9.3 Gate: Read Twelve Unseen Sentences — Epoché
What you will be able to do Translate twelve Latin sentences you have never seen, with a dictionary and nothing else. Measure what the first phase actually achieved, honestly, against a fixed standard. Decide, on evidence, whether to go on or to spend a week going back. Read sentences like Aeque procerus est ac frater meus. [37] — He is as tall as my brother. — without looking anything up. Prerequisites : lesson 9.2 — the forms. This is the gate of the first phase. Twelve sentences, none of which appears anywhere else in this course, and the only help allowed is a dictionary. Read this before you start. The twelve are not easy and they are not meant to be. They were taken from the corpus at random within a length band and then checked, by machine, against every sentence quoted in every lesson of this phase, so that none of them could have been seen. Nothing was smoothed. Two of them contain constructions this phase did not teach, and the notes say which — because that is what reading unseen text is like, and a gate that only tests what was taught tells you nothing about whether you can read. Eight to warm up Not scored. Translate these first, aloud, to get the machinery moving. If these are hard, stop and do 9.2 again before going on. # Latin English 1 Salve, meum corculum. [1] Good morning, sweetheart. 2 Ubique esse non possum. [2] I can't be everywhere. 3 Interpretor, ergo sum. [3] I translate, therefore I am. 4 Aeque procerus est ac pater. [4] He is as tall as his father. 5 Triclinium prope culinam est. [5] The dining room is near the kitchen. 6 Placetne tibi hic saccus dorsualis? [6] Do you like this backpack? 7 Catervam stipulatorum circum se habet. [7] He has bodyguards. 8 Dic mihi, quaeso, de tua magistra. [8] Please tell me about your teacher. Twenty sentences These are the twelve that count, numbered from nine so that the twenty sentences of this lesson run together. The third column is a hint about the grammar, not a translation; read it only if you are stuck, and score the sentence as half a mark if you needed it. # Latin Hint 9 Compara translatum tuum cum eius. [9] An imperative, two possessives and a preposition. One of the possessives is a pronoun in the genitive. 10 Volo te uno momento tacere. [10] An accusative and infinitive after a verb of wanting, and an ablative of time. 11 In culina sedent et potionem Sinensem bibunt. [11] Two verbs sharing a subject, a prepositional phrase and an adjective of nationality. 12 Equus qui Cornelium vehit pulcher est. [12] A relative clause inside the subject, and the main verb at the very end. 13 Quando nuptiae tuae sunt? [13] A question with the copula and a plural noun that has no singular in this sense. 14 Solum facimus quod iussi sumus. [14] A relative clause with a perfect passive, and an adverb doing a lot of work. 15 Visne iterum ad illam virginem? [15] A question with the enclitic particle, an adverb, and a verb of motion left out. 16 Mea suntne an tua? [16] Two possessive pronouns, the question particle attached to the verb, and a word meaning or . 17 Quanti olivae et crustula constant? [17] A genitive of price, two subjects joined, and a verb that takes it. 18 Proximo anno in Scotia me visuri estis. [18] An ablative of time, a place, and a future participle with the verb to be. 19 Cur hic natare non licet? [19] An impersonal verb with an infinitive as its subject — the hardest construction in the twelve. 20 Quid eis dicam ? [20] A deliberative subjunctive and a dative plural pronoun. How to do it. One sentence at a time. Read it aloud. Find the verb. Find the nominative. Account for every other word by its ending. Look up what you must, in the dictionary, using 8.2 — and look up no more than five words in the whole twelve, which is the real constraint and the one that makes this a test of reading rather than of decoding. Write your twelve translations down before looking at the answers. Writing them down is not a formality: a translation you have only thought is always better than the one you actually produce, and the gap between them is the thing being measured. Score yourself One mark for a sentence whose meaning you got right. Half a mark if you needed the hint. No mark if you got the general sense but the grammar wrong — if you read a passive as an active, or attached an adjective to the wrong noun, that is a miss even when the English comes out plausible. 10 to 12. The first phase has done its work. Go on to the second and do not go back; what is still shaky will be re-taught in a harder form and will stick better the second time. 7 to 9. The ordinary result, and a pass. Go on. Take note of which of the twelve defeated you and what they had in common — it will usually be one construction rather than a general weakness. 4 to 6. Go on, but read volume 5 again first, aloud, all eight lessons, without the commentary. That is about two hours and it is the highest-value two hours available to you. Below 4. Something specific is missing rather than everything being weak. The three scores from 9.1 and the four from 9.2 will say what. Fix that one thing, retake this lesson in a fortnight, and do not treat the score as a verdict on whether you can learn Latin — it is a verdict on one afternoon's reading. However you scored , note this: three months ago you could not read any of these sentences at all, and the question was not how many but whether the page meant anything. It does now. That is what the first phase was for. Practice Read them aloud. Read all twenty aloud once before translating anything. Count your lookups. Keep a tally of every word you look up. Anything above ten means the vocabulary of volume 4 needs another pass. The two untaught constructions. Find them, and say what you think each one does from its context alone. Retranslate three. Take the three you got wrong, work out why, and translate them again without the answer in view. Write the next step. In one sentence, say what you will do differently in the second p