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.

06 February 2016

Lesson 14 - What's Latin for velcro?

Making the accusative singular feminine
The session started off with a verb warm-up, translating from Latin to English, using three new verbs: amare (to love), dare (to give) and festinare (to hurry). You're all getting pretty quick and accurate. Good stuff. And so onto something similar with nouns. By the power of velcro, we took masculine, feminine and neuter nouns and conjured up variations in nominative and accusative cases, and in the singular and plural. Then, putting our work with nouns and verbs to good use, we tackled some pretty tricky translations on paper.

 So focused were we that we almost ran out of time for our weekly dose of Dyskolos. We recapped Pan's prologue, which sets the scene for the play. It's the usual tale of boy meets girl, girl's father won't like it, boy is forced into all kinds of schemes to win the object of his affections. We looked at the (slightly complex) inter-relationship of all the characters in the play: 
Next week, we'll be multi-tasking, making masks for the characters in Dyskolos, while at the same time performing a read-through of the play. Ambitious: could this all go horribly wrong? Quodlibet*. I'm sure as long as we all end up laughing, the ghost of Menander will look kindly on our efforts. Anyway, if you want some inspiration for your masks, have a look here at some pictures of both ancient and modern ones.
*=whatever