Learning Classics is a bit like putting on a magic pair of 3-D glasses. Once you start delving into the language and the culture, you'll start to see it all around you. This blog is a record of the club's journey through the worlds and language of ancient Rome and Greece... and through modern times, too, searching for the influence of classics all around us. You'll also be able to find vocab, home tasks, links and generally enlightening info here, too.

31 January 2016

Lesson 13 - Cases and comedy

I can't believe how much hard work Classics Club did today. After warming up with some quick-fire present tense verbs (Latin to English and English to Latin), we tackled nouns in the nominative and accusative. To help you remember which case is which, here's that rap I showed you...
Jaszmine tackles cases expertly

 We then set about doing quite a tricky exercise, identifying the number (singular/plural), gender (masculine/feminine/neuter) and case (nominative/accusative) of various Latin nouns, alone and in sentences. Here's that table again to remind you of the endings:



masculine
feminine
neuter

singular
plural
singular
plural
singular
plural
nominative
us
i
a
ae
um
a
accusative
um
os
am
as
um
a
The descendants of Aristophanes

 After about forty minutes of taxing language work, we started on our journey into the (sometimes strange) world of Greek comedy, tracing its influences on modern comedy. We identified:

  • fantasy choruses, still used by The Muppets
  • satire and social commentary, like in The Simpsons
  • layers of deception, such as Shakespeare uses in many of his comedies