One of the things I have been reflecting on recently, both in reading a fair bit, but also working on the composition of LGPSI, is how useful it is, and would be, to take the WAYK concept of “same conversation” and apply it at the text level.

Same conversation is a technique where you deliberately repeat the same conversation, on a familiar, habitual, repeated topic, practice, habit, occurrence. What might that look like for texts?

Well, take capitulum primum of Lingua Latina, it’s basically a geography lesson, that to some extent leverages of people’s ability to recognise major countries and cities, and of the visual prop of a map. That’s smart (good one, Ørberg!). LGPSI starts with the same basis, though less effectively (because fluvius, oppidum, insula do not work nicely in Greek, eheu).

But what if you did other geography ‘lessons’ after this. You’ve built some basic vocabulary and structures around these things, so you can ‘repeat’ this lesson with a text about somewhere or somewhen else. So, a map of the Mediterranean, but now it’s the 10th century. Or, a map of America. Or a map of the 1960s. And you can start to make things more complicated. Add a geographical feature or two. Build more complex relationships between entities. And so on.

This is the advantage of thinking about ‘reading sideways, but up a little’, you build on the same conversation, to revisit the same language, but a little bit more complicated, with different content.

Or, to be honest, you could come back to the exact same conversation/text, but later. E.g. what if there was a second volume of (e.g.) Familia Romana that was the same storyline and content as the first, but the language was all ‘scaled-up’ to reflect the fact that you’d read the whole book before.

These are some of the ideas floating around and looking for implementation in the broader vision of my LGPSI project. Multiple storylines in multiple times, gives the opportunity to do lots of ‘same conversation’ with different content, and growing complexity.