The Catullan corpus

The other day, I finished typing in the whole of the Catullan corpus as part of my Catullus project. Sure, I could have just cut and paste, which would have been a lot faster, but then I wouldn't have been able to get a sense of the whole thing. I'm glad I did it. To be sure, Catullus didn't leave volumes of poetry or mountains of prose. I wouldn't have wanted to do this with Cicero.

In the process I got to appreciate why people have enjoyed his work over the centuries. He's not just a love poet, but he does that very well too. To modern readers, his poems about his life come across as ordinary. What poet wouldn't write about his life? Heaney does. Except that in antiquity, to write about some aspect of your life wasn't the thing to do. You'd write about something epic. Like the Iliad. Or the Odyssey. Or the Aeneid. Or, well, you get the idea. Catullus, along with the neoteric poets broke the norms. Can you imagine poetry as familiar as Catullus's being avant garde? It's really hard to imagine. I also got to see the changing norms of how we present ancient texts, which I blogged about already.

So where to go from here? I don't know. This is kind of where I want to go, but I'm not sure about doing that for each poem. I'll probably want to do a few more movies where I recite the poems. That would be cool. I enjoy the challenge of writing vocabulary in Latin. But am I fired up enough about Catullus to do the whole mess?

End of semester wrap up and reflection

And spring semester is over. Or, rather, I went to the last night of classes last night. 

As you may know, I've decided to post my homework on Scribd—at least the stuff that might be of interest to someone. Why? If someone is interested in how language works, my homework might be of interest. So as much as I think I can get away with it, I try to write for you instead of the professor. Whether I've succeeded or not is another matter that I leave to you.

One advantage of posting my homework beyond wider circulation is that I can refer back to it, which I did on a recent paper. I saw something in subject agreement marker syncretism that reminded me of some work with pronouns I had done. And a revelation hit me: I couldn't have done this (easily) pre-internet. I made the connection, referenced it in the paper and had a bit.ly link pointing  back to the previous work. That's really powerful. Building connections between classes, admittedly easier at graduate level, is a major part of education: taking disparate information and synthesizing knowledge.

So what information got poured into my head this semester? Morphology, which may or may not be a thing, and First Language Acquisition. I loved one form the get go and needed some encouragement in the other. Oddly, the classes were taught by husband and wife. They couldn't have been more different for it. 

But now I don't have to tangle with stuff I'm less interested in. Hopefully there will be more time for blogging and crunching through texts. Derivational morphology in Latin anyone?

Reading Plautus

I've read Plautus before, but this time I'm doing it 21st century style: on a computer. Well, not entirely. I'm also using a Bristol commentary. Anyway, it's new for me.

My problem is that I really like reading on paper. I grossly prefer a book. Call me old school. But I've also been spoiled by Geoffrey Steadman. Have you seen his Greek commentaries? While I don't need the extensive support in Latin, I like having it available. Especially for vocabulary. I understand the value of looking up words, though the power of extensive reading outweighs that. Call me crazy.

Anyway, I'm reading Pseudolus. For fun. My goal is to finish it this week. Here's my progress bar, so you can hold me to my goal. I'll be updating.

1337 / 1337
(100%)

So why do we set up our readers in such a way as to discourage reading for fun? Why do the very people who love Latin the most seem to be publicly hostile to reading for fun?

End note:
75 / 1335 on Monday
137/1335 end of night Monday (not strong progress, is it?)
230/1335 end of night Tuesday
370/1335 end of night Wednesday, I may not finish this week
537/1337 Thursday evening, I may read a bit more tonight
766/1337 end of night Friday
904/1337 Saturday evening
1337/1337 following Wednesday, holidays got in the way, but I'm done.

Pleasure reading

Between kids and school and teaching, I feel like there's not a whole lot of time for pleasure reading. It's all just too much. So now that I have turned in my official last bit of homework, I need to pick something to read. 

I've got all sorts of actual books piled up. I'm thinking Mark Walker's Hobbitus Ille would be fun. I've also got a copy of a few of Plautus's plays kicking about I should read one. I've also got part of the Odyssey kicking about. I started in on it in September, but school quickly quashed that idea. But now I've got time.

So here's my pleasure-reading plan. Hopefully not too ambitious.

Week 1: Hobbitus Ille, a few chapters
Week 2: Pseudolus, the whole thing
Week 3: Book 9, OdysseyWeek 4: Something fun and new

Fall 2012: end of semester roundup

Sorry for the late semester silence.

I managed to make it through the ordeal of typology. Phonology was another story. I loved that. So now I am 3 down and 9 to go. Four more requirements to go and then it's all electives. First language acquisition and morphology are on deck for spring—both requirements.

Over the winter break, I want to blog a little about Latin phonology from a constraint-based perspective. I've already done some, but why not flesh it out a bit more? I'm sure it would get me a slot on the student research symposium in the spring. And I want to get it out of my system before it's time to get going on my thesis.

And then on the last night of class, a fellow student saw my Rockford College t-shirt and asked if I knew Ray DenAdel. Well, of course. I remember going to his office on occasion to talk. I remember his classes: he always spoke of long-dead Romans as if they were alive and just outside of class. If I'm half the teacher he was, I'll be alright.

Why dead langauges?

Over at a language learners' forum, someone asked "what do you like about dead langauges"? And here, somewhat edited and expanded, is my reply:

Knowing dead languages allows me to gain a perspective that I otherwise couldn't get. I feel the continuity of humanity stretching over the centuries that I am a part of. I can touch artifacts of antiquity. I can engage them in my home without specialized scientific tools. I can see how we are all human through the centuries—facing the same challenges of our common humanity. I am connected to minds from the remote past who still have vital things to say. 

Does it get better than that?

Strike of the Modern Languages: Italian

I've been working on upping my abilities to read Italian lately. I've found a book I really like. For those of you who know about Lingua Latina per se Illustrata, it will look familiar. Really familiar.

Since I've primarily only seen commercially available materials for learning Italian, L’italiano secondo il «metodo natura» is like coming home again. And the differences are shocking.

L'italiano is like Lingua Latina. They're both very repetitive. Everything is in context. Many things are explained simply. Shades of meaning, while in the text, are not discussed at any length. In fact, L'italiano is even more minimalist in its approach to grammar than Lingua Latina. The other big difference between L'italiano and other materials is that there is more Italian in the first few chapters of it than in an entire series of other materials. Or so it seems to me. 

I checked out Living Language Italian Intermediate from the library, since I thought that my skills were fairly basic and that an intermediate level was right. Apparently not. The article and verb conjugation are topics of instruction. Twelve chapters into L'italiano, and that's done. Of course at that point you've seen a lot of Italian. A lot. Living Language Italian has some short dialogs and comprehension passages. Though admittedly I only checked this out to listen (and relisten) to the audio.

I'm not maligning the Living Language offering. It looks good, just not to my style of learning.  And that's no small matter. If people are learning languages with programs like Living Language, I'm falling down somehow. (Again, I'm not maligning the program. It looks pretty solid.)

I'm beginning to realize that the only way languages come into my brain is brute force. The less recourse I have to English, the better. For what it's worth, Benny Lewis seems to take this approach too, but he's far more interested in the social and spoken end of it. If I wind up being able to speak, that's bonus points. 

She loves me

She bought the Teach Yourself Complete Old English (Anglo-Saxon).

I don't know that I'll have time to get serious with it right away, but soon enough. Soon enough. I can't wait to dig a bit deeper into the predecessor of the language I call my own: English.

Future personal study

I'm not sure, but I'm thinking Old English and Sanskrit sound like fun targets for organized study.

I like Old English because it is, after all, the forerunner of the language I speak on a daily basis. It also doesn't hurt that there is quite a bit of interesting stuff written in Old English. Including wikipedia. I suspect it would be pretty easy to get to a respectable reading level but real work to master it. The cool thing here is that cruddy learning materials shouldn't hinder me too much—there are some deeply intuitive things going on in Old English for native English speakers. Well, from what I've seen anyway. Here's a sentence I cherry-picked from the OE wikipedia.

Willelm I (c. 1027 – 9 Hāligmōnaþ, 1087) wæs Engla cyning fram 1066 tō 1087.

There's only one word in there that I can't figure out, and I can see it is a month.

Sanskrit also appeals because it is kind rounds out the trifecta of dead languages with bad reputations: Latin and Ancient Greek being the other two. My apprehension with Sanskrit is that it will be Persian redux—cool, but difficult to crack with self-study. I mean look at this:

मनो हि द्विदिधं प्रोक्तं शुद्धं चाशुद्धमेव च ।

I'd tell you what this says, but I don't know. I've never studied Sanskrit.

Speaking of the Farsi debacle, I've been working on this. The idea behind it is to introduce everything with the context of Persian—this should look suspiciously familiar to Latinists. If you are a native speaker of Persian and see any gross errors, please let me know. This is how I am solidifying what I have learned in Persian. Which isn't much. Of course, the whole thing requires that you have a working knowledge of the alphabet. Hey look! I've found a series of videos that do just that.

Motivations for going back to school

It may seem odd to someone stumbling across this: why is a man in his late 30s with two small children and a decent part-time teaching gig going to grad school? Aren't I busy enough?

Well, I suppose I might as well get it out: my mother was diagnosed with a serious illness this fall. I had been toying with going back to school for many years but never really got serious. I had written to the linguistics faculty at NEIU over the summer, but I can't say I was in any big rush to hear back from them. Time seemed abundant.

Then came the cancer diagnosis. My mother is not old.  Not yet 61. Suddenly time seemed short. I now had a big rush. Here we are now. I writing. You reading. I hope that the development of this blog as I go through school is of value to you.