I long ago grew pretty tired of the pronunciation wars over Ancient Greek. I have opinions, have read a bunch of the literature, and have made my piece with how I currently pronounce Greek in different contexts. This doesn't mean I don't care about it, but
I'm running lots of calculations these days, you might notice. Some of that is driven by projects I'm working on, some of it is me being curious. I'm also back into reading a lot more SLA literature than in recent years. You might be
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the need for extensive reading, and how that's challenging for Ancient Greek, but also very necessary. In particular, the question I've been asking, or set of questions, looks like the following: 1. How many 'words'
I am sure that I have posted this before, but I have found myself re-referencing it several times in the past couple of weeks, and so I had to go digging to find what I had in mind. Now, at least, I can just search my own website. Back
If you are fortunate enough to have any of our excellent merch, you might notice that it has an 'established' date of 2016. That was me trying to retroactively figure out when I started teaching online. But actually on May 1st, 2015, I received a polite email inquiry
I have just been reading the amazing and intriguing doctoral dissertation by Francesco Felici, entitled "Now You’re Talking... Old Irish Towards a conversational approach to teaching Old Irish", and I want to share both the dissertation, and some related thoughts. The thesis itself is fascinating because it
In today's post I want to muse a little about the practice of using grammar-translation as a 'fall-back' position for when some type of communicative teaching 'isn't working'. I mean that in two different ways, and I think teasing out
As I wrote very briefly last week, I've moved thepatrologist over to a new site. In this post I want to talk about where we've come from, then very briefly about why the move, and then about where to find things that have gone missing, and
What does language exist for? Why learn languages? The answers to both of these questions are tied together: communication. Language exists fort he purpose of communication. That is, you and I as sentient beings share something, and we express and exchange meaning through the means of language. So the why
This is The Patrologist, the new but old site by Seumas Macdonald. I have a bit of tidying to do and making things more functional, but you can look forward to posts on language acquisition, ancient Greek and Latin, classics and patristics, and similar related topics. In the meantime you
Even as I wrote my last post, I considered complicating the metaphor I borrowed from Keeline: If you are working in a factory, you would be foolish not to use a forklift to lift things. If you are working out in a gym, you would be foolish to use a
(This was originally posted to my substack. But I think it's such an important piece, and it crosses the divide between my two blogging spaces, that I am reposting it here) The university sector is in crisis, humanities are under threat, AI is killing our ability to think,