Mater Anserina

I am having fun finding some nursery rhymes in old Latin textbooks and also in writing my own Latin versions of traditional rhymes... and of course I also need to recommend the brilliant book by Milena Minkova and Terence Tunberg: Mater Anserina, which has around 30 nursery rhymes done in Latin, plus an audio CD along with Soundcloud versions online. There are also used copies at Bookfinder!

I'll probably end up doing my own versions of many of the rhymes they have done, and it's fun to compare my version with theirs. In adapting rhymes like this, of course you have to take all kinds of liberties, which means that every version comes out differently! Years ago I created a collection of Latin Christmas songs, and I was amazed by the number of different versions of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer, for example. In my opinion, we need all the versions of these songs and rhymes as we can get because they are so useful for language learners, making the Latin words both fun and memorable.

As you can see from the cover, the rhymes are accompanied by the famous Kate Greenaway illustrations; here is an 1890 Greenaway Mother Goose at the Internet Archive.