Gwynne's Latin - by N M Gwynne (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The ultimate guide to Latin, for its own sake, to improve your English, and to make you better at everything else

Latin is "it", the most wonderful "thing". It is mind-enhancing, character-improving, enthralling, exciting, deeply satisfying, and valuable. My solid determination is to spare no pains to do it the justice that its importance demands.

Mr Gwynne, author of Gwynne's Grammar, is just as emphatic about the importance of Latin as he is about the importance of grammar. From the novice to the more well-versed, Gwynne's Latin is essential for anyone interested in learning Latin; Mr. Gwynne promises to teach you more Latin in half an hour than you would learn from years of being taught Latin at school. He also includes a fascinating section on everyday Latin usage, which discusses all the Latin words and idioms we still use today, such as quid pro quo and sui generis. Though we need no further convincing--as we know, Mr Gwynne is never wrong--here are just some of the many reasons why Latin is utterly wonderful: Latin is an academic subject easy enough for the least intelligent of us to grasp all the basic elements of, and yet difficult enough to be demanding for its greatest scholars. For well over 1,000 years it was the means of communication that united the whole of Europe culturally and in every other significant way. It is the direct ancestor of, between them, the five most widely-spoken European languages, and both of the official South American languages. It is the ancestor and source of more than half of the English language, partly directly and partly through French, which for some centuries was England's official language. Following in the same beautifully designed footsteps of Gwynne's Grammar, Gwynne's Latin will teach you all the fundamentals of Latin quickly, thoroughly, and better than all the competition.

Review Quotes

"The personality of its author is not the least attraction of Gwynne's Grammar . . . [a book] with not the least wisp of dumbing-down in his composition . . . I feel a certain elegance in what I have been taught and still take to be correct English." --Wall Street Journal on Gwynne's Grammar


"[Gwynne] is more in the mold of an 18th- or 19th-century grammarian than a modern-day prescriptivist . . . [His appeal ] has been less about the rules themselves and more about his ability to invoke pre-1960s, cold-shower rigor . . . Gwynne's Grammar has its undeniable pleasures." --Boston Globe on Gwynne's Grammar

About the Author

N. M. Gwynne began teaching in the 1980s, at first privately. He soon found that he had a clear vocation for teaching, and that his traditional methods, universal up to the 1960s and refined and perfected century after century up till then, had suddenly become all but unique because of the revolution in teaching that had taken place worldwide.. Now with an international word-of-mouth reputation, Mr. Gwynne has been flown around the world in order to teach his pupils. He is also the author of Gwynne's Grammar: The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English.