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Just because you have gifts doesn’t mean you’ll get to use them. I’ve taught this many times. But it’s not an easy lesson to learn. I remember clearly one particularly member of a church, saying to me after a service, that he wasn’t sure how
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I think (perhaps naively optimistic) that we’re on the cusp of a generational divide in Latin education. And this post is an attempt to help some on the ‘old’ side of that divide, cross over to the ‘young’ side. What I mean is this: In the last 20 years
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LGPSI, also known as Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata, and by its Greek name ἡ ἑλληνικὴ γλῶσσα καθ’ αὑτὴν φωτιζομένη, is an expansive writing project aimed at producing a new type of Greek reading text built for learners of ancient Greek. It takes its name from the famous Lingua Latina
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it many more times – Ørberg completed a work of genius in composing Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. The more I read it, the more I see how carefully he crafted it, and appreciate the finesse required to construct a book (more
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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