One of my regrets when studying Classics was that I didn’t learn very many of the old schoolboy mnemonics that helped successive generations learn Latin and Greek paradigms. The only one I really remember is “Dick’s fat duck’s fur” for the irregular Latin imperatives dic ‘say!’, fac ‘do!’, duc ‘lead!’ and fer ‘carry!’. It recently [...]
The Winter 2007 issue of The Classical World featured a collection of papers under the heading ‘The Linguistic Edge: Using Linguistics to Enrich the Teaching of the Classics’: Joshua T. Katz, ‘What Linguists are Good For’ Egbert J. Bakker, ‘Time, Tense and Thucydides’ Mary R. Bachvarova, ‘Actions and Attitudes: Understanding Greek (and Latin) Verbal Paradigms’ [...]
For the past several weeks I’ve been working with North and Hilliard’s classic Greek Prose Composition to brush up on my Greek. It has only now occurred to me that if all those composition workbooks I encountered as an undergraduate thought to specify prose composition, then there must have been exercises of writing verse in [...]
Several years back Michael Weiss, an Indo-Europeanist at Cornell, offered on his website a fine outline of the evolution of Latin grammar from PIE to the classical era. Weiss recently published this Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin (Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press, 2009), though regrettably through a no-name press that isn’t [...]
It occasionally happens that a word newly encountered, which I suppose to be completely defunct and perhaps even a hapax legomenon, is met again soon after somewhere very different. While reading Saint-John Perse’s work Amers, his long poem in honor of the sea, I was not sure of the definition of one of the terms [...]
In the second volume of a Festschrift for Oswald Szemerényi published in 1979, I found Adam Makkai’s paper ‘Latinate Diglossia in Finno-Ugric’ that is one of the few examples of ‘speculative linguistics’ I know. Latin was almost like a native language for the Hungarian gentry in Austro-Hungarian times, but eventually the Language Purification Movement came [...]
I am fascinated by cases where multisyllabic words are worn down to a nub. In his textbook Historical Linguistics (London: Arnold, 1996) Larry Trask gives the following as the introduction to an exercise in Chapter 3: This is thought to be the history of the French word cent over the last 6000 years or so: [...]
I have updated my guide “LaTeX for Classical Philologists and Indo-Europeanists”. It now provides new solutions for PIE labiovelars and glides recommended by Prof Arlo Griffiths of the University of Leiden, and the method of typesetting the unspecified laryngeal resonant has been fixed so that it actually works now. As always, feedback is appreciated.
I have updated my guide “LaTeX for Classical Philologists and Indo-Europeanists” to give solutions for the various complications that TIPA presents. I’ve learned that, in spite of LaTeX’s undoubtable power and quality, TIPA is a pain to deal with. One shouldn’t expect classicists and Indo-European linguists to want to fight with this themselves, although they [...]
Since I’m currently studying in a Classical Studies department where literary criticism, history, and philosophy are the only acceptable topics for a paper, and historical linguistics is often seen as a foreign and irrelevant voodoo science, I thought I would engage in an entirely masturbatory fantasy about how I would approach the teaching of Latin [...]