hunc situm, ut patet, paulo reformaui quo melior pateat quid hic situs interrealis uere sit. non est “podcast” quod res audiendae non post interuallum certum sed ex tempore adduntur. hic situs id agit ut possitis desumere res audiendas ad libidinem. quo dicto, iam licet uobis uti instrumento “iTunes” aut simili quod uos certiores facat de nouis editionibus.

Arx firma Deus noster est,
Is telum, quo nitamur;
Is explicat ex omnibus
Queis malis implicamur.
Nam cui semper mos,
Iam ter terret nos:
Per astum, per vim,
Saevam levat sitim;
Nil par in terris illi.

In nobis nihil situm est,
Quo minus pereamus:
Quem Deus ducem posuit,
Is facit ut vivamus.
Scin quis hoc potest?
Iesus Christus est,
Qui, dux caelitum,
Non habet aemulum:
Is vicerit profecto.

Sit mundus plenus daemonum,
Nos cupiant uorare;
Non timor est; uictoria
Nil potest nos frustrare.
Hem dux saeculi!
Inuitus abi!
In nos nil potes,
Iam iudicatus es;
Vel uocula te sternat.

Hoc uerbum non pessumdabunt,
Nec gratiam merebunt;
In nobis Christi Spiritus
Et munera uigebunt:
Tollant corpus, rem,
Mundique omnem spem:
Tollant! iubilent!
Non lucrum hinc ferent;
Manebit regnum nobis.

Today I was made aware of a new resource for the Small Catechism in Latin. It’s a new edition of the Catechismus Minor with notes for grammar and vocabulary aid. It appears to be lacking Luther’s preface, (which is a shame I think), yet otherwise is a most praiseworthy effort. Though the Latin text of the SC is readily available, the commentary offered in this nice edition will no doubt be of use to new students of Latin or those unfamiliar with 16th century Latin.

Let ev’ry race and ev’ry language tell
Of Him who saves our lives from death and hell (LSB 837, stz. 5).

This includes Latin, as I believe. I promised that I would list some resources for praying the offices in Latin from Lutheran sources. The list below is incomplete, as I am still myself figuring this whole thing out. The following have been of great use to me:

• B. T.G. Mayes, The Brotherhood Prayer Book: Second Revised Edition. This is a must and the best resources for the offices available in English. One could actually use this and just plug in bits of the ordinary in Latin for a mixed Latin/English office.
• _____, Sacrosanctae Ecclesiae Confessionis Augustanae Preces. This is a handy little pdf (free!). It is text-only, but still a great source.
• Matthaeus Ludecus, Vesperale et Matutinale, 1589 (reprint available and sample). This is *the* book to have for Lutheran Latin offices. It’s a bit pricey, but well worth the cost and is of high quality. When I get really comfortable with this book I hope (DV) to have time to use this book to put together a sort of BPB Latin suppliment.
• Latin Psalter. If you download Dr. Mayes’ pdf above you’ll have the Neo-Vulgate translation of the psalms which is pretty good. There are several Latin translations of the psalms. Our Lutheran forebears generally used the vulgate, which is good reason for doing so. I myself am partial to the so-called “Piana” (harder to find) because it’s actually a translation from Hebrew, and its Latin makes sense.
• A Roman Breviary. This can serve as a handy reference, and many used copies are available. You may prefer one with rubrics in enlgish (there exists a nice edition with commentary by Parsch).

Beatum confessionis Augustanae diem sit uobis!
Happy Augsburg Confession day!

There are many reasons why I think it important to pray in Latin, but primarily I will speak now about its didactic function. You see, language, if it is to be truly language, must be used. Maybe we’ll never be able to use Latin like we do English, or German when in Germany, but we can still use it. If we don’t use a language, it becomes more like math than language. Consider how most of us (myself included) are with Hebrew. We know the rules of Hebrew, and so we tackle a verse of Hebrew as if it were sudoku: find the three letter root, look for the preformative, what’s that schwa doing there?, etc. I am not saying that this method is invalid, or even bad, but it really treats language more like math or sudoku than language.

With Latin, however, things don’t have to be this way. We can teach and learn Latin in a way that encourages its use: to translate Latin into English is one thing, not to need English at all while reading Latin and just actually read (not translate) Latin directly is quite another. This was the way of our forefathers.

My thesis is that if you want Latin to be more language and less sudoku you have to use it yourself. You have to force your brain to move into a different way of operating. Your mind must store Latin not as tools to translate a code into English so that you can understand it, but it must store Latin as something that can be immediately understood. I believe that one way to achieve this is audio, hence the recordings on this site.

Still another way to accomplish this is to write it and speak it. Get a composition book and work through it. Get a couple friends together and try to speak Latin to each other. It really can be done; I promise.

Still, there is definitely one person who understands Latin better than any of us: Jesus. He hears prayers in Latin. Prayer is a fantastic way to use Latin. Use a Latin collect (get them here), understand it, then make the words your own in prayer. I believe that you will be surprised at how effective this is over a long period of time. But you can go further. You can actually pray an office or two in Latin (or part in Latin, part in English). In my next post I will list necessary Lutheran resources for doing so.

Finally, I think that my second proposition, that praying in Latin is Lutheran, needs little defending. Of course I am not saying that to be Lutheran you must pray in Latin, only that to use Latin and pray in Latin is something not foreign to Lutheranism but rather quite congenial to it, as our own confessions say. Praying in any foreign language reminds us that we are not alone. The catholic Church always prays with us, in all her various tongues.

The cool thing about this recording is that there are chapter marks so you can skip right to the article you want to hear. Listening to this familiar and rather easy text will go a long way towards your aural Latin proficiency.

Confessio Augustana: Pars Prima

Augustana.pdf

If we were to ask a plain man what is the object of learning a language, he would almost certainly say ‘to speak it’. And surely he would be right, right in several ways…because here he lays his finger on the characteristic feature of language, namely that it is something spoken. Language is speech…This is the primary
thing in language, all else is secondary. It may be objected that there are languages, e. g. ancient Egyptian, which nobody can speak or learn how to speak. But such languages are not real languages, they are fragmentary or fossil languages, or (in the true sense) dead languages. There are some who maintain that Latin is such a language, that we cannot know the rhythm of or even the pronunciation of it…

We shall assume then that anybody learning a language is learning it for the purpose of using it, that is, primarily, for the purpose of speaking it. The question now arises, How is he to learn it? And the answer is that the best way to learn to speak it is to practise speaking it ; and, generally, the best way to learn to use it is to practise using it, by speaking it, singing it, reciting it, acting it, writing it, and doing with it whatever else a man does with a language that he knows.

From Andrew, S. O., Lingua Latina – Praeceptor: A Master’s Book, 7-9.

Militis Christianus sum qui in proeliis cotidie uersor. Ex quo sentio in nobis parum uitam Christianorm dici militarem. Sape autem mihi accidit ut quidam me roget cur pastor esse uelim. Causae uero sunt permultae, tamen imprimis est quod nihil malle possum quam praeceps ac Domino potissimo fretus cum gladio Spiritus Iesu duce impetum facere in copias Diaboli uerbo Dei solo (sed fortissime) armatus. Christus uicit; bellum iam debellatum est. Quam ob rem ad uiduam sponso priuatam ueniam cum consolatione Euangelii; ad matrem cui infans nuper datus est cum aqua purissima baptismatis ueniam; in hostem cum lege Dei, ad paenitentem et humilem cum promissionibus Domini, denique ad omnes ubicumque erunt ueniam, Domine Iesu, regnum tuum caelestem praedicatum. Conserua me Domine Iesu in fide simplici et fac me in nomine tuo in quo baptizatus sum audacem misericordiae tuae causa. Amen.

Special thanks to David Finucane, who also has produced an iPhone version of LSJ, for making this project happen.

I need not tell my fellow Latinists what an amazing thing it is to walk around with the LSJ and LS in your pocket, ready to go. For less than the price of the print editions of each ($240 on Amazon) you can buy and iPod Touch ($229) + $4 for the two apps instead. Amazing!

For the few of us who lament the loss of Latin in use among Lutheran Churches, it’s nice to see that there are strong “aftertastes” of a Latin speaking church yet remaining among us.

Oh, and it goes without saying that, though the English translations are very good, the beauty and brevity of the Latin is unsurpassed.

I cannot, however, actually place this on the iTunes App Store without paying $99 for an iPhone Developer membership. If I could charge a small fee for the app then I might be able to afford it, but since I cannot charge for the app (due to the license of the dictionary data itself) I cannot afford to pay the whole $100 bucks right now (nor am I sure that it’s really worth it).

So, until I get a way to fund this *wink* or meet someone who could put it on the App Store for me (is that legal?), Verba for iPhone will remain on my desktop waiting to fulfill its destiny.

Meditatio XIV

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio XII

Click here to view the text.

If iTunes downloaded the wrong file (you’ll know because it won’t match the text and it’ll say “meditatio undecima”), you can fix it by doing this:

1. Delete Meditatio XII and move the file to the trash.
2. Collapse the Retinenda podcast list (click the arrow thing).
3. Uncollapse the Retinenda podcast list while holding option/alt.
4. You should see a button to “get” Meditatio XII.

The biggest change in 1.1 is that whether or not one uses ‘i/j’ ‘v/u’ no longer affects the query (e.g. ‘iubeo’ and ‘jubeo’ both work).

Meditatio XI

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio X

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio IX

Click here to view the text.

Announcing Verba, a simple interface to A Latin Dictionary, by Lewis and Short. I’ve often been in class and wished that I could look up the full definition to a word, but not had internet access at the time. My only two recourses until now were WORDS (a fine program if you need parsing help, but the definitions can be lacking) or Diogenes (a fantastic program for PHI and TLG texts as well as for the LS and LSJ, but a bit slow and bulky on my computer). Finally, however, I have taken a little initiative to solve my dilemma. My coding skills (especially for Mac) are very rudimentary, yet enough to create this simply program for browsing Lewis and Short.

Verba is designed to do just that, viz., lookup words in LS, and nothing more (this is not and will never be a parser). It is lightweight and fast. I sincerely hope that it will be of some use for those who would also like blazing-speed access to this time-tested resource.

The download is fairly small (~12MB), but when extracted will require around 90MB of disk space due to the size of the dictionary.

bonam lectiōnem!

Meditatio VIII

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio VII

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio VI

Click here to view the text.

Get the PDF here and print it out if you are so inclined!

Meditatio V

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio IV

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio III

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio Secunda

Click here to view the text.

Meditatio Prima

Click here to view the text.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

The text for every recording will be available on this website, but for those who would like to download the entire work you may do so here (PDF) or here (TIFF).

For more information about the life of Gerhard see this page.
For more information and a free translation of the Meditationes Sacrae see this PDF.