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Ablative Phrasebook: Mastering Latin’S Most Interesting Case

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Ablative Phrasebook: Mastering Latin’S Most Interesting Case [A sample of the book available at Amazon.com] Ablative Phrasebook: Mastering Latin’s Most Interesting Case Claude Pavur © 2014 Claude Pavur: this ebook which includes original material, revisions of parts of Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar (1903), and some material adapted from the author’s webpages at the Latin Teaching Materials website. Partial Contents [sample] Prefatory Note for Teachers and Students ............................................................................................................................................... 4 Part I: Understanding Cases, Declensions, and Ablative Forms ............................................................................................................. 6 The Ideas of Case and Declension ...................................................................................................................................................... 6 Finding the Base to Which the Endings Are Added............................................................................................................................ 7 The Ablative Case ............................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Ablative Forms .................................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Synopsis of All Ablative Singular Forms...................................................................................................................................... 10 Synopsis of All Ablative Plural Forms ......................................................................................................................................... 10 Summary of Ablative Case-Endings (Singular / Plural) ................................................................................................................... 10 The Ablative Absolute ...................................................................................................................................................................... 12 Famous Latin Ablative Absolutes ................................................................................................................................................. 13 Part II : AG Ablative Examples with Translations ................................................................................................................................ 15 Overview: Ablative Usage from the AG Latin Grammar ................................................................................................................. 15 I. Ablative Proper (from) (Separative) .................................................................................................................................................. 17 I. 1. Of Separation, Privation, and Want (§ 400) ............................................................................................................................... 17 I. 2. Of Source and Material (participles of origin etc.) (§ 403) ........................................................................................................ 20 Part III: Examples of Ablative Usage in Caesar’s De Bello Gallico III ................................................................................................ 23 Prefatory Note for Teachers and Students There is no way around the ablative case if you want to understand Latin. It is practically everywhere. Mastering the ablative early will give you a decisive advantage and make Latin a far more enjoyable experience. Of course, to understand the ablative case is necessarily to understand the idea of case and declension as well. This book offers you a very focused and practical way to accomplish this, especially by gathering over 600 translated examples of ablative phrases. As you use this book, you will pick up much more understanding of the Latin language than you now suspect. In brief, for those who are unfamiliar with the terminology: The ablative “case” (that is, form) of a word expresses a variety of meanings. For example, haec nox means “this night” (as a subject of a sentence); in the ablative case, this phrase takes the form hâc nocte, and it can mean “on this night.” The ablative typically follows certain prepositions, as in the phrase magna cum laude (“with great merit”) or as in ex post facto (“on the basis of what was done later”). The most common ablative that we use in English now is probably the one found at the start of memos: re means “in the matter of” (the ablative of res, matter). Another one-word ablative expression has become quite standard in itineraries: via (viâ, by way of). Not long ago, the ablative designation A.D. (anno Domini, in the year of the Lord) was generally used to indicate dates of the Common Era. And in sixteenth-century Europe, a reformation was forged with the help of the ablative phrase sôlâ fide (by faith alone). Since there is no single way to translate ablatives, you have to get a feeling for the way the ablative case is used in context and make a judgment about its likely meaning. *** We learn languages best by attending to, remembering, and appropriately imitating examples of communication. This example-book includes two bilingual treasuries of ablative phrases that can supply any introductory or more advanced courses with material for supplementary and diagnostic exercises. As with all phrasebooks, mastery of these smaller units of communication best precedes more ambitious attempts in reading or in prose-composition. Part I first explains the ideas of case and declension and then it presents the ablative case-forms across all the declensions. It is far easier to master such forms by “dividing and conquering” this way: take up the ablative as a separate object of study until you feel quite comfortable with it. Since there are only five major case-forms, mastering this one will move you well along toward expertise on Latin nouns. The first treasury of examples (Part II) extracts more than 400 items from Allen and Greenough’s Latin grammar (hereafter, AG) to help you consider ablative usage without a great deal of explanatory material. It is not that the grammatical explanations are not valuable. In fact they are often important and necessary for clarification. But they can frequently distract you from the supremely important practice of comprehension, or even divert you to a level of abstraction that exercises an area of the understanding rather different from that by which linguistic fluency is achieved. For those who wish to consult the AG explanatory material from which the examples come, the reference-numbers are kept in the text here. But the most important thing will be studying the instances that best develop a feeling for ablative usage. The second treasury of examples (Part III) provides some examples of ablative usage from the third book of Caesar’s Gallic Wars (De Bello Gallico). It is only by seeing many examples and repeatedly getting the meanings that you will begin to experience confidence and fluency in Latin. This book supports a phrase-based approach to Latin pedagogy. Phrases are basic in the learning of any language: we cannot get very far if we stress the learning lists of single words. We need to see items again and again in manageable contexts and develop an ability to interpret the language appropriately in “chunks.” You can know the English words “hold” and “up,” but you need to familiarize yourself with how these can be combined to produce different meanings: hold up (= delay) traffic hold up (= rob) a bank hold up (= raise) your hand hold up (= endure) under pressure hold up (= support) the ceiling. Hold up! (= “Wait!”) Note: (1) Not all the examples included here involve ablative-forms exclusively: sometimes AG mentions or contrasts other uses, which it seems helpful to keep in this presentation. (2) As in most Latin texts, the long vowels are not usually marked. (3) This book does not present all the ablative uses with prepositions: for these, see Latin Prepositions: A Handbook for Teachers and Students (2013). Claude Pavur Saint Louis January 5, 2014 Part I: Understanding Cases, Declensions, and Ablative Forms The Ideas of Case and Declension A case or case-form is a form of a noun, pronoun, or adjective that reveals how that word may be used in a sentence. “He” and “she” are in a different case from “him” and “her.” English uses the first pair as subjects in sentences, and the second as objects. Doing the reverse makes a statement ungrammatical: it would be wrong to say “Him likes she” if you mean “He likes her.” In English, the possessive case changes “he” and “she” to “his” and “her.” So if you are asked about the case of a word, you are often being asked about something that involves a form of that word. But what may confuse you is that “case” can often refer to the more general idea behind the particular form. The “subjective case” is a category: the idea of “the set of forms that can be used as subjects.” In this sense, case can refer to this grammatical idea. So you can say, “The word he is in the subjective case; the word him is in the objective case.” (That is, they belongs to these grammatical categories of subject-forms and object-forms.) The question “What case is the word him?” means “Into what case-category do we put the form him?” Answer: the objective case. We needed these categories to be able to talk
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