I will be attending a wedding this afternoon and will be short on time for completing the “Teaching Lingua Latina” series that I have been working on. Instead, I will be offering what I hope is an adequate substitute. 

Over the last year or so, I have been assembling a document that contains useful vocabulary, phrases, fables, myths, names, poems, etc. The common denominator is that they all potentially are of interest to middle/high-school kids. I have, for example, collected the names of animals, fictitious animals, family members, the gods, sicknesses, constellations, and a whole lot more. 

I am quite fastidious about the information and vocabulary that I gather, and make an attempt, as best as I am able to verify that what I include is thoroughly “Latin”. Much of what I have collected comes from things that I stumbled across in a primary text first, and then verified in a Latin-to-English lexicon. It would be very easy to look a lot of these things up in an English-to-Latin lexicon first, but, as great as this kind of lexical resource is, in my opinion, it can give unintentionally misleading information about the way Romans would have expressed themselves, or it simply does not contain the kind of information you are looking for. I am also just unreasonably skeptical of English-to-Latin lexicons and prefer furnishing my own storehouse of information. 

The document is a continuous work in progress, and I hope to one day offer it in its entirety to you all. Until that time, I will provide a small fraction of it for a blog post. 

Below you will find some animal sounds that I have collected reading through Eramus’ Adagia, Colloquia, Epistles, and other works. Some of them are proper verbs associated with a specific animal e.g. “elephantus barrit”. Others are general verbs that could be applied to the sound that a specific animal makes. For example, the word “stridere” is not specific to the cicada, but it is a fitting verb for the sound it makes. 

There are a couple of verbs on the list that are not strictly classical, meaning they don’t appear in that corpus of authors we consider classical: Cicero, Horace, Vergil, etc. “Barrio”, for example, according to Lewis and Short, appears in a fourth-century text. Nothing, however, is a “neo-Latin” fabrication.

I have found that children are quite fond of the sounds that animals make, hence their inclusion in the document.

If you would like to see more or have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below. 

      – Rogerius