Latin/Time Lesson 1

Salvēte omnēs! Welcome back to Latin for Wikiversity. Here you can peruse a new lesson in Latin, in a simple format. If you would like to catch up, you can find a directory of lessons, a classified vocabulary list, and Memrise courses at the links on the right.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be concentrating on Latin expressions of time and dates. Please be aware it would be difficult to reconstruct “authentic” Roman usage of some of these terms. Where possible we give the word that would be most familiar in the classical era. For a description of Roman calendar practice, here is a good site. The days of the week in this week’s lesson are given in the base form of nominative followed by the genitive; e.g., diēs Lunae = Monday, day of the moon. When you are describing an event that happens “on Monday,” you use the ablative form for day but keep the genitive: diē Lunae. Grammar refers to this as the “ablative of time when,” and it allows a noun or noun phrase to serve as an adverb. The frequently used ablative hōc diē (on this day) contracted and became the adverb hodiē (today). For some words we’ll be using sentence fragments because we haven’t learned future or past tenses yet!

Practice
Thank you once again for following these lessons. We’ll learn months of the year next time. Bonam fortūnam vōbīs!