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A Primer of
Ecclesiastical Latin
A Supplement to the Text by John F. Collins
Prepared by
John R. Dunlap
This answer key comes in response to numerous requests over the years
since the publication of John F. Collinss Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin in 1985.
Collins himselfwho died in 2002 before the issue of an answer key to his
text had been resolvedenvisioned his text for self-teaching as well as con-
ventional classroom use. In addition to greater flexibility for teachers, then,
the key is intended also to make the popular text more accessible to autodi-
dacts, homeschooling families, parish seminars, and the like.
The answer key covers the regular drills, exercises, and, eventually, short
readings that occur in each of the 35 units of the text. The translations of
exercise sentences, especially as they become more complex, are intended
to be serviceable rather than exhaustive. Intermittently, however, alterna-
tive translations are provided, in most cases for obvious reasons. The most
common reason is to give a more idiomatic English rendering of a Latin ex-
pression the sense of which may not be clear with a literal translation. Such
alternatives are indicated with a slash mark (/) followed by the more idiom-
atic English expression.
In the course of preparing this key, two issues emerged of sufficient im-
portance to warrant some preliminary attention in the key. The first is the
issue of vocabulary glosses, five of which are not expansive enough in the
texts vocabulary lists to handle particular sentences in which the Latin
words occur. The second is the issue of simple printing errors, which were
discovered in a few units of the text. These two issues are outlined below for
convenient reference.
vii
viii Preface
A. Addenda
1. Unit 10, p. 85: solvo needs abolish to accommodate Exercise #3,
p. 150.
2. Unit 13, p. 106: subdo needs add, supply to accommodate Exercise
#15, p. 117.
3. Unit 14, p. 114: homo needs man to accommodate the normal trans-
lation of such scriptural terms as Filius hominis, Son of Man.
4. Unit 22, p. 189: peto needs seek to reveal the logic behind the idiom
peto a [noun] ut.
5. Unit 33, pp. 29596: confero needs ponder to accommodate Exer-
cise #42, p. 300.
B. Errata
1. Unit 22, p. 187: diaconem should be diaconum.
2. Unit 22, p. 193, Reading 2, ll 34: flawed punctuation; change to fac-
tum est nihil, quod factum est; in ipso . . . (comma after nihil; semicolon
between est and in)
3. Unit 28, p. 250, Exercise I, #19: the reference should be to Psalm li, 4
(not 6).
4. Unit 29, p. 260, Exercise I, #28: praeterquam is incorrectly glossed
for the context; should be contrary to (cf. general vocabulary, p. 430).
5. Unit 30, p. 271, Exercise I, #35: nos should be vos, according to the
Nova Vulgata; but the sentence is translated as-is in the key.
6. Unit 33, p. 301: the reference should be to Psalm li, 7, 1 (not 9, 3).
Apart from the addenda and errata outlined above, a few issues of trans-
lation are noted and explained as they emerge in the key. These include a
consistent translation of the ablative absolute when the form occurs without
a larger context, the idiomatic translation of future perfects in conditional
clauses, and the normal translation of the historical present.
I am greatly obliged to several people for their encouragement and help.
Particular thanks are owed to the fathers and brothers of the Carmelite
Monastery in San Jose, Californiastudents of mine who first suggested to
me the need for a study aid to accompany our Collins text; to my depart-
Preface ix
ment chairman, Bill Greenwalt, who lobbied for my sabbatical time; and es-
pecially to David J. McGonagle, director of the CUA Press, whose patience
and guidance were, with respect to the whole project, sine qua non.
John r. dunlap
Department of Classics
Santa Clara University
December 2005