Latin for Beginners

              LATIN FOR BEGINNERS

                       BY

           BENJAMIN L. D'OOGE, Ph.D.

 Professor in the Michigan State Normal College




               Ginn and Company
      Boston - New York - Chicago - London


  Copyright, 1909, 1911 by Benjamin L. D'Ooge
          Entered at Stationers' Hall
              All Rights Reserved
                     013.4




               The Athenaeum Press
Ginn and Company - Proprietors - Boston - U.S.A.


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PREFACE

To make the course preparatory to Caesar at the same time systematic,
thorough, clear, and interesting is the purpose of this series of
lessons.

The first pages are devoted to a brief discussion of the Latin language,
its history, and its educational value. The body of the book, consisting
of seventy-nine lessons, is divided into three parts.

Part I is devoted to pronunciation, quantity, accent, and kindred
introductory essentials.

Part II carries the work through the first sixty lessons, and is devoted
to the study of forms and vocabulary, together with some elementary
constructions, a knowledge of which is necessary for the translation of
the exercises and reading matter. The first few lessons have been made
unusually simple, to meet the wants of pupils not well grounded in
English grammar.

Part III contains nineteen lessons, and is concerned primarily with the
study of syntax and of subjunctive and irregular verb forms. The last
three of these lessons constitute a review of all the constructions
presented in the book. There is abundant easy reading matter; and,
in order to secure proper concentration of effort upon syntax and
translation, no new vocabularies are introduced, but the vocabularies
in Part II are reviewed.

It is hoped that the following features will commend themselves to
teachers:

The forms are presented in their natural sequence, and are given, for
the most part, in the body of the book as well as in a grammatical
appendix. The work on the verb is intensive in character, work in other
directions being reduced to a minimum while this is going on. The forms
of the subjunctive are studied in correlation with the subjunctive
constructions.

The vocabulary has been selected with the greatest care, using Lodge's
"Dictionary of Secondary Latin" and Browne's "Latin Word List" as a
basis. There are about six hundred words, exclusive of proper names, in
the special vocabularies, and these are among the simplest and commonest
words in the language. More than ninety-five per cent of those chosen
are Caesarian, and of these more than ninety per cent are used in Caesar
five or more times. The few words not Caesarian are of such frequent
occurrence in Cicero, Vergil, and other authors as to justify their
appearance here. But teachers desiring to confine word study to Caesar
can easily do so, as the Caesarian words are printed in the vocabularies
in distinctive type. Concrete nouns have been preferred to abstract,
root words to compounds and derivatives, even when the latter were of
more frequent occurrence in Caesar. To assist the memory, related
English words are added in each special vocabulary. To insure more
careful preparation, the special vocabularies have been removed from
their respective lessons and placed by themselves. The general
vocabulary contains about twelve hundred words, and of these above
eighty-five per cent are found in Caesar.

The syntax has been limited to those essentials which recent
investigations, such as those of Dr. Lee Byrne and his collaborators,
have shown to belong properly to the work of the first year. The
constructions are presented, as far as possible, from the standpoint of
English, the English usage being given first and the Latin compared or
contrasted with it. Special attention has been given to the
constructions of participles, the gerund and gerundive, and the
infinitive in indirect statements. Constructions having a logical
connection are not separated but are treated together.

Exercises for translation occur throughout, those for translation into
Latin being, as a rule, only half as long as those for translation into
English. In Part III a few of the commoner idioms in Caesar are