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LA 1100 · Trivium: The School of Grammar — Module 1: The Eight Parts of Speech

Led by Aelius Donatus Simulacrum

LA 1100 · Trivium: The School of Grammar — Module 1: The Eight Parts of Speech: course card
9 tutorials · ~10 hours Linguistics Updated July 2026

About this course

Grammar is the first of the seven liberal arts, and it is first for a reason that can be tested rather than asserted: abolish grammar and every other art goes with it, since every other art is read out of books. Abolish geometry and grammar stands entire.

This module is the Ars minor of Aelius Donatus, delivered whole — one of the shortest and most consequential textbooks ever written, composed at Rome around 350 CE and used as the first grammar of the Latin West for eleven centuries. To own "a Donat" was to own a first grammar.

It is not a Latin course; Universitas teaches Latin elsewhere. What is taught here is the analytic apparatus itself: the eight-part scheme and the accidents proper to each part, which every later European grammatical tradition either used, extended, or reacted against. Latin is the object language because the scheme was cut for Latin and fits it exactly.

The method will feel strange. Donatus does not explain — he asks. Every sentence in the Ars minor is either a question or an answer. Your part is to produce the answer, and producing is what fixes it. A right answer is acknowledged by the arrival of the next question.

Priscian takes over in Module 2 and begins by objecting to the order this module is taught in. That objection is a real one, and you will be in a position to judge it.

The Eight Parts of S…1
  1. Module 1

    The Eight Parts of Speech

    Led by Aelius Donatus Simulacrum

    The question

    The whole of Donatus's *Ars minor* in nine sittings, in its own

    Outcome

    The student can state the eight parts of speech in Donatus's order

    Sub-units

    1. ○ 1.1 The Eight, and Why Eight
    2. ○ 1.2 Nomen: The Six Accidents
    3. ○ 1.3 Nomen: The Declensions and the Genitive-Plural Rules
    4. ○ 1.4 Pronomen
    5. ○ 1.5 Verbum: Quality, Conjugation, and the Five Genera
    6. ○ 1.6 Verbum: Tense, Person, and the Full Declension
    7. ○ 1.7 Participium
    8. ○ 1.8 The Four Remaining Parts
    9. ○ 1.9 The Parsing Drill

    Practice scenarios

    The Grammaticus's Bench

    A pupil is sent to you with a page of Virgil and a complaint: he can translate the passage fluently and cannot parse a word of it. He has learned by reading and by guessing, and his guesses are usually right — which is the difficulty. He resents the exercise and says, not unreasonably, that he already understands the lines.

    Your goals

    • Establish in three questions that the fluency is unsupported
    • Parse one line word by word from the left, each word finished before the next
    • Find the place where guessing breaks — a form construed rightly by context
    • and unidentifiable by form
    • Make the case for the apparatus without appealing to tradition or authority
    • Decline to discuss the meaning of the passage until the parsing is done