Month April 2024

Latin Grammars

Jesse

Over at r/latin on Reddit, someone asked for recommendations of more “advanced” Latin grammars. Partly for my own future reference, here’s the list that I suggested. I hope it may be helpful to anyone looking for such a list who may stumble upon it here.

One-volume Reference Grammars

In my experience, the most comprehensive of the standard one-volume grammars in English is the following:

But its terminology is somewhat different from contemporary standards, and, depending on the problem, I may still need to “triangulate” between it and other standard grammars, including the following:

More advanced grammars of Classical Latin

When a one-volume reference grammar isn’t enough, I often turn to the following two classics:

Also extremely useful are the (very fat!) textbooks that have made available to the world the teaching approach of the late Fr. Reginald Foster, especially because the index to the second volume helpfully cross-references the grammatical constructions that are taught in volume 1 to real-life examples from the letters of Cicero in volume 2:

Two options offering a more historical/linguistic approach are the following:

  • James Clackston (ed.), A Companion to the Latin Language (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
  • Michael Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin (Ann Arbor, MI: Beech Stave Press, 2009; 2nd edn 2020).

I have not personally made use (yet) of the following, to which I have online access through my university but which seems prohibitively expensive to buy (probably because each volume is over 1400 pages long):

  • Harm Pinkster, The Oxford Latin Syntax, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015–2021).
    • vol. 1 (2015): The Simple Clause.
    • vol. 2 (2021): The Complex Sentence and Discourse.

The Heavies

For really heavy grammatical study, however, no one can beat the Germans, to whom we owe the following multi-volume reference works in the series Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft [“Handbook of Studies in Antiquity”], one for Classical Latin and one for Medieval Latin:

Classical

Manu Leumann, J. B. Hofmann, and Anton Szantyr, Lateinische Grammatik auf der Grundlage des Werkes von Friedrich Stolz und Joseph Hermann Schmalz [“Latin Grammar, Based on the Work of Friedrich Stolz and Joseph Hermann Schmalz”], new edn, 3 vols., Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.2 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1972–79):

Medieval

Peter Stotz, Handbuch der lateinischen Sprache des Mittelalters, 5 vols., Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft 2.5 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1996–2004). All five volumes accessible at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/2.5.5.-p.-stotz-bibliographie-quellenbersicht-und-register-2004/

  • vol. 1 (2002): Einleitung: Lexikologische Praxis; Wörter und Sachen; Lehnwortgut. [“Introduction: Lexicographical Practice; ‘Words and Things’ (a technical term for a trend in twentieth-century philology); Loanwords”]
  • vol. 2 (2000): Bedeutungswandel und Wortbildung. [“Change in Meaning and Word-Formation”]
  • vol. 3 (1996): Lautlehre. [“Morphology”]
  • vol. 4 (1998): Formenlehre, Syntax und Stilistik. [“Accidence, Syntax, and Style”]
  • vol. 5 (2004): Bibliographie, Quellenübersicht und Register. [“Bibliography, Overview of Sources, and Index”]

Latin Grammars Written in Latin

As for grammars of Latin written in Latin, apart from a few specimens at the introductory level, the ones that I’m aware of were written in Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period:

“Find out how the Young are enjoying themselves, and put a stop to it.”

Jesse

At his unmissable blog “Mutual Enrichment,” Fr. John Hunwicke has reminded us of that fateful day in 1581 when Edmund Campion’s pamphlet (in Latin) against the Protestant Reformation in England appeared on the seats of the audience at the annual “University Act” at Oxford. The title loosely translates as “Ten propositions that Edmund Campion, of the Society of Jesus, has offered to uphold in a debate against his adversaries about the (Catholic) Faith.”

I managed to track down a scan of the original printing, and in a characteristic bout of “productive procastination,” I spent a couple of hours cleaning up the scan to make it as legible as I could and then formatted it for at-home printing: Rationes decem (1581)

In deference to Fr. Hunwicke and his British readers, the resulting pdf is sized for A5 paper. But I’m sure that anyone who finds it here will be able to resize it for printing on whatever paper is desired.

Hurter’s “Nomenclator” for looking up Catholic theologians who lived between 1109 and 1894

Jesse

In a great many theological works written (in Latin) from the early modern period down into the twentieth century, there is a casual assumption that readers will understand references to an abbreviated form of an author’s name, plus a volume and page number. If you aren’t part of the assumed audience—the people who just “know”—there won’t be anything like a list of abbreviations or bibliography of works cited to help you out.

For example, a colleague recently asked me to help him translate a (rather racy!) passage from an 1835 edition of St. Alphonsus Liguori’s Theologia moralis, where I encountered an in-text citation that looked like this:

Negant Sanch. l. 9. D. 17. n. 5 et Boss. c. 7. n. 175 et 193. cum Fill. ac Perez …. Sed verius affirmant Spor. de Matrim. num. 498. Tamb. l. 7. c. 3. §5. num. 33. et Diana. p. 67. tr. 7. R. 7. cum Fagund.

That means that some guys named “Sanch., Boss., Fill., and Perez” said “No” to the question under discussion, whereas some guys named “Spor., Tamb., Diana., and Fagund.” said “Yes,” and that, in St. Alphonsus’s view, “more truly” (verius). But who are the writers, and what are the works, that St. Alphonsus is referring to?

Hunting for answers in the venerable 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, I noticed that the entry for one of these theologians cited “Hurter Nomenclator,” and that led me to the following work, which has been made freely accessible at the Hathi Trust Digital Library:

Hugo Hurter (1832–1914), Nomenclator literarius recentioris theologiae catholicae theologos exhibens qui inde a Concilio tridentino floruerunt aetate, natione, disciplinis distinctos, 2nd edn, 4 vols. (Oeniponte [Innsbruck]: Libraria academica Wagneriana, 1892–99).

(“A literary name-identifier for more recent Catholic theology, showing the names of theologians who flourished after the Council of Trent, divided by era, nation, and discipline.”)

  • Vol. 1 (1892): Theologiae Catholicae seculum primum post celebratum Concilium Tridentinum, ab anno 1564–1663 [Hathi Trust]
  • Vol. 2 (1893): Theologiae Catholicae seculum secundum post celebratum Concilium Tridentinum, ab anno 1664–1763 [Hathi Trust]
  • Vol. 3 (1895): Theologiae Catholicae seculum tertium post celebratum Concilium Tridentinum, ab anno 1764–1894 [Hathi Trust]
  • Vol. 4 (1899): Theologia Catholica tempore Medii Aevi, ab anno 1109–1563 [Hathi Trust] [index of names for all 4 volumes]

(The fourth volume goes back in time to the Middle Ages.)

There were subsequent third editions of a couple of these volumes, and even a fourth edition of one of them, but those aren’t accessible online.

Hurter covers everybody, but there’s not much on offer in the way of “immediate gratification.” For example, when I looked up “Boss.,” I found fourteen possible names, scattered across all four volumes. But I worked out a fairly quick way of sorting between them. I looked in the (very detailed) table of contents of each volume and checked to see where the page number next to each name fell in the various sub-disciplines of “Theology.”

It didn’t take long to notice that the page number for “Bossio Jo. Barn. it (1665) II, 288” fell in a section of volume 2 devoted to the topic at hand, namely, “Theologia moralis.” Turning to that section, it was only a matter of minutes to work out that St. Alphonsus had to be referring to Giovanni Angelo Bossi (1590–1665) and to his treatise De effectibus contractus matrimonii (1655).

I don’t know how I would have worked that out without Hurter’s Nomenclator!

What I’ll probably do is print out a booklet containing the union index of names from volume 4 and the tables of contents from all four volumes, to speed up the name-hunting process.

Update (April 13, 2024)

I’ve now created a permanent page for this resource under “Other Useful Reference Resources” in the navigation menu. And to make it easier for myself others to use it, I’ve also created, and made accessible for download, two pdf files, one with the whole union index from volume 4, and the other with the tables of contents from all four volumes: