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Lately I’ve started copying out by hand the texts of Familia Romana and Italian Athenaze, complete with macrons, and full diacritics (including marking vowel lengths on alpha, iota, upsilon) in Greek. I was prompted to do so by hearing from a few people how valuable they had found the
Books
I recently read Bringing our Languages Home: Language Revitalization for Families, edited by Leanne Hinton. The bulk of the book consists of contributed essays by various families/persons involved in language revitalisation in a family context. There are 13 chapters grouped in 5 sections. The first section opens with two
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Last weekend I was alerted to this book, A Strange Odyssey: Confessions of a Classicist, by Carlos Martínez Aguirre, translated to English by Elaine Riedel and Francisco Javier González Estepa; (Thanks to David Miller for pointing it out to me.) This book resonated so much that I read it in
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I’m just back from spending a week (a mon-fri week only, quod me paenitet), at the 2nd Australian Rusticatio. What’s a rusticatio? Well, it’s a live-in, immersion week of Latin in a rural setting, in which you only speak in Latin, and participate in various
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I'm not, generally, a big fan of the word 'fluency'. It doesn't do what people want it to do. On the one hand, 'fluency' as meaning something like, 'an ability to communicate at speed with accuracy' is almost never what
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[1] My promise was a lie, I confess, that I would be with you and join in the philosophical life, when I was yet in Athens, and a promise born out of our friendship and unity there; for, I have no appropriate word for this. [2] I lied, but not
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Spend any time at all looking into Greek pronunciation and you will inevitably encounter the 'pronunciation wars'. People have very heated opinions about how Greek should be pronounced. This ranges from virulent comments that because Greek is still Greek, modern Greek is the only way to pronounce it
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I've written plenty about how I don't think translation is a very useful task for language learners. However, lately I've been having great fun in the sport of translation Greek to Latin and Latin to Greek. I thought I'd write a little
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I thought I'd take the time to just talk about things I've been reading. Especially since it's been a couple of weeks: sickness, end of semester marking, general adjunct fatigue. Anyway, here's things I've read or am reading, over the
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Introduction When I first undertook theological studies, which for us involved both Greek and Hebrew, an older scholar proclaimed to us with sage wisdom that learners should eschew electronic resources until they were rather advanced, instead proceeding with printed texts, and looking up words and structures in printed lexica and
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In January of 2018, so over a year ago, I signed up to Discord, an app basically designed for gamers to provide voice-chat, but with text-chat channels as well, and adopted and adapted to various other purposes. Here's the brief story of how it changed my
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I'll be back to regular old blogging about classical language pedagogy and other things later this week. If you're after specific things you can do to help me, feeling perhaps some sympathy after last week's katharsis, here's five: 1. You can directly