Melting my own frozen breath

Today was interesting at Penncrest..  Some of us listened to a professional adventurer talk about his amazing trips to the north and south poles.  The pictures were beautiful, the stories compelling, and let's face it--we each were a bit dumb-struck that you could do this for a living.  And the entire time I listened and watched, I thought about Latin.  Now I admit that I am prone to daydreaming, and Latin forms the stuff of most of my dreams.  But I found the connections between our guide's melting his own frozen breath to get drinking water and learning Latin too obvious to miss.  

What is that, you say?  You don't see the connections?  Let me elaborate:

Just like the south pole, Latin is not some immediate place.  It is not easily accessible, filled with jocular citizens and attractive singers.  You don't get on a plane and fly to Latinium, you don't go to a Latin restaurant, you don't find a Latin station on your radio.  It is far away in about every possible connection.  Time separates us.  Geography and climate separate us.  Culture separates us.  And our own social niceties make seeking it out hard.  I mean, come on:  how many "in" people do you know reading Latin and name-dropping Cicero at lunch or in the movies?  No one simply stumbles into Latin like you might into a good sale at the Gap.  You get there because you set off to go there. 

And the getting there is not easy, either.  Our adventurer-guide spends crazy amounts of time preparing for his various expeditions.  We saw the pictures (or know someone who did):  the physical stamina, the mental focus he required.  Latin requires no less.  Rarely do we get a fellow to speak with, someone to write to.  Our conversations are with long dead writers.  We must overcome the barriers of vocabulary and grammar with hard work.  And though we don't have to run up mountains pulling tires behind us, we do need to return time and again to stories, vocabulary, and sentences.  We need to write notes, paragraphs, little snippets of thoughts as they come.  And we often do this alone.  

More importantly, our guide considered the destination worth the effort.  He arrived in a remote place with a desolate landscape, yet it was beautiful and life-changing.  He considers it so worthwhile he takes others there, repeatedly.  Anything he has to do to get there is worth it--even walking for two days straight, even scraping his frozen breath off the inside of the tent so he could melt it for water.  In Latin we have the last two millennia calling over their shoulders to us, urging us to come see what they have gone on ahead to discover.  They considered the destination worth the effort.  They returned repeatedly, brought others, overcame obstacles for the pleasure of reaching this goal of Latin.  The goal IS worth it.

So as I listened, I connected with his struggles, his disciplines, his goals, his victories.  I saw Latin in every picture.  And I knew how good the water tasted, even though flavored with tent.

Participles like fully-cooked chicken

Participles, as the earlier blog suggested, can be tough cookies.  But a little milk takes care of some of that, so let's go after them like a two-year-old goes after an Oreo.  And who knows?  Maybe we'll even find something tasty in them yet.
Participles belong to that vast, unwashed category of words called verbals.  Sometimes we want to call them something else entirely, but let vocabulary be what may and try to understand it.  Though actually nouns or adjectives,  this ill-mannered gang carry with them certain roles we generally think of as verbs.  First, they usually do/did something (like loving, hitting, jumped, or killed).  We commonly think this makes them verbs, but for the time being you must trust me they are wholly incapable of doing a verb's job as is.    Second, participles show some characteristic of the action.  It either is ongoing--we call that progressive--or it is finished--that's called perfect.  Think of the words I used:  ongoing and finished.  You can see how we express that aspect.  Third, they tell us when this activity happened.  Well, sort of.  Like we tell our parents when we arrived home from the "study session" at our friends house.  Context is everything, right?  And finally, they indicate how that action is viewed--it either goes out (active--loving) or comes back (passive--loved).  Remember our illustration from class:  the killing chicken vs the killed chicken.  Be sure to cook it all the way!
Yes, a dense paragraph, but hopefully it makes some things clear:  participles show an event with some aspect of completion or progression occurring at some relative time while its voice declares whether it did the action or had it done back.
Whew.  That was a lot to bite off at one time.  And what started off like a cookie tastes more like chicken now.  I hope its fully cooked.

A Cold Glass of Milk

Our review now ended and the year stretching out ahead, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable place confronting participles on the page.
I confess, I enjoyed writing that last sentence.  I snuck in a few participles.  Can you find them?
Participles are often difficult to recognize--both in English and Latin.  In English, as we discussed in class, they mirror the forms found in some verbs.  This is particularly troubling since in such verbs the participle contains the action of the idea, and we mistakenly think the action must be the verb.  Right?  And in Latin we struggle to keep them separate from the verb since our translation moves us to the dreaded verb-as-understanding, especially when we see we use dependent clauses for much that Latin expresses as participles (Magister, you lost me at "dependent").
So what are we to do?
Well, first, let's take a breath and admit there may be some rough sailing ahead.  Weakness in vocabulary and struggles with the role of the cases will make participles difficult to understand.  The best responses are to double down on our commitment to Latin, slow down our reading rate to fewer words per minute, and work with the reading towards comprehension.  Anxiety or unrealistic expectations will not help here.
Second, let's look at what participles are presenting to see how we can understand what they are saying--preferably keeping it in Latin--and gain a measure of confidence with them.
In the next several posts I will try to simplify participles for us.  Not make them simple--this is not a panacea--but reduce the grammar noise and narrowly consider what they do and how they do it.  While I do that, why don't you go get a cold glass of milk, a couple of cookies, and settle in.  This is going to take a while.