apolloslibrary

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[apolloslibrary]

Today my friend insisted that this blog is probably run by a social media team. Thought you might find that amusing.

The nearest thing I have to a social media team is Dan Guy, who looks after neilgaiman.com and sometimes posts things for me (when I'm busy) on Facebook or Xitter (although on FB you can always see who posted it, so you'll know if it's him). Tumblr, Bluesky or Mastodon it's just me. (Instagram and Threads it now seems to be just me again but I need to work out how to make it include Dan again.)

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this was so funny to me btw

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this ‘rose gold’ northern cardinal has obvious abnormal coloration; it’s believed this is due to xanthochromism, or an overproduction of yellow pigmentation. it was photographed in the wild in michigan.

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people will just use polynesian words completely incorrectly with completely made up meanings while being really offensive and won't even care huh lol

#i was briefly interested in polynesian cultures several times in my life #I've heard about mana before and since the first time I heard about it I've never used it in context of fantasy magic #and I'm glad to have learnt about the other appropriations just now

[apolloslibrary]

Oh shit this makes so much sense

[original]

Google results quality has been absolute crap for years and this may have a lot to do with it.

[apolloslibrary]

I think the biggest sign of the grand “fall of Bethesda” or whatever is the fact that Starfield officially released a full calendar month ago today and I literally have zero idea what it is about or what happens in it. absolutely zero cultural osmosis seems to have happened, which would’ve been unthinkable for a Bethesda RPG like ten years ago

[apolloslibrary]

ok so funny story

there was no post about hebrew last Tuesday because the class was cancelled lmao

not entirely of course, just for the week

because the lecturer was on a pilgrimage

what you get when you sign up for classes in the faculty of theology lmao

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being a healer after you buff your team before a boss fight

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Mondo Mango: Marbles

Allowing myself to play.

[apolloslibrary]

I may have accidentally left this blog unattended after uhhh.... two days... yeah sorry

but! I've got some news

This semester I will be learning biblical hebrew, and I intend to use this blog as a place to keep some of my notes in

soooo stay tuned! my first class will be next week, tuesday!

#langblr #biblical hebrew #hebrew #JayJayLearning

[apolloslibrary]

Latin Alphabet Revisited: Pars Ⅱ—consonants and digraphs

So last time i talked about vowels in latin, and before i proceed i'd like to make a slight correction: Y in classical latin was most likely pronounced as U which makes sense - some romans would probably know to pronounce it as a rounded i sound having received greek education, but anyway

So the second, larger part of the alphabet is of course made up of consonants. There's little to talk about here imo except some letters that might cause some confusion but I'll go over all of them anyway

so the consonants of the latin alphabet are

B C D F G H J K L M N P Q R S T V X Z

although if you went a bit back in time you'd find the consonant inventory a little bit smaller at

B C D F H (I) K L M N P Q R S T V X

there might be some mistakes, as I am not showing them at a specific point in time, merely listing the ones I know have stuck around since the earliest days

anyway as you can see, at some point the Latin alphabet lacked letters G J and Z - funnily enough, Z was present in the earliest forms of the latin alphabet (and stood between F and H like Ζζ does in the greek alphabet!) but it didn't see much use, so it was dropped

G essentially arose out of necessity—its inventor was Spurius Carvillius Ruga, who supposedly was tired of people pronouncing his cognomen wrong, because at the time both sounds /k/ and /g/ were written with ⟨C⟩ (as K had fallen out of favour and remained in use mostly for abbreviations and to write the word Kalendæ (calends, the first day of the month, etymon of the word Calendar) so he added a stroke to distinguish them

curious might be the inclusion of ⟨i⟩ to some of you: well originally i and v were originally both vowels and consonants—/i~j/ and /u~w/ respectively (which also means that if I wanted to be extra accurate, I could've written the u's as v's, as that's how romans would have done it, but our current latin spelling convention prefers to use ⟨u⟩ for that

Anyway the pronunciation B /b/; C /k/ - in all positions despite what the ecclesiastical (church) pronunciation or most national pronunciations do D /d/; F /f/; G /g/ - as with C, no matter the position it is pronounced as a hard g H /h/; I/J /j/ - this pronunciation occurs when the letter is surrounded by vowels, or at the beginning of the word while being followed by another vowel (e.g. in IVVENIS - nowadays written as iuvenis or juvenis). I'll make a post about the validity of using J in latin spelling some other day! K /k/ - I'll make a post discussing C K and Q another day, as all three make the same sounds, and it may seem like a weird case of redundancy, especially since K, as I said before, didn't see much use L /l/; M /m/ - today it is agreed upon that the classical pronunciation also featured nasalisation (like the thing that happens in French) of vowels in certain environments, usually triggered by M and N - the ending -um was especially guilty of this - but that's another topic for another day! N /n/; P /p/; Q /k/; R /r/; S /s/; T /t/; V /w/ - similar situation to I/J, where it could be used both as a vowel and as a consonant. Again, IVVENIS/iuvenis is an amazing example here X /ks/ Z /z/ - this letter never appears in native latin words, and the sound isn't native to latin either, it was re-borrowed into latin upon the roman conquest of greece (despite having been part of the alphabet before dropping it lmao - anyway that's the reason Z is at the end of the alphabet now), and it was most likely pronounced /ts/ (like in modern italian). In poetry it counted as two consonants, possibly because in ancient greek it was pronounced either /zd/ or /dz/ (about which I will talk in yet another post)

Ok so with single consonants out of the way, let us discuss the digraphs: there are six notable digraphs in latin I believe:

AE, OE, PH, TH, CH, RH

let's start with ae and oe - those two are usually pronounced identically to E in most traditional and the ecclesiastical pronunciation. Romans however pronounced it more as a diphtong - for example Caesar (Cesar the name) - in German the word became Kaiser, which reflects the antique pronunciation, as e in the diphtong would often sound very close to i.

Ph, Th, and Ch are all roman attempts to transcribe the letters φ (phi) θ (theta) and χ (chi), and similarly to those letters, they are pronounced as apsirated plosives (p in party, t in tonne, c in cake - sorry if I got these wrong, I pronounce them with aspirated plosives and no one seems to find it weird) rather than f english th and english ch or something like that

and now rh - seemingly the most useless digraph in all of latin - this one is another spelling adaptation made to accurately transcribe greek loanwords, and the reason behind is the fact that the greek rhotic - ρ - could actually become unvoiced in two situations: - at the beginning of the word (e.g. of such loanwords in latin rho, rhombus, Rhodus/Rhodos) - when geminated (doubled) in which case the second r would become unvoiced (e.g. diarrhoea, Pyrrhus)

So there it is! I think that's all for the Latin alphabet for now, in future posts I will be explaining some history or fun facts regarding the latin alphabet (such as the C-K-Q redundancy), describe the greek alphabet, and of course start doing some grammar and vocab on here!

#latin #latin alphabet #linguistics #Iacomus docet #alphabet revisited #langblr #history #language learning

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Latin Alphabet Revisited: pars Ⅰ (prima) —the vowels

because I'm feeling down, I've decided to do something simple as my first proper post on this blog

some of you may think: "but why? everyone and their european mother knows how to read latin!" well turns out that's not as simple as it seems; there are multiple latin pronunciation conventions, most of them local, and while they will usually be mutually intelligible, they are not consistent

you may have heard that we don't know how latin actually sounded - and it's true we don't know *for sure* how it would have been pronounced, but thanks to the magic of linguistics we can make some educated guesses when it comes to the most probable known pronunciation of latin, and i will be presenting the reconstructed classical pronunciation

so let's start with the vowels: we have 5~6 pairs of vowels in Latin:

āă /aː a/ ēĕ /eː ɛ/ īĭ /iː ɪ/ ōŏ /oː ɔ/ ūŭ /uː ʊ/ and sometimes y /yː y/ (my keyboard doesn't allow for macrons and breves above y I'm sorry)

the letters with macrons (– above) are long vowels, the letters with breves (◡ above) are short vowels. note the difference between the pronunciations of long and short vowels: while you would be definitely understood if you pronounced them the same in terms of quality, but it would be clear you are not a native speaker

i would love to give layman's approximations in English words for those phonemes, but I'm not a native English speaker + english IPA confuses amd frightens me, and even just sticking to RP english (what i try to emulate when speaking) is hard for me in phonetic transcription

anyway the y - I've seen some sources differentiate between Y and I which would make sense, romans were Greek Freaks and they added the letter Y to their alphabet to try and approximate the pronunciation of the greek Υυ, which was pronounced the same/similarly at the time; meanwhile other sources/tradition (including my latin teachers) claim Y and I be pronounced the same (making e.g. the word hymen be pronounced like he-man which I find absolutely hilarious)

anyway the vowel length is important for two things: poetry and grammar

you may be familiar with the fact that Shakespeare wrote a lot in the iambic pentameter - the iambic part refers to iambs which in poetry is a metrical foot of one unstressed or long syllable and one stressed or long syllable (depends on the language - in Polish for example it would use syllable stress, but in Latin it's vowel length) which in the metrical notation is written as ◡– (and yes, this notation takes from the way vowel length is marked in Latin!) - yea that's essentially why it's important in poetry

in grammar however it will often differentiate inflected forms of words - best examples being Ⅰ declension's nominative-ablative endings (-a -ā), Ⅱ declension's dative-ablative endings (-o -ō) and the infinitive endings of Ⅱ and Ⅲ conjugations (-ēre -ĕre respectively)

so this is it for now! in the next post I will discuss the consonants and digraphs (including ae and oe)

#latin #grammar #vowels #phonology #langblr #iacomos docet #alphabet #alphabet revisited

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Prima Introductio

Salvete! My name is JayJay and I'm a college student.

For a long time I have been interested in ancient Greece and Rome. In High school I got to learn Latin as part of my track, and recently I've begun learning ancient Greek.

This blog is to serve as a sort of notebook for myself, that I hope will also lend itself useful to others!

#latin #ancient greek #greek #langblr