Found in Antiquity

Tag: Latin

  • We need to talk about Latinitas.

    We need to be allowed to talk about Latinitas in the context of Latin teaching. What follows is a 7,000 word explanation why. In the course of this essay we will explore the effects of mandating a veneer of public positivity about CI Latin novellas and why this is problematic. As a community we need…

  • Launching a new Ancient Greek YouTube channel

    As I’ve been making more Ancient Greek language videos on my Latin channel, it has become increasingly clear that it is best if these Greek videos have their own home on a dedicated channel for Ancient Greek content. So now I’m launching a new channel for Ancient Greek comprehensible input – Found in Antiquity: Ancient…

  • The internet brings spoken Latin back into classrooms

    This article was originally written for the Iris publication of the Classics Association Victoria. The print version will come out in March 2022 at the annual conference. I will also be presenting a talk on incorporating spoken Latin in classrooms. Thanks to the internet age, we now have ways of teaching and learning Latin that…

  • Aeneid poster for sale, and other merch!

    I’ve opened a merch shop for Found in Antiquity, to support my YouTube channel and my work in creating more comprehensible input in Latin and Ancient Greek! Aeneid Poster I’ve just started adding products, but let me show you this pretty poster: These are the first 11 lines of the Aeneid, the epic poem about…

  • A living Latin project: LingQ’s 60 Mini-Stories

    2023 update: The first 10 mini-stories are finalised! Here are the links to all audio files: Would you be interested in partnering with us to translate 60 Mini-Stories into Latin? This is an open, Creative Commons project in which we have the ability to create adaptations, videos, and supporting materials without fear of infringing copyright,…

  • A complete guide to Classical Latin pronunciation: the sounds of Golden Age Latin

    I have now made a Classical Latin pronunciation series on Youtube! Check out the first three parts here: These videos are suitable for complete beginners and advanced students alike. I speak 100% in Latin, with no English in these videos. This means I make no verbal descriptions of the sounds or comparisons to any variety…

  • Grammar Analysis scores don’t correlate with unseen translation ability

    Some of the types of assessments Latin teachers have been traditionally setting are quite weird, the kind of things that aren’t normally done in any other languages. Consequently, it is hard to find recent research on whether what we are testing really matters. Perhaps one of the strangest things we do is Grammar Analysis, where…

  • ‘Palatina Medea’ or ‘Medea Palatina’? A preference for adjective-noun word order in Latin

    We’ve been told that adjectives in Latin ‘tend to’ or ‘prefer to’ follow the nouns they describe. But on the contrary, the statistical evidence shows that Caesar and Cicero actually preferred putting adjectives before nouns. We didn’t learn that ‘noun then adjective’ rule from reading unadapted Latin. We didn’t discover it from real usage. We…

  • The accent of words ending in -que

    TL;DR: Latin words ending in -que should be accented on the syllable before -que only if that syllable is (or has become) heavy; otherwise, the word should retain its original accent. If this sounds new to you, that’s probably because you’ve been following Allen & Greenough and other nineteenth century scholarship. The rules of accent…

  • Latin tutoring: Practice literary and context questions for Aeneid VI

    I’ve been captivated once again by the wonderful style and substance of Vergil’s Aeneid. But this year I’ve been particularly nerding out because my three Year 12 Latin tutoring students are all studying book VI, the journey to the Underworld, which was the book I studied when I was in Year 12.