Strategy: Rhyme

Rhyme is a special instance of sound repetition. It is a stylistic device that I find really appealing, and it is widely used in medieval Latin. In classical Latin, however, it is something that is positively avoided, almost as if the Romans found it in bad taste. I'm not sure why that is - given all the different kinds of word play and sound play that you can find in the Roman use of Latin, the near-absence of rhyme is something that has always surprised me. The Middle Ages more than make up for this, however, with all kinds of rhyming proverbs and poems!

There are actually different types of rhyme, ranging from perfect rhyme, to various forms of near rhyme. Perfect rhyme means that the final stressed syllable contains the same vowel, with identical vowels and consonants following that final stressed vowel.

You have near rhyme if some but not all of these conditions prevail because of differences in stress, differences in the exact vowel, differences in the exact consonants, differences in stress, etc.

Here is an example of a perfect rhyme with the final sound string "ernum" ("e" is the final stressed vowel): Vivat in aeternum, qui dat mihi dulce Falernum!

Here is an example of a perfect rhyme with the final sound string "atur" ("a" is the final stressed vowel): Verbum laudatur, si factum tale sequatur.

As you can see, Latin lends itself to many types of what are called "grammatical rhyme" where the word formation itself leads to specific patterns of sounds at the ends of words. Because of these grammatical rhymes in Latin, even if you have just a small vocabulary you can make lots of rhyming pairs. Any word that has a polysyllabic ending offers you a chance to make a rhyme. For example, all these first conjugation verbs rhyme in the first-person plural form: amamus, vocamus, putamus, navigamus, etc. etc.

For an example of imperfect rhyme, consider this saying: Non omnis pugnat, minitans qui fortia clamat. The stress is not on the final syllable of pugnat and clamat, but they do both end with the sound -at. This is the weakest kind of rhyme, but it still provides a kind of verbal echo. If these were the first-person plural forms, they would be perfect rhymes (pugnamus-clamamus) but since the third-person singular form of the verb does not have a polysyllabic ending, you have only near rhyme here.

In one of my vocabulary challenge responses, I used the near rhyme of repletum and quietem; you can see the results here if you are curious. In this example of near rhyme, the final stressed syllable is the same ("et"), but the subsequent syllable is not identical ("um" v. "em").

Also, remember that medieval Latin had a pronunciation that differs from classical Roman pronunciation. Perhaps most importantly, the diphthongs "ae" and "oe" were pronounced "e" as you can see in these rhymes: Nunquam dives erit, multum qui ludere quaerit (quaerit rhymes with erit), and Ex magna cena stomacho fit maxima poena (poena rhymes with cena).

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Strategy: Conditions without Verbs

You probably remember studying conditional (or hypothetical) sentences in Latin and perhaps you memorized those labels such as "future less vivid" condition or "past contrary-to-fact," depending on what types of indicative or subjunctive verbs were used in the sentence. In this strategy tip, I want to highlight how you can actually leave out the verb in the "if" part of the condition (the "protasis" as it is called), so that you can express the idea of a hypothetical situation in just two simple words, without even having to use a verb.

First, let's review some of the conditional particles that you can use to express a hypothetical idea. Of course, you have si (if) and nisi (if not; unless), for straightword conditions. In addition, there is a whole series of concessive participles that are very useful that express the idea of "even it" or "even though" in English: etsi, tametsi, etiamsi, licet and quamvis.

So, you can take any one of those hypothetical participles and use them without a verb to express a hypothetical idea - all you need is a noun or adjective or prepositional phrase, something that will link the hypothetical idea to the main sentence.

Here's an example. When I saw this word list - equus - res - discipulus - iste - animal - I knew I wanted to say something about how the horse is a good pupil, while the donkey (who is often the opposite of the horse in the world of proverbs) is not a good pupil. Here's how I described the donkey: asinus nihil discit, etiamsi verberatus, "the donkey doesn't learn anything, even if (he is) beaten." Without having to worry about what kind of verb to use there, I was able to use an adjective (a participle, as it turns out, but any adjective will do) in order to express a hypothetical idea. If you want to see how the whole thing turned out, here it is.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Writing Strategy: Correlative Word Pairs

Latin abounds in correlative word pairs. Not only are these very useful in expressing ideas, they often are similar in sound, too, providing a nice quality of sound repetition, in addition to clarity of meaning.

So, if you see a word list, notice if any of the words in the list is part of a correlative word pair that you could use to organize your response.

For example, when I saw this list - refero - quantus - dignus - verus - cura - I knew that I wanted to use the correlative pair quantus-tantus in my response. You can see the results here, if you are curious.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Writing Strategy: The Moral of the Story

There are basically three ways that the moral of an Aesop's fable can be expressed. You can have the moral stated at the beginning of the story; this is called a promythium, which is a Greek word meaning "before-the-story." You can also have a moral that comes after the story, which is an epimythium, "after- the-story."

In addition - and this is the kind of moral that I like the best - you can have the moral be pronounced by one of the characters in the story itself. There is not a traditional technical term for this kind of moral, but I like to call it an endomythium, "inside-the-story."

So, for example, when I read this list - hic - modus - gens - quam - reddo - for some reason I thought about the fable of the man who picked up a frozen snake, but when the snake warmed up it then bit the man who had saved it. I decided to use the Latin words to express the moral of the story, putting words in the man's mouth as he died from the snake's venom. You can read the results here if you are curious.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Writing Strategy: Parallel Structure

The use of parallel structures is very common in Latin. Instead of saying something once, you say it twice - perhaps with a subtle variation between the two different instances.

If you are using opposites, for example, you can put those opposites into parallel expressions. In this list - crux - bellum - meus - qui - quoque - I knew right away that I wanted to build my sentence based on the opposition between bellum and pax. So, I ended up with two parallel phrases: in bello and in pace. I like the interplay between having opposite words used in parallel constructions! If you are curious, you can see how the rest of it turned out here.

You can also create more elaborate kinds of parallel constructions. For example, in this list - primus - sanctus - arripere - aetas - ex - I recognized right away that while primus and sanctus are not synonyms, they do have something in common that I could use to build a parallelism - they are both "good" attributes. So, I used that parallelism to create my sentence, which features a number of parallels and repetitions. It is will be more clear if I write it out this way:

Omnia fert aetas,
e manibus meis - arripiens - et PRIMA et pessima
tollensque - e mundo - et SANCTA et scelesta.

Each of the "good" words - prima and sancta - end up in two parallel phrases. Each of those parallel phrases contains a participle, a prepositional phrase, and an object of the participle which pairs the good word with its opposite. To vary things a little bit, I put the prepositional phrase before the participle the first time, and the second time I put the prepositional phrase after the participle. One of the fun things about working with parallelisms is that by emphasizing the similarity you also get to play around with little differences, too!

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Writing Strategy: Proverb Commentary

When you read a list of words, perhaps that list will somehow remind you of a Latin proverb or saying that you already know. You can then use your sentence to provide a kind of introduction to or explanation of that existing proverb. You can quote the existing proverb in your response, and add your own words as a kind of commentary on that proverb.

For example, when I saw this list - equus - res - discipulus - iste - animal - it reminded me of the medieval proverb about someone sending his "asinus" son off to the university, in the mistaken hope that this would turn the "asinus" into an "equus" instead: Parisios bipedum si quis transmittat asellum, si fuit hic asinus, non ibi fiet equus.

When I saw this list - longs - ars - puer - invito - is - I could not help but think of Horace's dictum Ars longa, vita brevis, so provided a kind of commentary on that saying, making it explicit that even if we live to be a ripe old age, we cannot hope to have perfected our art. Here's how it turned out.

So, I wrote a sentence that explains the metaphorical thinking of that proverb, and attached it to the proverb. You can see the results here if you are curious.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Strategies

Here is a list of the posts describing different strategies you can use in responding to the vocabulary challenge:

• Sound Repetition
  
• Rhyme
• Parallel Structures
• Opposites
  
• Correlative Word Pairs
• The Power of Participles
  
• Conditional Statements without Verbs
• Comment on a Proverb
  
• Amplify a Proverb
  
• Write a Moral for a Story
  

Do you have any favorite strategies you'd like to share? Please add a comment to this post with any tips and tricks you find useful!

Strategy: The Power of Participles

Participles are quite amazing things, and along you to build very expressive sentences using a minimum of words. Have you ever thought about the ways in which participles are different from verbs? Here are two general ideas to ponder:

Participles are happily un-coordinated. In Latin, there can only be one main verb in a sentence. If you have other verbs, those verbs have to be coordinated with the main verb. You can use coordinating conjunctions or subordinating conjunctions but, generally speaking, you must do something to coordinate your verbs. That can get a bit complicated, and it also forces you to make explicit the relationship between the verbs - temporal, causal, etc. - that perhaps is not really important to the message you are communicating. If you use participles instead, you have the option to leaving things suggestively un-coordinated, as it were.

Participles have gender. One of the interesting and unusual things about Latin verbs, and about the verbs of Indo-European in general, is that they are not marked for gender. They have person, they have number... but they do not have gender. Given the obsession with gender in the world of nouns and adjectives, the fact that gender drops out of the equation in the world of verbs is a bit odd, don't you think? Well, when you use participles, you add gender back into the verbal equation! Admittedly, participles don't have number - but participles, by having gender, build a nice bridge between the world of nouns and the world of verbs. If you think of participles in English terms, you don't realize what great "glue" they are for knitting a sentence together, since gender is not important in English. In Latin, however, gender is enormously important, and participles help you knit your verbs firmly into the gendered world of nouns.

So, whenever you are pondering a verb in Latin, think about whether you want to use a participle instead. After you have a main verb for your sentence, for every other action, you really can choose between using a verb or using a participle instead. If you think of what you want to say in English first, you will rarely come up with a participle, because participles just do not play the same role in English. So, try to banish thoughts of English from your mind, and let Latin participles exert their allure. If you have more than one verb in your sentence, think about that just a minute or so, letting your mind explore the participle options, and see if you might want to try replacing one of your verbs with a participle, just to see how it sounds!

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Writing Strategy: Sound Repetition

Sound repetition is a very powerful stylistic strategy to use in your writing! There are lots of different ways you can use sound repetition.

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds. Consonance is the repetition of a consonant sound in a series of words. Alliteration is a specific form of consonance when the repeated consonant sound is found at the beginning of the words.

Rhyme is a form of sound repetition which you can find in medieval Latin, but which is quite uncommon in classical Latin. Near rhyme can be based on similar but not identical sound repetition.

In this list - primus - sanctus - arripere - aetas - ex - I knew that I wanted to create opposing pairs for the adjectives primus and sanctus. For the many possible words that are the opposite of primus, I chose pessimus, because of the alliteration. For sanctus, I chose scelestus as the opposite, again because of the alliteration. I really like the idea of words that are opposite in meaning sharing a similarity in sound. You can see the results here if you are curious.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Writing Strategy: Amplify a Proverb

In addition to commenting on a proverb, you can also recreate a proverb, amplifying it and expressing the same idea in a new way.

In some cases, there might be an existing proverb that contains several of the words you need already! When I saw this list - mereo - fides - vel - remaneo - unus - that immediately reminded me of this traditional proverb: Testis in uno falsus, in nullo fidem meretur. The proverb already had three of the five words in it! So, all I needed to do was find a way to fit in vel and remaneo, which was not hard to do: Testis in uno vel falsus vel ambiguus, in nullo fidem meretur; dubitatio semper remanet.

Sometimes, you might end up amplifying the proverb to a much greater extent. For example, when I saw this list of words - primus - sanctus - arripio - aetas - ex - the words aetas and arripio made me think of Vergil's famous words, Omnia fert aetas, "Time bears away all things." I use that tiny proverb in Vergil to inspire my longer expression of the same basic idea, using all the words in the list. You can see the results here if you are curious.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.

Writing Strategy: Opposites

A powerful way to organize a sentence is through OPPOSITES. So, when you look at the Vocabulary Challenge words, start by asking yourself if you can find some pair of opposite words to use in building your sentence and expressing your ideas.

Some words instantly seem to conjure up their opposites! In this list - crux - bellum - meus - qui - quoque - I knew right away that I wanted to build my sentence based on the opposition between bellum and pax, war and peace. So, I ended up with two parallel phrases: in bello and in pace. I like the interplay between having opposite words used in parallel constructions! If you are curious, you can see how the rest of it turned out here.

Other opposites are not immediately obvious. For example, when I saw this list - equus - res - discipulus - iste - animal - I thought of the contrast between equus and asinus (a very common opposition in Latin fables and proverbs!), and I built my saying around that; take a look if you are curious. Another opposite that could work with this same set of words is discipulus-magister, so you could build your sentence around that contrast. Not every word in a language has a clear opposite, but if you can figure out, in Latin, what the opposites of the words in your list would be, that gives you one very good strategy for writing your sentence!

In this list - primus - sanctus - arripere - aetas - ex - I thought of creating parallel pairs, taking the positive words primus and sanctus and pairing them up with their opposites. I paired primus with pessimus and sanctus with scelestus. So, not only was this a great way to build my sentence based on opposites, it also gave me a parallelism and alliteration, too! You can see the results here if you are curious.

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Do you have some good strategies for doing the Vocabulary Challenge in Latin? Share your ideas here! Here are some strategies that I've used in writing my responses.