 This is the last in a series of videos I'm making about Latin, and this one is a sample of actual Latin. Before we dive in, I want to talk a little bit about the alphabet. It is, for most of us, really quite familiar, especially if you're a native English speaker. This is also our alphabet. So A-B-C-D-E-F or in Latin, A-B-K-D-A-F. Now in some Latin texts what you may notice is that some of the vowels have lines over them, and we call those lines macrons, and it distinguishes between long and short vowels. So like here we have E without the macron. Eh, eh, and that's with the macron. Eh, eh, so it's longer. In some Latin texts you'll see the letter I uses both the consonant and vowel, and in some you'll see J as the consonant instead of I. Yeah, another one is U and V, and some of them you will see U and V distinguished, and other people say that you and V are the same letter. That's why you might go to a museum and see on it carved letters M, V, S, E, V, M. Well, it's because capital U, traditionally when carved is a V, so really those are used at some museum and not a mvvvv. But now on to the Latin. The text in front of us is the opening to Julius Caesar's De, De Bello Gallico, and it's fairly famous, you know, Gaulia est omnis du visa in parte tres, so Gaul is divided into three parts. So let's go ahead and give this a look through and talk about some of the things that make Latin Latin. You may hear me try to nasalize the final M's on some of these words, and according to our best scholarship that is what Latin sounded like, so let's see if I can do this and approach something like what we think Latin sounded like 2,000 years ago. Okay, so let's go back to the top and talk about some of the features we see here. So Gaulia est omnis du visa in parte tres. You're not going to see it right here, but I'll point it out as we go on. Latin has case endings in parte tres, so in two, three parts. And what we see here is one, one. Okay, well, let's start with Gaulia est omnis du visa. Gaul is all divided in parte tres, in three, well in parts three. So all of Gaul is divided into three parts. They say Gaul, all, and notice how it's on either side of the verb est. It's literally divided by the verb Gaul, all, du visa, divided. So Gaul is divided, and that's a nice trick you can do with Latin because they have a flexible word order. So Gaulia omnis, so they say Gaul, all, or all, Gaul, whereas we say all of Gaul. Du visa in parte tres, divided into three parts. Quarrum, of which we're referring back to the parts. Unam, incolunt belgai. Unam, one, referring to parts. Incolunt, they inhabit belgai, the Belgians. So we have direct object, the verb, and then the subject, which is running completely backwards to how we do it in English, and in fact you couldn't say that. You'd say, one, inhabit the Belgians. Well, it doesn't sound very good in English, so one inhabits the Belgians and that makes no sense. Whereas in Latin it makes perfectly good sense because we have unam indicating accusative case, nt, the verb, ai, for belgai, indicating the subject. Aliam aquitani. And this is the other, the Aquitanian. So here Cesar says one in one inhabit the Belgians, and here because we're just going to say, aliam aquitani, and you're just supposed to figure that he's referring that the Aquitanians live in the second part, and he doesn't need to repeat the verb incolunt. He can just jump right over it and squeeze that down and compact it down. Tertiam qui ipsorun lingua keltae nostra gali apelantor. And here he does it again. The third, who, of their own language, and this is telling you how it's done, you can't see it, but that a should have a Macron over it, but I didn't use any Macron's keltae. So who, by their own language, kelts? By their own language, kelts what? Nostra, by ours, by our what? Well, by our language, in other words, Latin, gali apelantor. So they call themselves kelts. We, the Romans, call them gali. He omnis lingua institutis legibus interse differunt. These, the people's mentioned in the previous sentence, omnis, these all, by language, institutions, laws, among themselves differ. And this sentence has a pretty standard default word order for Latin. You've got the subject first. You've got stuff in between, in this case, ablative of means is what we call it in the Latin world. We have a prepositional phrase. And then finally, the verb. And that's pretty vanilla for Latin. It goes subject, then the other stuff, and then finally the verb. Galos ab aquitanis. The Gauls, someone's doing something to them, but we don't know what. Ab aquitanis from the Aquitanians. Garum na flumen, the Garum river from the Belgians. We still don't know what. From the Belgians, abel gismatrona et sequana, the Marne and the Seine, duetit divides. Okay. So the Garum divides the Gauls from the Aquitanians, and the Marne and the Seine from the Belgians. It divides the Gauls from the Belgians. And here's the case marking that I'm talking about. So gali here, they're the subject. Galos, there. They are the direct object. So Latin uses this case marking to indicate who's doing what in the sense. And as a result, you can really scramble the word orders. So between the telescoping and getting rid of things that you've already said. So un am incolunt belgai, ali am incolunt aquitani, so you get rid of the incolunt, so you don't repeat yourself. So between that, cutting out of repeated information and the ability to scramble words in a direct object verb subject manner, so that you can scramble the words however you like them. These two things make Latin, well, they give Latin a bad reputation for being hard, because the word order is always changing. There are all sorts of syntactical things and morphological things that you have to keep an eye on. And then just to keep you really on your toes, they don't repeat things they don't need to. They make you the reader do a lot of the heavy lifting for them. And this is kind of what Latin is like.