Ancient Roman Festivals Dedicated to Cybele Posted by kunthra on Mar 21, 2009
The 22nd of March is the festival of Die Sanguinas. Die Sanguinas is The Day of Blood in Latin. This festival honors Cybele, the goddess of fertility and rebirth. The priests serve Cybele by slashing their wrists and splattering the blood against a stone likeness of Cybele. Ahh, how nice! The priests back then were…
March (Martius) Posted by kunthra on Mar 18, 2009
March (Martius) is the month devoted to Mars, the god of war. If you know anything about the Ancient Romans, you’ll know that they revered Mars and held month long celebrations to honor Mars. Mars was the epitome of valor and courage. He’s one of the more macho gods. He’s known as the god who was…
Latin Sentence Structure Posted by kunthra on Mar 16, 2009
We’re going to take a look at some subjects and verbs. I’ll try to make this as painless as possible 🙂 Let’s take a look at the sentence: Cicero is a farmer. In Latin this sentence would look like this: Cicerō est agricola. In Latin, articles like the and a are omitted. That’s why in…
More Pronunciation Rules: Vowel/Syllable Length Posted by kunthra on Mar 14, 2009
A vowel is short before another vowel or h. An example of this is in the word po – ē – ma, which means poem in Latin. Another example of this is in the word ni – hil, which means nothing in Latin. A vowel is pronounced with a short sound before nt and nd…
Latin Consonants Posted by kunthra on Mar 13, 2009
Let’s get to the long awaited Latin consonants. Before we do that I just want to say that if you’re an English speaker or if you speak a Romance language like Italian, French or Spanish, you’ll probably relate to Latin a lot easier than someone who has no familiarity with a Romance language. Most of…
Latin Vowels Posted by kunthra on Mar 12, 2009
Tada! We’re going to look at some Latin vowels. When you see a horizontal line over a vowel like this: ā, it means that the vowel is prolonged. Ok, let’s start the Latin learning. ā : is pronounced like fAther. An example of a Latin word that contains this sound is hāc a : is pronounced…
Introduction to Latin Posted by kunthra on Mar 11, 2009
Salve! Let’s start the first post in Latin with a greeting. In Latin salve means hello. Today’s post will be about pronouncing Latin letters. I’ll reserve another post for Latin greetings some other time, but for today let’s just focus on Latin pronunciation. Before I start, I want to talk about the dicey issue of…