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Triumph the Comic Insult Dog & Stupid Latin Tricks
By matt | August 28, 2008
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Triumph the Comic Insult Dog
If I laughed and that means I’m puerile, then I’m puerile.
Stupid Latin Tricks
Now, as the only language I ever studied in school was Latin, let me impress you with what I learned as a puerile puer! (”Puer” in Latin means “boy”.)
In the table below, which brings this post up to the Mandatory Intellectual Content Quotient that the editors of Bakaitis.com demand for publication, you’ll see that Latin declines the noun, which isn’t true in English. So “puerorum” is in the genitive case and usually used in the same way “of the boys” is used in English. Reading Latin is fun-orum.
| declension | singular | plural |
| nominative | puer | pueri |
| genitive | pueri | puerorum |
| dative | puero | pueris |
| accusative | puerum | pueros |
| ablative | puero | pueris |
Where we get all scatological with the pronunciation…
I was always annoyed when I had to say puer. Unlike puerile, which is pronounced like the words “pure-eel” or “pure-aisle”, puer is pronounced “poo-air” if you use the Latin pronunciation. Poo air.
…also, for some reason, declining Latin words always sounded like I was chanting some kind of strange semi-sexual poem. (Is that puerile?)
Sing along at home (make up your own tune):
puer, puer-i, puer-o, puer-um, puer-o, puer-i, peur-orum, peur-um, puero-o
Phonetically: poo air, poo air-E, poo air-O, etc…
I hope I made Father Bede proud with this post. 20 years later and I still remember how to decline Latin nouns. I can conjugate verbs, too!
Topics: none of the above |
August 30th, 2008 at 12:15 am
Funny,Matt,very funny.