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Today's saying is Libri muti magistri sunt. In English: "Books are silent teachers."
I thought this would make up a good follow-up to yesterday's saying about how writing allows those who are absent to be present via the written word. When someone's words of wisdom are recorded in writing, that allows the person to become your teacher, even if you are not in a classroom together in the same place, at the same time. You can learn from listening to a teacher's spoken words, but you can also learn from the written words recorded in a book, which is how that book can become your silent teacher. For me, this has been profoundly true: even in school, I learned more from books than from listening to teachers in the classroom, and now as an adult, I do almost all my learning directly from books, especially the treasure-trove of GoogleBooks. That is why I consider reading to be a fundamental skill, essential for all students to learn: when you can read, the whole library becomes your teacher.
In terms of Latin grammar here, the trick is definitely in separating the subject from the predicate. As you read long, you find the word libri first, "books," and then the next word, an adjective, muti, "silent," could go with books, grammatically speaking, but that really does not make sense: libri muti would imply that there are some books which are not muti, talking books as it were. Since that really does not make sense, you need to place a mental pause there, taking libri, provisionally, as the subject, and muti, provisionally, as part of the predicate. Then, sure enough, the next word lets everything fall into place. Libri, subject, are muti magistri, predicate.
For those of you who are fans of macrons, here is the Latin written with macrons:
Librī mūtī magistrī sunt.
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