Renaissance Latin Literature

About this course

hi this is Evan here and I’m going to talk to you a little bit about the playlist which follows from this video part of the goal of this latinum course as far as Latin this concern is to build

fluency and this means the ability to read a large and wide variety of material easily the primary problem we have however as students of Latin is access to the kind of material that we

can read very quickly just do to get through masses and masses of material without having to spend too much time decoding and thinking and there is one type of textures particularly well

suited to this and these are what we would call technical technical books particularly text books written for high school students there are enormous number of these books written in the

seventeen hundreds on chemistry on mathematics on basic philosophy on logic on Roman history all books intended for students to to read so the type of Latin used in them isn’t terribly difficult

enabling us to get through the massive amount of material needed to build fluency so I’m not going to be reading one book to completion necessarily I’ll dip in an art of various texts as the

fancy takes me and add them to this playlist which I will call technical books this idea I got from a great Russian linguist who was well known for fluency in a number of languages and she

said that this reading technical books is extremely important especially in subject areas that you are really familiar with if you read material in a foreign language in an area where you

already have some familiarity then it’s much much easier for you to make the leap so it’s much easier for us Westerners to read a book on chemistry and it is too

to read Cicero simply because it’s closer to us in terms of culture in terms of expectations it’s not an entirely different social setup that we have to get to grips with and of course

the surviving material from the Romans was not written for beginners in the language is written for people who were very advanced that’s the material that survived by and large there’s some more

simple material but the vast majority of the stuff the stuff we really want to read it’s like going straight into you know studying advanced Beethoven rather than beginning with scales and you know

very very simple pieces we need this practice language learning is is in many ways similar to music and we need to have this volume of material constantly going through our ears in order to

acquire fluency now they are not very many people in the world who are fluent in Latin anymore but it’s an achievable goal not that hard it just requires a throughput and perseverance anyway

that’s it so this is the playlist for technical books and boom I hope you enjoy dipping into it from time to time to see what I offer here by while