Fun With the "Cat in the Hat" in Latin

For Latin, we use the Catholic Heritage Curricula Latin program. We are currently on Level C, the highest level they offer. We are not Latin scholars. My goal at this point is really to give my children some basic vocabulary and an understanding of how Latin works. The CHC series focuses on the Life of Christ and Mary which also offers a spiritual component. Overall, we are making Latin progress. Latin, however, does not usually leave any of us laughing.

Except for this week - we have been taking a break from our usual study and been working on "Cattus Petasatus," which is the "Cat in the Hat" in Latin. I had heard of this a while ago, and decided to request it from my library system (they had one copy!) After getting our copy and attempting to read it, we decided we definitely needed to have the original at our disposal. With that in hand, we set to work.

Thankfully, the Latin version includes a dictionary in the back which we have been making considerable use of. What I had thought would be just a fun diversion has turned out to be a really good lesson in translation - the whole issue of literal versus getting the meaning of the text. Those who created the translation must have worked very hard to make the Latin rhyme, but this is definitely not a literal word-by-word translation and that is what has been making us laugh.

In any case, it has been a great deal of fun, so if you are studying Latin, I would highly recommend it! There are also some other fun Latin translations you can find here: Fun with Latin