Tuesday, January 30, 2007

A Few Words from the Latin Convention

The Wisconsin Junior Classical League Latin Convention, which Ria, Gilbertgirl and I attended was a highly concentrated weekend filled with Latin fun and academics. They're pretty efficient with their time and volunteers - 450 students and perhaps 25 or 30 adults, so everyone stays busy most of the time.

I had certamen score-keeping duty one afternoon. I was a little nervous about this since I had never even seen a certamen machine before and I was assigned to the advanced level room, but everything went very well. They had three adults running each room - one to read the questions (and judge the answers), one to run the machine and one to keep score. That way no one was overwhelmed with too many pieces of the puzzle.

It was delightful to meet so many young Latin enthusiasts and visit with them between rounds. I found that the experience inspired me to want to go back and read and study more.

One thing that amazed me was some of the terminology relating to the Latin language that I never knew existed. I thought that would be an appropriate piece to share here (aided by the fact that they gave all the teachers a packet with all of the certamen questions from this year's event). So here goes...

anaphora - The repetition of a word at the beginning of successive clauses.

hyperbaton - The violation of the usual order of words.

prosopopoeia - "Personification is also referred to as..."

protasis - The term for the clause which contains the condition in a Latin conditional sentence.

apodosis - The term for the clause containing the conclusion.

5 comments:

Dr. Thursday said...

This is particularly funny since these are all Greek words.

love2learnmom said...

I did notice and/or suspect that was the case with a number of them. Interesting.

love2learnmom said...

Once upon a time I learned how to read Greek even though I never made it beyond that stage (i.e. I could read it, but not pronounce it). I'd really like to get back to that some day - I think the kids would enjoy it too (and they might just go farther than I did).

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

the last two should be:
prodosis - apodosis
"foregift" - "offgift"

Hans Georg Lundahl said...

and tradition in Greek is paradosis "alonggift"