native" language, and they learned this in totally unique and special ways, ones only children can use...

These people are full of shit.

When those kids didn't know what something meant, they *looked it up*, too. Not in paper dictionaries, generally (lol paper books, right?), but TV shows, or other people, or comic books, or... Well, you get the idea. Quite a distributed way to explain a language, if you ask me.

You may have noticed that there aren't many Romans around these days. There's a bunch of [cosplayers in Italy][Vatican], but they're kinda weird. So where did I look it up?

There are a bunch of sources, but the three main sources are, dictionaries, parallel texts and context.

As a dictionary, [Whitaker's Words][Words dict] is pretty good. (Also has an [online version][Words online]. The program is written in Ada, which, as you may know, is the second-oldest language known to man, right after COBOL, which was invented by the Sumerians.) You can google for more.

Parallel texts just means "look this shit up in a translation". The original sentence is the beginning of Caeser's <del>blog posts</del> account of the Gallic war, so that's pretty popular and there are translations galore.

And context, well, did you really needed me to tell you that 'in' means 'in' or 'into'? You just got that? Could make an informed guess? Perfect.

No other magic involved.[^grammar] I don't secretly have Caesar chained up in my basement, that's a dirty lie, you have no proof! It's just those and similar tools. Be as lazy as you possibly can.

You have your pre-installed Latin module. You feed it content. You encounter some bugs, you look them up in the most convenient way possible. You feed it more content until all the bugs are fixed.

You now know everything there is to reading Latin.

[^grammar]: Here's Lucius Vorenus opinion on grammar: "Grammar... I am a son of immersion! I fuck grammar in its arse!"
