Principia: A Beginners' Latin Course

Ninth Edition. — Shrewsbury: Wilding and Son Limited, 1969. — 258 p."Principia" is intended to cover the first part of a two-year Latin course which aims at giving pupils a sound working knowledge of the Latin language, so that they can write, speak and, above all, read it with reasonable ease, and can tackle the original texts with some degree of confidence. In the view of the authors of this book, the teaching of elementary Latin is primarily the teaching of a technique to be mastered rather than of a "subject" to be learnt. The aim of a beginner's course ought to be, we feel, to teach the pupils how to use for themselves the set of tools that the Romanshad to hand in the task of communicating ideas, and not merely to instruct them in the details of a "dead" language. This implies a functional rather than an analytical approach to Latin.