I checked out the page on Caesar's The Gallic War and looked at its famous opening line "Gallia est omnis diuisa in partes tres , quarum unam incolunt Belgae , aliam Aquitani , tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae , nostra Galli appellantur".
Apart from the UI around the word parsing pop-up being kind of buggy (it doesn't close readily, the scroll position seems to get saved differently depending on the word), I'm pretty sure there's an analytical error in that sentence.
The word "nostra" is glossed as Nom Plur Neut; that is, the possessive adjective "noster", "ours", in its nominative plural neuter form. "Nostra", with a short final -a, is indeed the nominative plural neuter form of that possessive adjective. However in that sentence, the word is being used as an ablative singular feminine, with a long final -â (which is unmarked because the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all).
archive.org has this (https://archive.org/details/caesarscommentar07caes/page/n11/...) 1918 out-of-copyright literal word-by-word translation of the text, which does mark vowel length, and you can see that the translator words the last clause as "the third, (those) who in (the) language of themselves are called Celtae, in ours, Gauls". nostrâ is modifying an implied linguâ there, which is a singular feminine noun in the ablative case, so nostrâ has to inflect to agree with it - nostrâ [linguâ] translates to "in ours [our language]".
My Latin is self-taught and mediocre at best, but even I was able to spot that error. And The Gallic War is a very famous text that is routinely taught fairly early on in traditional Latin education - a lot of students of Latin over the centuries have read that exact line of Caesar's. The fact that the LatinCy neural language model for Latin, which the site claims performed the analysis, screwed this up doesn't leave me very confident about the quality of the grammatical analysis in more difficult corners of Latin grammar.
Congrats on self learning Latin. That takes hard work. I adore reading texts on ancient texts that go into possible alternative interpretations. One of my favourite classes in university was on a work of Plato where the professor knew both the Greek, Latin and Arab versions of the text and could get carried away philologically, even philophillically, on how we could alternatively interpret sentences. Reading about deconstructing the origins of say the Bible. Those are scientific works of marvel to me.
the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all
I think most Latin text out there won't use diacritics at all. I only studied it for 3 years back in high school leading to the AP exam and I don't think I was ever taught about them or saw them once. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3bmLi1bKI0 and wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_%28diacritic%29 were interesting. I'd bet part of the reason is just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never speak it / pronunciation doesn't matter. I remember very little of the language, I believe also in part because of that.
You are correct: Latin vowel length is usually only indicated in educational material, dictionaries, etc.
just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never speak it / pronunciation doesn't matter. I remember very little of the language, I believe also in part because of that.
You're not the only person to have had this insight. Modern pedagogy often emphasizes using ancient languages spoken aloud, conversationally. We read Latin aloud in class, and our textbook had Latin dialogues to act out in class. We used the reconstructed classical pronunciation. We were graded on our pronunciation. Mostly as a token though and our teacher allowed some leeway, because it is after all a dead language. (I found it hard to drop some of the church Latin "ch" for "k".)
With the exception of the Aeneid, all the epic poetry of antiquity was originally oral poetry later written down, and it is obviously meant to be read aloud. The Iliad, Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, the Chinese Classic of Poetry. All were meant to be read aloud in performance, and probably they were set to song.
My understanding is that the lack of vowels, word spacing, and punctuation in texts suggests that all ancient texts were meant to be heard, not read. I think it was Augustine, or some other Church Father, was talking about seeing someone reading silently as something remarkable or that he hadn't seen before.
I host a parallel translation of the original book on Peano’s Axioms. If you have comments on either the Latin or English translation, they’d be very welcome!
(My 2 years of high school Latin from a Latin-Mass priest is helpful, but insufficient.)
Comments
I checked out the page on Caesar's The Gallic War and looked at its famous opening line "Gallia est omnis diuisa in partes tres , quarum unam incolunt Belgae , aliam Aquitani , tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae , nostra Galli appellantur".
Apart from the UI around the word parsing pop-up being kind of buggy (it doesn't close readily, the scroll position seems to get saved differently depending on the word), I'm pretty sure there's an analytical error in that sentence.
The word "nostra" is glossed as Nom Plur Neut; that is, the possessive adjective "noster", "ours", in its nominative plural neuter form. "Nostra", with a short final -a, is indeed the nominative plural neuter form of that possessive adjective. However in that sentence, the word is being used as an ablative singular feminine, with a long final -â (which is unmarked because the text as they present it doesn't seem to mark vowel length at all).
archive.org has this (https://archive.org/details/caesarscommentar07caes/page/n11/...) 1918 out-of-copyright literal word-by-word translation of the text, which does mark vowel length, and you can see that the translator words the last clause as "the third, (those) who in (the) language of themselves are called Celtae, in ours, Gauls". nostrâ is modifying an implied linguâ there, which is a singular feminine noun in the ablative case, so nostrâ has to inflect to agree with it - nostrâ [linguâ] translates to "in ours [our language]".
My Latin is self-taught and mediocre at best, but even I was able to spot that error. And The Gallic War is a very famous text that is routinely taught fairly early on in traditional Latin education - a lot of students of Latin over the centuries have read that exact line of Caesar's. The fact that the LatinCy neural language model for Latin, which the site claims performed the analysis, screwed this up doesn't leave me very confident about the quality of the grammatical analysis in more difficult corners of Latin grammar.
Congrats on self learning Latin. That takes hard work. I adore reading texts on ancient texts that go into possible alternative interpretations. One of my favourite classes in university was on a work of Plato where the professor knew both the Greek, Latin and Arab versions of the text and could get carried away philologically, even philophillically, on how we could alternatively interpret sentences. Reading about deconstructing the origins of say the Bible. Those are scientific works of marvel to me.
I think most Latin text out there won't use diacritics at all. I only studied it for 3 years back in high school leading to the AP exam and I don't think I was ever taught about them or saw them once. This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3bmLi1bKI0 and wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apex_%28diacritic%29 were interesting. I'd bet part of the reason is just a side-effect of teaching Latin as a dead language where you never speak it / pronunciation doesn't matter. I remember very little of the language, I believe also in part because of that.
You are correct: Latin vowel length is usually only indicated in educational material, dictionaries, etc.
You're not the only person to have had this insight. Modern pedagogy often emphasizes using ancient languages spoken aloud, conversationally. We read Latin aloud in class, and our textbook had Latin dialogues to act out in class. We used the reconstructed classical pronunciation. We were graded on our pronunciation. Mostly as a token though and our teacher allowed some leeway, because it is after all a dead language. (I found it hard to drop some of the church Latin "ch" for "k".)
With the exception of the Aeneid, all the epic poetry of antiquity was originally oral poetry later written down, and it is obviously meant to be read aloud. The Iliad, Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, the Chinese Classic of Poetry. All were meant to be read aloud in performance, and probably they were set to song.
My understanding is that the lack of vowels, word spacing, and punctuation in texts suggests that all ancient texts were meant to be heard, not read. I think it was Augustine, or some other Church Father, was talking about seeing someone reading silently as something remarkable or that he hadn't seen before.
I host a parallel translation of the original book on Peano’s Axioms. If you have comments on either the Latin or English translation, they’d be very welcome!
(My 2 years of high school Latin from a Latin-Mass priest is helpful, but insufficient.)
https://github.com/mdnahas/Peano_Book/