Latin Via Fables

Since I've been lazy, and not updating this blog as much as I'd like, I've been remiss not to have linked and discussed Laura Gibbs' several great sites. Today, I want to point you to Latin Via Fables, and explain how I've been using it to great effect the last few days.

As you'll quickly find, Latin Via Fables presents a vast collection of interesting and accessible stories (in the manner of Aesop's Fables). Laura has also gone to the trouble of "segmenting" most of the stories and providing an English gloss. By "sementing", as I understand it, I mean she has grouped (on separate lines) adjacent words which form a coherent semantic unit, or which should be processed (plus minusve) at one time. An English example would be:

I
saw
the dog
with brown spots.

Rather than something like:

I saw the
dog with brown
spots.

Since Latin is different, we can have the tendency to read it and not properly "chunk" it mentally. This segmentation is quite helpful.

I'm using these stories in the following way. I copy her segmented text and, for each Latin word I don't already know, I look it up and write (in Latin) an explanation or a gloss for that word (as preparation for what's next). Then I am presenting the stories orally to my wife after dinner, and answering her questions about vocabulary only in Latin (using my prepared glosses mainly).

In my next post, I'll give you an example fable from Latin Via Fables, with my prepared Latin glosses.