Frequency of Latin Phraseological Units in the Perseus Digital Library Greek and Roman (Latin) Corps and the Croatian Language Library: Test Probe A

Abstract

Education systems worldwide use a large number of Latin sayings and proverbs popularly called Dicta et sententiae (hereaf­ter: D&S) which are taught randomly, without sub-categorizing. Usually, their importance to the educational area of a particular school is taken into account. This may suit law schools to some extent due to the formulaic nature of the legal discourse, while the choice of sayings in high school, medical, philosophical, and social-humanistic schools, in general, is left to the subjective cho­ice of the teacher. The largest Croatian collection of Latin D&S Latinum in aeternum (LIA), Marević (2002) contains 18,632 re­ferences, and in secondary schools, 100–200 D&S are taught in two to four years of learning Latin. The catalog of the Croatian state graduation exams in Latin language (2016–2021) contains less than 200 sayings. It is therefore imperative to determine the frequency of Latin D&S in the largest possible corpus of Roman (and later Latin) literature and sub-categorize D&S, thus provi­ding school systems around the world with a much-needed cata­log based on D&S frequency as a tool for compiling teaching and examination catalogs. Manual entry of sayings into the corpus search engine and the extensiveness of the LIA collection require too much effort and time for a single scientific paper. Therefore, the corpus representation of the test probe of 1270 D&S from the LIA collection starting with the letter A in the Perseus Digital Library Greek and Roman Materials corpus is investigated here and also in the corpus of the Croatian language repository (HJR) of the Institute for the Croatian Language and Linguistics. The search results are useful for teaching Latin worldwide and for teaching Latin and Croatian in Croatian schools.