Donors Up the Latin Ante with Scrabble

While the English version of Scrabble allows for use of words that do not require hyphens, apostrophes, or any capital letters, Latin Scrabble is far more complex, but the underlying purpose of the game is still the same: players can have fun while practicing vocabulary and morphology.

Because of the differences in the two languages, it would be difficult to substitute an English Scrabble board for the Latin board. The Latin alphabet is much different, and many letters are common in Latin that we don’t frequently use in English.

With the help of the Foundation, Dr. Tichenor received several Latin Scrabble sets last spring, and his students were able to play a few times before leaving in March.

“Latin nouns are not just singular or plural; no, they must also specify their syntactic use in one of up to seven cases, in one of three grammatical genders, following one of five possible declensional patterns,” said Instructor of Latin Dr. Morris Tichenor. “Verbs are even crazier: three subject persons, two numbers, six tenses, two voices, three moods. That's what's so fun about Latin Scrabble.”

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