Language
Amicus noster, in pipiatione nuper hoc misit, atque hic quoque ponendum esse dixit. Here's a wonderful letter from Albin Putzker, in 1895. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. You can see the original in situ. The footnotes, nisi fallor, are Arcadius Avellanus offering his
Latin
Lately, I've been really getting into.... podcasts. Previosuly, I'd never quite had a good 'set-up' in my life to make listening to them useful, but that changed and now I'm on the bandwagon. I mostly, though, listen to target language podcasts
Books
Alright, let’s get to a textbook I really enjoy. Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina per se Illustrata: Pars I: Familia Romana This is, without exaggeration, the best Latin textbook on the market. It’s not perfect, it’s not the be all and end all, but there’s simply
Latin
The Oxford Latin is not quite as well known as the Cambridge Latin Course, the latter appearing firs tin the 70s, the OLC not until the 80s. It is primarily the work of Maurice Balme, and James Morwood. I had the pleasure of meeting Morwood a few years back. As
Thesis
Or, 'what I think my thesis is actually about'. I don’t post much about my thesis work, for a few different reasons, but here’s part of a draft introduction that I can pretty safely share. If you’d like to read some portions of my thesis
Latin
No true Scotsman is a form of (informal) logical fallacy, of the type where having set up definition X of something, e.g. “A scotsman is blah, blah, blah”, and faced with a particular example, “Well then, so-and-so is a scotsman, based on your definition”, the interlocutor moves
Language
Foreword: this is our last post for 2014. Enjoy your holidays and you'll hear again from the Patrologist in 2015. In this second of twin posts I’m exploring common ‘defeater’ reasons people give for sticking to GT as a method and rejecting approaches like Communicative Instruction. In
Language
In twin posts I’m going to explore some of the reasons people teach classical languages (by which I mean Ancient Greek, Latin, and similar languages that are mostly no-longer spoken and primarily of academic or historical interest) via the Grammar-Translation method (i.e. teaching grammar explicitly and