Classical Latin.
Wheelock’s Latin uses a variety of texts, though mostly from the classical period- Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Cicero, ect.
Although in terms of grammar it is quite compatible with Ecclesiastical Latin. You may use the Ecclesiastical pronounciation if you wish, and I plan to add a feature to the forum with links to letters from the Church Fathers, Latin documents and the Vulgate.
Hi Caesar, sounds like you have a good plan. The reason I mention ecclesiastical Latin isn’t so much for the pronunciation, but for the greater ease of learning it. I say this primarly based on an essay by Dorothy Sayers. Here are a couple of excerpts:
"And it is my belief that the classical texts of the Augustan Age are simply far too difficult.
They were difficult even in their own day, in the sense that they were elaborate, literary, and highly artificial. The language of Cicero was not spoken in the streets, nor even, I fancy, in the drawing-rooms, of ancient Rome. …The ordinary educated Roman could appreciate Virgil and Horace or Cicero because he came to them through his own daily speech, as we come through our own modern speech to the elaborations of Joyce and Eliot. …But teachers do not, as a rule, ask foreign children to plunge immediately into the study of English by way of Donne and Euphues without any help at all from the current English, whose syntax and vocabulary are so much nearer to their own. Doubtless, when the time comes, they are put on to Shakespeare; but they are not, from the start, confined exclusively to the highly compressed and elliptical language of the later Shakespeare, on the grounds that this represents the Golden Age of English from which every later development is a debasement and a degeneration of the language. Yet this is the way in which, for the last four hundred years or so, we have started English boys on the learning of Latin. It can, of course, be done. It was done-in a more leisured age, and for one sex only of a privileged professional class, and in schools which concentrated on the teaching of classical languages and on uncommonly little else. But I doubt if it is the right way of going about it today. And it is not the way in which it was done for the first fifteen centuries of our era. …
And-to go back to my former point-the Medieval Latin is much easier than the classical. Not all of it; some of it is very crabbed, and there were always, in every age, men who tried to conform their living Latin to the Latin of the Augustans. But the true mediaeval Latin is akin to us, with its simplified construction and modern analytical syntax. The proof of that is that I, who cannot read a page of Virgil or Cicero or Horace without the pains of the damned, can read Aquinas without more difficulty than is involved in understanding what he is talking about. When I read Benvenuto da Imola on Dante, I can pass from Italian text to Latin commentary and scarcely notice the change-over. In short, my training in the Latin grammar, while it left me still unfitted to cope with the Augustans, did fit me to cope with the Medievals, whom I could have read easily and fluently, had anybody directed my attention to them in time.
And lest you should think I know too little to know what I am talking about, I will quote from the preface of a book which I met with only the other day after I had decided what I was going to say to you. I wish I had known of its existence earlier: it would have solved half my problems for me. That is H. P. V. Nunn’s
Introduction to the Study of Ecclesiastical Latin. He says:*Much of Classical Latin is highly artificial, not to say unnatural, in its modes of expression. The authors whose works are most generally read wrote for a fastidious and highly cultivated society of littérateurs . . . and especially under the early Empire, they wrote with a view to reading their works to admiring circles of friends, whose applause they hoped to arouse by some novel or far-fetched term of expression.*And, having said that those who intend to use his book “should possess at least a knowledge of the conjugations of Latin verbs and the declensions of Latin nouns such as may be got from any primer”-and that was what I had, before I was in my teens-he goes on:*The author feels confident from experience that those who begin with the Latin Bible and the easier Ecclesiastical authors, will be able to go on to the study of the classics, if they desire to do so, with far more intelligence and profit than if they had tried to approach them without some previous preparation.**
memoriapress.com/articles/sayers/sayers4.html*Nevertheless, regardless of whichever route you take, best wishes. It’s probably best to go with whatever route you have the most enthusiasm for.
