It’s not difficult to argue that the biggest initial hurdle that native speakers of English have to overcome when learning Latin or Greek is the case system. In my experience, the most common problem-areas are: (1) English, of course, does not (99.999% of the time) use case, so the concept is entirely unfamiliar; (2) formal grammar education, at least today in the U.S., is not incredibly thorough, and using cases requires at least a baseline comfort with formal grammar; and (3) the way a native speaker of a ‘fixed word-order language’ like English approaches a sentence conflicts pretty harshly with the way that they’d ideally approach a sentence in a case language. It’s this last one that we’re going to address here.

A language like English, which uses such rigid word order, programs our brains to treat words as, essentially, their dictionary entry. To explain what I mean, let’s look at a very basic example:

                The caterpillar eats the leaves.

If I know what each of those individual words’ dictionary entries is, I can translate the sentence. Even if I don’t know that /s/ is how English marks the third person singular in the present tense, a left-to-right, just-insert-the-dictionary-entries translation gets the meaning across. The word order makes it clear that the caterpillar is the subject, even without my knowing that “leaves” can’t be the subject because it doesn’t agree with the verb in number. This tends to work regardless of how complex your sentence gets:

                Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.

Aside from the ambiguity of whether “that” is a relative or a demonstrative, this sentence essentially works the same as the one above: insert dictionary entries for their respective words starting from the left, and you’ll basically know what the sentence says.

To sum it up: in English, morphology and syntax are radically deprioritized, and denotation (with its friend connotation) reigns supreme; if I know the dictionary entry of each word in the sentence, I will have a decent understanding of the sentence.

This, of course, is not a reliable strategy for case languages. Sometimes it works perfectly fine:

                O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. Consul videt; hic tamen
vivit. Vivit?!

There is the single sticking-point of the direct object haec coming before the verb, rather than after it, but “the senate these things understands” is not a valid sentence in English and is fairly easily remedied. Even the postpositive tamen can be translated where it lies in the sentence without any problems (sorry, Wackernagel’s Law). As we’re aware, however, most of the time this does not work. There is, of course, the simplest illustration:

                Puer mordet canem  //  Canem mordet puer  //  Puer canem mordet

Using our insert-the-dictionary-entry strategy, we would get, respectively, “the boy bites the dog,” “the dog bites the boy,” and “the boy dog bites,” all reasonable sentences in English. But, of course, only the first one is right. That’s because, unlike in English, so much information is contained at the end of the word. No matter how many times you tell students that word order contributes very little to meaning in Latin, you will still get all three of those translations.

So. What do we do about this? Our students need to be taught how to approach words in a way that puts morphology and syntax first – we want them considering these elements before they ask themselves what the dictionary entry of the word is. We can do this by teaching them to approach each word with a simple progression, which we’ve named The Flow:

                Morphology > Syntax > Literal Translation > Vocabulary >
_______Final Translation

So, for instance, if we were to look at the earlier sentence: canem mordet puer. Our students’ most likely first instinct will be to say “the dog bites the boy,” because (1) that’s the order the Latin words are in, and (2) this combination of a dog, a boy, and biting makes perfect sense. But if a student is using The Flow, the process looks quite different:

                Morphology                       can/em morde/t puer/Ø

                Syntax                                 can/ [direct object]; morde/ [main verb];
_____________________________puer/ [subject]

                Literal Translation           The puer mordet the canem

                Vocabulary                          puer/- boy    morde/ – bite   can/ – dog

                Final Translation               The boy bites the dog.

For a person familiar with case languages, this might seem fairly obvious. The purpose of The Flow, though, is to essentially reprogram students’ brains into the mindset of ‘morphology and syntax come first.’ The natural impulse of every one of them is to see the word canem and say “that means dog,” when in reality, it doesn’t. Canem means “direct object-dog,” just like mordet means not “bite” but “3^rd-person-singular-subject-actively-bites-in-the-present-time.” Approaching every word with The Flow will slowly get them into the ‘morphology-and-syntax-first’ mindset necessary for succeeding with a case language.

* * *

What does this mean for instructors? Aside from introducing students to The Flow and reminding them to use it when they approach words, you want to (please don’t make fun of me for this next word) ~embody~ The Flow when you’re teaching. For example:

• ask students about morphology before you ask them about denotation;
• relentlessly segment words out like I’ve done above to emphasize that a word is a combination of sense-units rather than a monolith with a singular meaning;
• write practice sentences with crazy word order to remind them that Latin doesn’t use word order in the way that English does (if you’re worried about writing a sentence that’s ‘too wild to be representative of real Latin,’ go read Livy’s preface to remind yourself there’s probably no such thing as ‘too wild’ for Latin; also just remind yourself that poetry exists).

Possibly most importantly, it is crucial that you give partial credit on assessments when it’s clear that the student understood the earlier steps of The Flow. I always tell my students that translating, e.g., canem mordet puer as “the puer bites the canem” tells me that they understand Latin just as well, if not better, than someone who translated it as “the dog bites the boy.” The first student recognized the malleability of Latin word order and knew the case-endings of two different declensions and what those cases denote; they understand the fundamentals of Latin, they just happened to not know some vocab. The second student essentially just knew that a word starting with can means “dog” and a word starting with puer means “boy;” that’s knowledge, not understanding, and getting our students to understand the language should always be our ultimate goal.

-David Welch