Camillus, Columbus Rōmānus, Cap.2: Frātrēs et Sorōrēs (Patreon)

Lūcius coeptīs fautōribus salūtem! Sorry for the long delay on Capitulum II; I went through a number of revisions, including the incorporation of periodic formatting and the past tense:

Past Tense

Kephalos recently made a useful comment: virtually all the intro Latin and Ancient Greek readers trick the beginner, who expects the past tense in a storybook, yet is force-fed the present tense. There are good paedagogical reasons behind the strategy of teaching the present tense first, but the confusion is always manifest in the classroom: students inevitably interpret present forms as past, until the teacher, through much wrangling, is able to dissuade the students of that notion and imbue in them the fact that the narrative is in the present tense. Then, when the past tense is finally introduced, the students interpret it as present tense, since the instructor told them to think of past tenses as present tenses. Heu!

Therefore, to avoid that didactic whiplash, I have rewritten the first chapter with past tense in the narration from the first page, and this chapter shows the same. I have to the best of my ability employed both imperfect and perfect tense forms where they naturally ought to occur, and, with much hope that a patient beginner will, above all, follow the story and worry about the details of grammar at a later date, have allowed the narrative to do the heavy lifting of communicating the meaning of the vocabulary, rather than the morphology (though that's in there too).

Periodic Formatting

Adrian Hundhausen, through meticulous study of the way the Ancient Greeks and Romans actually composed their texts (the so-called periodic structure), has begun to employ an exceedingly clever formatting technique that is deeply appropriate in a digital age when "paper" need not be conserved on the screen: he puts spaces and line breaks between units of speech, imitative of the same formatting used by the ancient writers themselves. There are numerous benefits to this approach to formatting: the useful aspect here is that the beginner, when reading a phrase aloud, will know exactly where the sense-unit ends, and pause if desired. I've begun to change the formatting of Thrasymachus' Catabasis in the same way, and the utility of this for my students has been wonderfully evident. All credit goes to Adrian Hundhausen for bringing this simple but powerful formatting technique to my attention.

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CAMILLVS · COLVMBVS ROMANVS is an introductory Latin reader that follows the story of a pigeon in Ancient Rome who travels from the Eternal City to the edges of the Empire.

This video will be made public on YouTube later today. Audio, PDF, and additional resources for patrons will soon follow.