I am Minimus

September 9, 2024 3:37 AM

Minimus sum, mus sum. (I am Minimus, I am a mouse.) I live at Vindolanda (and in Suffolk) with my family. I'll help you to learn Latin. sequere me! (Follow me!)

Minimus home page.

posted by Wolfdog (13 comments total)

In pictura est mus, nomine Minimus.
posted by nat at 4:58 AM on September 9 [5 favorites]

I love Minimus. My wife has used it to teach Latin as an extra-curricular class to kids from a primary school with more than its fair share of issues (deprivation, high levels of need, many families speaking English as a second language and so on). It got the kids incredibly engaged and enthused about the language and classical civilisation more widely.

Meanwhile I'm from the generation of English prep school pupils that learned Latin from Ecce Romani - "look! Romans" - and the Cambridge Latin Course. Although I do have a very dog-eared copy of Kennedy's Revised Latin Primer handed out as a textbook at school in the 1980s and which I never ended up giving back, and which a previous owner has graffitied to read "Revised Way Of Eatin' Prime Pork".
posted by greycap at 5:52 AM on September 9 [6 favorites]

I am Minimus

And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.
posted by Phanx at 8:04 AM on September 9 [4 favorites]

I voluntarily took Latin in high school, so it's with some degree of hypocrisy that I ask: why are people learning Latin in 2024? It felt like a weird throwback when I studied it [sotto vocce] in the 80s; what draws people to it now, when the world seems so much wider?
posted by phooky at 10:29 AM on September 9

I wish I had taken Latin in high school! Instead, I took two years of German, Spanish, and French. Interesting but not particularly useful. Of course, I'm kind of a language buff, not good at any aspect of it, working in a faint, but pursuing, desire to understand the workings of language.

Instead of taking a double degree with one being a Batchlor in English (fries, anyone?), I should have gotten an Associate in Medical Transcription. Not only would I be more financially secure in my old age, but I've also always envied my friend who could immediately parse a word with Latin origins, and she's my go-to for translating all the MRIs, CATs, X-rays, surgical notes, ER findings, and other medical crap that comes with having lived an adventurous life and being 71.
posted by BlueHorse at 1:09 PM on September 9 [1 favorite]

Caecilius, I don't need to remind you, est in horto. I'd read a primer about the mus living at the bottom of his horto.
posted by Hogshead at 2:31 PM on September 9 [3 favorites]

Surprisingly, to me, there's a movement to bring spoken Latin back. For reasons.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-spoken-latin-is-making-a-comeback-180981621/

Among other efforts, from the article:

[snip]
These students are part of the Paideia Institute’s flagship Living Latin in Rome program, which offers participants two weeks of intensive study in the heart of the ancient civilization. Headquartered in New York, the nonprofit promotes classical languages and literature through immersion programs held abroad, digital outreach and educational events in the United States.
posted by aleph at 3:20 PM on September 9

I voluntarily took Latin in high school, so it's with some degree of hypocrisy that I ask: why are people learning Latin in 2024?

I mean, i learned it in highschool in the 90s, so not hugely later than you, but i still find it valuable day-to-day? Sure, there's very little call for reading Latin in my daily life; but there's lots of call for reading bits of Spanish, Portuguese (especially now that the Brazilians are on Bluesky) and other Romance languages -- and even though i don't actually speak any of those languages (except French), knowing Latin lets me get a lot of the gist of short posts without resorting to machine translation (and it helps me sanity-check machine translation when i do use it). On a more serious note, as someone else mentioned above, it's also really helpful for deciphering medical and legal terminology. I genuinely think it's one of the most useful things i learned in HS.
posted by adrienneleigh at 4:46 PM on September 9 [4 favorites]

Caecilius est in atrio, scribant.

I think I did 3 years of high school latin. My kids are constantly surprised when they ask me about certain words and I can take them to the latin root parts of the word and point out other words that share derivations. I wish I kept going with it, but even the smattering of Latin, French and German I took has enriched my understanding of English immeasurably. No regrets.
posted by tim_in_oz at 7:52 PM on September 9 [3 favorites]

What draws people to it now, when the world seems so much wider?

This is a sample size of one, obviously, but my daughter has got into Greek and Roman history through YA literature set in that period - in particular, Percy Jackson. That is quite different to my own childhood where I grew up reading about classical myths and legends and gradually started reading translations of the Odyssey and so on. But it does seem to have given her the bug for the period. I found her rifling through my bookshelf of Greek and Latin translations the other day!
posted by greycap at 3:21 AM on September 10 [1 favorite]

What draws people to it now, when the world seems so much wider?

I mean, it's an interesting language from an interesting time, and it's also useful if you're at all into reading European texts from anywhere from antiquity to the 1700s or so (it was still being used as the language of science until then). It's a window into a relatively different world.*

When I was in school I knew people who took it for one of the reasons mentioned above - that it's good for expanding your vocabulary (and doing well on standardized tests). Personally, I think that's not a very worthwhile reason to learn it in place of a modern Romance language; if you learn French or Spanish or similar you'll get a large percentage of the same roots, as well as the ability to decipher text in related languages.

I think there's also still a remnant, probably stronger in the UK than in the US, of the attitude that Latin and ancient Greek are more "rigorous" than their modern descendants, that learning a language with lots of cases and declensions is good for both mind and character, and that this character-building is better done with Latin than with other conjugation-heavy modern languages like German or Russian or Hungarian or what have you.

* The Roman world is actually one of the things that puts me off learning Latin a bit: all the textbooks I've seen with the format of "let's follow some locals!" are all "here's a family, here are its slaves", right from the first chapter. Including Minimus. Understandable, but still. (A combined Greek-Latin textbook presented from the perspective of a Greek slave code-switching between worlds would be interesting...)
posted by trig at 6:11 AM on September 10 [1 favorite]

Incidentally, here's Ben Franklin on the topic:

I have already mention'd that I had only one year's instruction in a Latin school, and that when very young, after which I neglected that language entirely. But, when I had attained an acquaintance with the French, Italian, and Spanish, I was surpris'd to find, on looking over a Latin Testament, that I understood so much more of that language than I had imagined, which encouraged me to apply myself again to the study of it, and I met with more success, as those preceding languages had greatly smooth'd my way.

From these circumstances, I have thought that there is some inconsistency in our common mode of teaching languages. We are told that it is proper to begin first with the Latin, and, having acquir'd that, it will be more easy to attain those modern languages which are deriv'd from it; and yet we do not begin with the Greek, in order more easily to acquire the Latin. It is true that, if you can clamber and get to the top of a staircase without using the steps, you will more easily gain them in descending; but certainly, if you begin with the lowest you will with more ease ascend to the top; and I would therefore offer it to the consideration of those who superintend the education of our youth, whether, since many of those who begin with the Latin quit the same after spending some years without having made any great proficiency, and what they have learnt becomes almost useless, so that their time has been lost, it would not have been better to have begun with the French, proceeding to the Italian, etc.; for, tho', after spending the same time, they should quit the study of languages and never arrive at the Latin, they would, however, have acquired another tongue or two, that, being in modern use, might be serviceable to them in common life.

posted by trig at 6:17 AM on September 10

All that said, Minimus is really cute, and I love that this is educational material that feels personal and like it comes from the heart - and a heart with some sense of fun and humor.
posted by trig at 6:35 AM on September 10 [1 favorite]