Students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Contribute to DCC

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Chris Francese

This spring, with generous support from the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, three UIUC students have been contributing to the Dickinson College Commentaries project. Pictured here are James Stark and Katherine Cantwell at a poster session last Friday, as they presented their work, which is being carried out under the supervision of Professor Arian Traill, a member of the editorial board.

James has done outstanding work creating complete vocabulary lists for the selections of Vergil’s Aeneid covered in the College Board’s AP Latin course, aligning those lists with the DCC core vocabulary in a way that will greatly ease the creation of a future DCC edition. This Vergil edition will eventually form a companion to the existing editionof the AP Caesar selections. Katherine has been working on the edition of Callimachus’ Aetia by Prof. Stephens of Stanford, making the existing content conform to the format and goals of the DCC. In both cases, the key activity is working on the vocabulary lists that accompany the (untranslated) Greek or Latin text. These lists are hand-designed and human-edited, not computer-generated. The expertise of the student in making these lists correct and properly targeted to the intended readership is a major part of what makes DCC distinctive and useful.

Wes Heap (not pictured) has been working with Prof. Mulligan of Haverford on his forthcoming DCC edition of Cornelius Nepos’ Life of Hannibal.

I would like to extend a big thank you to James, Katherine, and Wes for all their work, and to Prof. Traill for applying for the grant that is funding it, and for her expert supervision.

–Chris Francese

Favorite Commentaries: James Morwood

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Chris Francese

What is your favorite classical commentary? What place did it have in your intellectual development? Recently I asked the members of the DCC editorial board to write for the blog about these questions. Here is the response of James Morwood, of Wadham College, Oxford, author of many books, including the A Latin Grammar, The Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek, and most recently The Oxford Latin Course, College edition (Oxford University Press, 2012).

My favourite commentary is R. Deryck Williams’ Aeneid, which dates from 1973 and is now published by the Bristol Classical Press. I think that the main reason that I love it is that it is the work of a man who himself loved Virgil both wisely and well. This love shines on every page. It is a deeply civilized edition, constantly slipping into quotations from English poetry which set the Aeneid in its place near the font of European literature. It is odd that, as reception gains a more and more firm foothold, editors have become increasingly uptight about including literary parallels from the Renaissance and later in their texts. Williams read the Aeneid once a year – each time, he used to say, wondering whether Aeneas would bring himself to abandon Dido – and his understanding of the poem as a whole informs the edition throughout.

Mr. James Morwood, Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford

Of course, it is a work marked by its seventies vintage. It advances the “two voices” view of the poem that we identify with Harvard, and up to a point it tells us what to think. In fact, the two voices approach seems to have weathered well; and even if my own feeling is that editors should present the evidence objectively, giving their own view but not trying too overtly to influence their readers into accepting it, the passage of time has meant that we can regard Williams’ obiter dicta with a questioning sense of detachment. The thoughtful student of any age has nothing to fear and everything to gain from immersion in these pages.

It is not difficult to patronize Williams, as indeed Nicholas Horsfall has done. He wrote too much about this poet and was liable to repetition; his views could later slip into the banal. But he was a good scholar who lived and breathed Virgil, and that has made his edition an inspirational vade mecum for the Aeneid.

Favorite Commentaries: Terence Tunberg

Posted on March 4, 2013 by Chris Francese

What is your favorite classical commentary? What place did it have in your intellectual development? Recently I asked the members of the DCC editorial board to write for the blog about these questions. Here is the response of Terence Tunberg, Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Conventiculum Latinum Lexintoniense:

Daniel Crispinus’ 1674 edition of Sallust, in usum Delphini

When I taught Sallust two years ago, I benefited enormously from a commentary on Sallust’s works that most classicists today would consider obsolete. My students (most of whom couldn’t care less about what is considered obsolete and what is regarded as current practice) enjoyed the commentary even more than I did. Most of them were quite new to reading unadapted Latin texts, and using this commentary seemed to accelerate their appreciation of Latin as Latin. Here is the title, along with place and date of publication:

C. Sallustii Crispi quae ex<s>tant in usum serenissimi Galliarum Delphini diligenter recensuit et notulas addidit Daniel Crispinus (Parisiis apud Fredericum Leonard, 1674)

All of the introductory material and explanatory notes accompanying the text of Sallust in this edition are written in clear and elegant Latin. Moreover, on every page there is a Latin paraphrase of Sallust’s text, which really amounts to a translation of Sallust’s works into a different Latin. This well-written paraphrase/translation admirably fills out the sense of some of Sallust’s more compressed and elliptical phrases. The Latin footnotes (which are written in a very simple style) not only explain grammatical peculiarities and harder constructions, but also provide historical and biographical explanations to clarify Sallust’s text.

While all participants in my Sallust course benefited in many ways from the seventeenth century edition, we all, of course, felt the need to use supplementary material now and then. Historical and cultural information, and some of the textual notes, required updating in light of recent scholarship. Nevertheless, I came away with huge respect for this seventeenth-century edition as a superb pedagogical instrument – which provides all sorts of necessary help, but keeps the reader always in the target language. The students using this edition had many times the exposure to Latin constructions and vocabulary than they would have had, if they were using a recent edition in which the text of Sallust is explained by copious notes in English.

The late seventeenth-century editions of classical texts (both Greek and Latin) printed in Paris, and entitled in/ad usum Delphini, were indeed “for the use of the Dauphin,” namely for the son of the king of France. But the phrase in usum Delphini also appears in later editions which had no connection with the royal house of France.

Jean Clouet, “The Dauphin François, Son of François I.” First half of the 16th c., oil on panel. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.

In such editions this phrase in usum Delphini simply indicates the edition is designed for the younger readers in general, who are still getting used to the reading of the unadapted texts of ancient writers. Such, for example, were the classical texts printed in London in aedibus Valpianis during the early nineteenth century. These British editions also feature detailed explanatory notes written in simple Latin, but these notes are often swollen to such size that there is often room for only a tiny amount of original text on each page. Moreover, by comparison with the 1674 edition of Sallust described above, the Latin paraphrase of the classical author’s text was often vestigial or non-existent.

So, my hat is off to those who produced the original editions in usum Delphini.

Images:Google Books and Wikimedia Commons.

Favorite Commentaries: William Turpin

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Chris Francese

What is your favorite classical commentary? What place did it have in your intellectual development? Recently I asked the members of the DCC editorial board to write for the blog about these questions. Here is the response of William Turpin, Professor of Classics at Swarthmore College, and author of the DCC edition of Ovid’s Amores, Book 1:

In practice the most important commentaries are simply those that help me with the language. Daniel Garrison’s editions of Catullus and Horace, for instance, explain the things that he believes students will usually find mysterious, and that frees up my mind to concentrate on everything else. If I can’t understand a passage after checking the commentary, at least I know that it’s my fault.

The transformative commentaries in my own life have been those of T. E. Page, on Vergil. The small red volumes of text and commentary published by Macmillan were as iconic for classicists of my generation as OCTs and Loebs, and not just because they are so wonderfully portable. Their authors are deeply learned, insightful, and stimulating, though even relatively modern editions were probably unrealistic in what they expected of their readers; Kenneth Quinn, in 1970, could expect students of Catullus 51 to profit from his quoting Sappho 31 in the original Greek, with no translation.

Thomas Ethelbert Page (1850-1936), spent 37 years as a master at Charterhouse, one of the great English “public schools” (or we would say “private boys’ schools”). He remained at Charterhouse despite offers of headships of other public schools, and even the chair of Latin at Cambridge. He is also the subject of a short biography by the distinguished Latinist Niall Rudd, (T. E. Page: Schoolmaster Extraordinary, 1981), which I have not seen, and there is apparently a portrait of him at St. Johns College, Cambridge.

T.E. Page

In his 1929 autobiography, Good-bye to All That (which is mostly about his experiences as an infantry officer in the First World War), the poet Robert Graves mentions the profound influence Page’s teaching had on him. English poetry, in those days, was rarely taught in schools, which concentrated on Latin and Greek, but Page’s love of poetry and poetic language had a profound effect on Graves, no doubt on hundreds of other boys, and on readers of his commentaries.

A good example of what I mean is offered by Page’s comments on the first two lines of Eclogue I:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena
nos patriae fines et dulcia linquimus arva:
nos patriam fugimus; tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

Perhaps I might have found these lines appealing without Page’s help; they are, after all, some of the most important lines in western literature. But Page can pull the language apart in a way that I have never found easy: he comments on “the marked antithesis between tu and nos repeated in inverse order, and the pathetic repetition of patriae and patriam.” And Page enriches our connection with Musam meditaris by quoting Milton in Lycidas: “and strictly meditate the thankless Muse.”

All of this is the standard stuff of commentaries, and Page is by no means a comprehensive guide to what we would now call the “reception” of Vergil. Moreover his taste in “modern” poetry would now be considered downright reactionary; I remember him as referring above all to Milton, to the Psalms, and I think also Shelley. But he was the first classicist I encountered in print who gave me a sense of what made Latin poetry, and English poetry, worth reading.

William Turpin

image source: Michael Gilleland (no known copyright restrictions)

Latin Palindromes

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Chris Francese

One of my students asked me the other day if there were any Latin palindromes. I said I didn’t know any, but I knew where to look. I went straight to the wonderful book of Latin word games, Bella Bulla: Lateinische Sprachspielereien, by Hans Weis (Bonn: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlag, 1985). Below are my personal favorites:

Aziz Inan / Univ. of Portland

AURES SERUA (“safeguard your ears”), good advice for all aspiring rock musicians

SOL ATTIGIT TALOS (“the sun touched your ankles”), perhaps a compliment for a lady in a very long dress?

SIGNA TE! SIGNA! TEMERE ME TANGIS ET ANGIS. (“Signify yourself! Signify! You are rashly touching and distressing me”) All sorts of applications for this one in everyday life.

MITIS ERO, RETINE LENITER ORE SITIM (“I will be kindly, gently restrain the thirst in my mouth”). Perhaps best spoken to a bottle of beer.

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities at Dickinson

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Chris Francese

Please spread the word about this job opportunity! Application review begins March 15, 2013.

With generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dickinson College invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in Digital Humanities in the academic year 2013-14, with the potential for an additional year of support. The Fellow will work as a catalyst for faculty innovation by planning, promoting, and implementing strategies to encourage faculty discourse about pedagogy, e-learning tools, and the integration of digital media into teaching and scholarship. The postdoctoral fellowship is an academic appointment reporting to the Dean of the College through the faculty chair of the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee, but the Fellow will be housed alongside the Academic Technology staff in the Library and Information Services division. The Fellow will a) teach one or two courses each year within his or her area of academic specialty; b) guide and participate in workshops for arts, humanities, and humanistic social science faculty regarding disciplinary use of digital tools for curricular and research purposes; and c) work with LIS staff to train students to use digital tools and technologies in order to prepare them for significant student-faculty research collaborations. The Fellow will be eligible for internal grants for pedagogical innovation, as well as standard faculty support for travel and professional development. The salary will be $50,000 plus benefits. Dickinson College is a private, highly selective, liberal arts college located within two hours of major research institutions and metropolitan areas.

The Fellow must normally have received the PhD by July 1, 2013, and within the last three years, and not have held a tenure-track position. Candidates should be conducting research that requires demonstrated expertise in the use of Digital Humanities in their scholarly field.

For further information and to apply, please visit the Dickinson HR website and click on “Faculty.”

For more about digital humanities at Dickinson, please visit: http://blogs.dickinson.edu/digitalhumanties/

Vocabulary Dots

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Chris Francese

I am running all of my ongoing intermediate Latin and Greek classes on the basis of sight reading, rather than the traditional prepared translation method, and using elements of the flipped class concept with video content made with the ShowMe app. The concept is described in an APA paper I gave this year, and some of the nuts and bolts of the system, such as it is, are described in an earlier post. So how is it going, you ask? I’m doing a lot of grading (and avoiding it right now), but I am just thrilled at the change in the classroom dynamics and ethos.

Probably the best day was the day we worked on the basics of Latin scansion and metrics in the Catullus class (4th semester). They watched my little videos about the basics, material I used to do as lecture, but is now available in video form. Then in class we scanned Catullus 1 together: after the briefest of reviews (2 mins. at most) I let them loose on a big photocopy of Cat. 1 with lots of space between the lines, and off they went in pairs. A few had fully absorbed the difference between a long vowel and a long syllable, the concept of elision, and so forth, but many had not. I was able to hover around and give tips and little mini explanations using the examples at hand in a way that had everybody on the boat by the end of 30 minutes. I then projected the poem on to the blackboard and scanned it with them, just to check that everybody had it right. Class over, skill acquired, one hour, and they seemed to actually enjoy it. This is something I never was able to teach properly, and burned hours of class time tying futilely to explain in the abstract. This is a perfect application to Latin of the flipped class concept, lecture material outside of class, project-based collaboration inside. Bingo.

When it come to translation, things are a bit more complicated. I’m relying on them to absorb a vocabulary list for the day’s passage, then we translate together. Sometimes I call on individuals, sometimes I ask for volunteers. This is actually working quite well for the most part. The level of attention and focus on endings and word order is completely new, a total change from what we are all familiar with in the traditional method, where endings are seen as an annoying afterthought, word order as a kind of puzzle, Latin as mixed-up English. We go through word by word first, analyzing the endings (this often leads to mini-reviews on the board of, say, the reflexive pronoun). A second pass yields more or less decent English. We tend to re-translate the passage the next day as review, something necessary when sight-reading in my view.

The rub comes when they say “I don’t know what that word means,” though they were supposed to have learned the list the night before. Not that this is a crippling problem so far, but it brings up the perennial quandary of how to get students to efficiently absorb vocabulary.

My new inspiration for vocabulary work (this being in place of the usually unsuccessful attempt to translate at home, which is characteristic of the traditional method), is something I call vocabulary dots. Given a list of 20-30 lemmas, students choose three activities that simultaneously get them to use the words on the list and help them gain active command of key grammatical structures we will see in the texts themselves. Here are the dots. Let me know if you have any thoughts or comments! I have nicer formatting, with little sphinx emblems (these are the “dots,” but it’s not coming through in WordPress. The not terribly logical term “dots,” by the way, has caught right on, and all the students use it as an easy shorthand for loathsome term “activities,” which I suppose is more accurate. In the syllabus I just say “vocab. dots for Catullus 5 and 6” and they get the picture.

Latin Vocabulary Activities

For a new list of words, choose three activities. They should take about twenty minutes each.

I’d Have To Agree:Create fifteen noun-adjective pairs (e.g. manūs dextrae, right hands, fem. nom. pl.). Use all numbers, cases, and genders once. Translate the resulting combinations.	MiniSynopsis:Pick 6 verbs and give either a) all 6 tenses of the indicative in one person and number, b) all 4 tenses of the subjunctive in one person and number, c) all four participles, or d) all five infinitives. Make sure to use all options at least once, and a mix of active and passive voice. If there are fewer than six verbs, re-use.	Absolutely Ablative:Create ten ablative absolutes (including participle and noun), using a combination of as many words as possible. Make five passive and five active, and translate the results.
The Word Next Door:Write out 15 words with an etymologically related Latin word in the dictionary. Give full dictionary form and short definitions for each. E.g.: manus -ūs f. hand, band; manualis -e (adj.) for the hand.	Meet the Relatives:Write five short sentences using the given vocabulary words, including a relative clause in each. Make sure the relative pronoun is in the right gender, number, and case. Use five different combinations of gender, number, and case. Translate the results.	Acting Up: Write five short sentences including transitive verbs in the active voice, with a direct object. Reverse them so that the verb is passive, and the direct object the new subject. Make sure to change the endings accordingly, and translate both versions.

Greek Vocabulary Activities

For a new list of words, choose three activities. They should take about twenty minutes each.

I’d Have To Agree:Create five article-adjective-noun sets (e.g. τοῖς καλοῖς ἀνδράσι, for the handsome men, m. pl. dat.). Use as many different words as possible, and different combinations of number, case, and gender each time. Translate the resulting combinations.

MiniSynopsis:Pick six verbs and give one conjugated form for each principal part listed in Pharr’s lexicon. Use all combinations of person and number once.

Daring Do: Create five combinations of participle and finite verb (e.g. εἰπών ἕζετο, “having spoken he sat down”). Use as many different verbs as possible. Use a variety of tenses, genders, and numbers, and make sure that the participle (which will always be in the nominative) agrees with the verb in number.

The Word Next Door: write out 15 words words with an etymologically related Greek word in the dictionary. Give full dictionary form and short definitions for each. E.g.: ἥλιος -ου, ὁ sun; ἡλιόομαι be exposed to the sun). You may want to use LSJ for this. Make sure the words are in fact etymologically related, and not just spelled similarly

Meet the Relatives: write five short sentences using the given vocabulary words, including a relative clause in each. Make sure the relative pronoun is in the right gender, number, and case. Use five different combinations of gender, number, and case. Translate the results.

In That Case:Take ten nouns, pair them with ten different prepositions, and translate the result. Make sure that the noun is in an appropriate case for that preposition, and if the preposition can take more than one case make sure it is translated according to the case you use.

–Chris Francese

Visualizing the Classics

Posted on January 31, 2013 by Chris Francese

Anvil Academic and Dickinson College Commentaries are pleased to announce the availability of a $1,000 prize for the best scholarly visualization of data in the field of classical studies submitted during 2013. Two runners-up will be awarded prizes of $500 each.

Submissions must include:

one or more visual representations of data that involves some linguistic component (Latin, Greek, or another ancient language of the Greco-Roman worlds), but may also include physical, geospatial, temporal, or other data;
a research question and narrative argument that describes the conclusions drawn from the data and the visualization; and
the source data itself.

Submissions in any and all sub-fields of classical studies, including pedagogical approaches, are welcome from any individual or team. The three winning submissions will be published by Anvil under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-ND). The visualizations themselves and the narratives that accompany them will be published on Anvil’s website. The source data may be published there as well; though in any case the source data must be in some published form and included, even if only via link, with the submission.

Submissions will be evaluated by the panel of reviewers listed below on the criteria of scholarly contribution, effectiveness of the visualization, accuracy and relevance of the data, and the cogency of the conclusions drawn. Existing digital projects are welcome to submit entries, which must be formatted in a way that can be republished by Anvil, as described above.

Please contact Fred Moody (fmoody@anvilacademic.org) or Chris Francese (francese@dickinson.edu) with any questions.

Deadline for submission: December 31, 2013, to fmoody@anvilacademic.org; only submissions in electronic form will be considered.

Panel of reviewers:

John Bodel, W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History, Brown University

Alison Cooley, Reader & Deputy Head, Department of Classics & Ancient History, University of Warwick

Gregory Crane, Professor of Computer Science, Tufts University, and Humboldt Professor, Universität Leipzig

Lin Foxhall, Professor of Greek Archaeology and History, Head of School, School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester

Chris Francese, Professor of Classical Studies, Dickinson College

Jonathan Hall, Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History and Classics, University of Chicago

Dominique Longrée, Professor of Classics, University of Liège and Saint-Louis University, Brussels.

Andrew M. Riggsby, Professor of Classics and Art History, University of Texas at Austin

Greg Woolf, Professor of Ancient History, University of St. Andrews

Image: Pont du Gard, Dimitris Kilymis (cc)

Classical Commentary DIY

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Chris Francese

A guest post from Peter Sipes, who has been using the DCC core Latin vocabulary in the process of creating texts for his students. Perhaps you might like to do the same? Peter explains exactly how (and why) he does it . . .

Over the last few years of teaching Latin to homeschoolers, I’ve found that I need to make a lot of my own materials. It’s not that what’s available is poor quality: quite the contrary. I worked for publishers Bolchazy-Carducci for the better part of five years, and use their books when it makes sense. I’m also a great admirer of Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina series. There is a lot of high-quality material available for beginners and people studying Golden Age Latin literature. Once you get away from those two sweet spots, however, the supply of student materials quickly dries up.

Since I want to make sure my students are aware of a broad range of Latin, I present post-Classical literature. I’ve taught selections from the Vulgate three times, and just finished up with a second go around of Thomas More’s Utopia. These are wonderful texts, but they require the making of my own materials for students. My aim is fluent reading, and so I like for everything—text, notes, and vocabulary— to be on one page, as in Clyde Pharr’s well-known text of the Aeneid.

With some serious tweaking of process over the last few years, I have finally nailed down a good work flow. The big breakthrough was the publication of the DCC Core Latin Vocabulary—before that I never knew which words to assume students knew. Worse, I always felt like I was trying to reinvent the wheel.

Now that I’ve got it down, I’ve been slowly sharing my work, which you can find free of charge at this site. Here’s how I make my DIY commentaries on my laptop using free tools. Follow along with me as I make a student handout for the chapter 44 of Gesta Romanorum (entitled de invidia).

1. Select your text. I like thelatinlibrary.com (graphic 1). The text is fairly clean, and—this is important to me—there’s little formatting on it. Perseus has high-quality text, but it has a lot of formatting you’ve got to get out.

2. Open up your word processor. I use Open Office. Whatever you use, it needs good table support. Set up a new text document with a 2×3 table (graphic 3). The next few steps are tricky, but your students will want you to go through the trouble to get line numbering.

3. Highlight the two cells in the top row (graphic 4). Merge them (graphic 5). Now for the tricky part: highlight that cell and split it vertically into three new cells (graphic 6). Highlight the two left cells—but not the one on the right. Merge those two cells.

4. Push the cell divider to the right so that the upper left cell is really wide in comparison to the one on the upper right (graphic 7). The upper left cell will house the text. The upper right will house the line numbers. Steps 2, 3, and 4 will seem pretty odd right now. Just follow the screen caps.

5. Copy (graphic 2) and paste the text selected in step 1 into the upper left cell (graphic 8). At this point you’re pretty much ready to get to the real work. I like to double space the text and apply some gentle formatting—but that’s wholly optional. Here are my preferences for formatting:
a. Double space the text. Students need room to write and mark up.
b. Get the title out of the text cell. It offends me aesthetically—no other good reason.
c. Rag right alignment. I come from print. Old biases die hard.
d. Indent the paragraphs. Same reason.

6. If your text is longer than half of a page, you need to divide it into sections. Repeat steps 2–5 to make new pages. Better yet: cut and paste the table you’ve already got. It’s best to divide long texts at this step rather than after you’ve developed the vocabulary list. You can tweak the text on each page a bit after this step, but it is a tedious and error-prone process to do more than that.

7. Copy the text from your text cell into a new blank document (graphic 9). Perform a find and replace to turn spaces into returns (graphic 10). At this point, you should have a list of words, one word per line, in the order of the text (graphic 11).

8. Scrolling up, look for things you may not want on separate lines—usually names. I find that things to fix pop out much faster if I’m going against the flow of the text. Example: M., Tullius and Cicero should be on the same line.

9. At the top, select all text and sort alphabetically (graphic 12). Once again finding myself at the bottom of the list, I scroll back up looking for and deleting duplicates. But that is optional. Sometimes a quote mark or a parenthesis will cause their attached word to float to the top (graphic 13). Delete the offending punctuation and re-sort. This isn’t optional.

10. Open up the DCC Top 1,000 and scroll down both the Top 1,000 and the newly generated word list. When a word on the Top 1,000 appears, delete it from the word list (graphic 14). For the most part, you can probably guess the contents of the Top 1,000—but be careful until you know the list better. There are surprises.

Sometimes there will be word that are obviously derived from one of the Top 1,000 (graphic 15). I don’t delete them, since I would rather offer too much help than too little—but you might want to delete these derived terms to encourage student vocabulary building strategies. In the text I’m preparing, artifex is clearly derived from ars. Even though a student should be able to guess the meaning of artifex based on ars, I don’t chance it. I’d rather the gloss be at hand so as not to interrupt the flow of reading more than necessary.

Sometimes there will be words that are potential hits to the Top 1,000. In our text, we have bello and bella on the list. Since alphabetization removed the words from their contexts, you need to go check. Are bello and bella versions of bellum, -i (war) or bellus, -a, -um (beautiful)? One is on the list. The other is not. Fortunately this doesn’t happen too often. In this case, both bello and bella are derived from bellum, -i (war), which is on the Top 1,000 list. Out they go. On occasion, something like obtulit (offero) and sustulit (tollo) show up and make things somewhat out of order—remember to get them out too (graphic 16).

11. Once I’ve thrown out the Top 1,000 from the raw vocabulary list, I format the raw vocabulary list a bit (graphic 17): I set the type to single spacing; turn the point size down a little; and get rid of excess space before or after paragraphs. Copy the list of lower frequency words and then paste it into the left cell below the text (graphic 18).

12. Turn your raw word list into an actual glossary. Principal parts, noun stems, definitions—the whole lot. I add macrons to this list of vocabulary (on a Mac the Hawaiian keyboard is a godsend—option + vowel = vowel with macron: graphic 19). I like to use my paper dictionary, but Wiktionary (graphic 21) and Perseus will both tell you where the macrons go. If I’m in a pinch for time, I rely on my memory. Though I prefer macrons, they are optional. If the word list spills off the bottom of the page a little at this point, don’t worry.

13. Cut and paste the vocabulary list into two columns of equal length (graphic 20).

14. Add in the line numbers in the skinny cell on the top right (graphic 22). This will take some patience and some fiddling with the paragraph spacing to make it turn out right. Using a soft return (shift + enter) may take some of the pain out of the procedure. For the example I put in every line number, which I usually don’t.

15. Write the notes in the two remaining cells on the bottom. In an ideal world, it wouldn’t matter much what level the notes are at. Students will use them when they need them and ignore them when they don’t. Of course, this isn’t an ideal world. On average, I’d rather err on the side of too much help, since my aim is reading fluency. I tend to gloss over style and rhetoric in the notes and go for morphology when writing for beginning students, as is the case in our example. I probably also err on the side of an overly conversational style in the notes as well, but that’s what works for me. In the example, I point out the present participles quite frequently, since we haven’t come to them yet.

16. Find where the cell boundaries properties are. Turn all cell boundaries white or 0 pt. It makes the handout look more professional.

17. Export as PDF and upload to scribd.com or Google drive—accounts are free and the more material openly shared the better. What’s even better is that Scribd allows for revisions to be posted on uploaded documents. I exported the Open Office file to a Word format and have uploaded it here. Feel free to tinker with the file to see what I’ve done. The final pdf is on scribd.com.

18. Read with students and enjoy!

–Peter Sipes (sipes23@gmail.com)

Greek Core Vocabulary: A Sight Reading Approach

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Chris Francese

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystiancruz/3235797556/in/photostream/

Crytian Cruz, via Flickr (http://bit.ly/13HaBAU)

(This is a slightly revised version of a talk given by Chris Francese on January 4, 2013 at the American Philological Association Meeting, at the panel “New Adventures in Greek Pedagogy,” organized by Willie Major.)

Not long ago, in the process of making some websites of reading texts with commentary on classical authors, I became interested in high-frequency vocabulary for ancient Greek. The idea was straightforward: define a core list of high frequency words that would not be glossed in running vocabulary lists to accompany texts designed for fluid reading. I was fortunate to be given a set of frequency data from the TLG by Maria Pantelia, with the sample restricted to authors up to AD 200, in order to avoid distortions introduced church fathers and Byzantine texts. So I thought I had it made. But I soon found myself in a quicksand, slowly drowning in a morass infested with hidden, nasty predators, until Willie Major threw me a rope, first via his published work on this subject, and then with his collaboration in creating what is now a finished core list of around 500 words, available free online. I want to thank Willie for his generosity, his collegiality, his dedication, and for including me on this panel. I also received very generous help, data infusions, and advice on our core list from Helma Dik at the University of Chicago, for which I am most grateful.

What our websites offer that is new, I believe, is the combination of a statistically-based yet lovingly hand-crafted core vocabulary, along with handmade glosses for non-core words. The idea is to facilitate smooth reading for non-specialist readers at any level, in the tradition of the Bryn Mawr Commentaries, but with media—sound recordings, images, etc. Bells and whistles aside, however, how do you get students to actually absorb and master the core list? Rachel Clark has published an interesting paper on this problem at the introductory level of ancient Greek that I commend to you. There is also of course a large literature on vocabulary acquisition in modern languages, which I am going to ignore completely. This paper is more in the way of an interim report from the field about what my colleague Meghan Reedy and I have been doing at Dickinson to integrate core vocabulary with a regime based on sight reading and comprehension, as opposed to the traditional prepared translation method. Consider this a provisional attempt to think through a pedagogy to go with the websites. I should also mention that we make no great claim to originality, and have taken inspiration from some late nineteenth century teachers who used sight reading, in particular Edwin Post.

In the course of some mandated assessment activities it became clear that the traditional prepared translation method was not yielding students who could pick their way through a new chunk of Greek with sufficient vocabulary help, which is our ultimate goal. With this learning goal in mind we tried to back-design a system that would yield the desired result, and have developed a new routine based around the twin ideas of core vocabulary and sight reading. Students are held responsible for the core list, and they read and are tested at sight, with the stipulation that non-core words will be glossed. I have no statistics to prove that our current regime is superior to the old way, but I do know it has changed substantially the dynamics of our intermediate classes, I believe for the better.
Students’ class preparation consists of a mix of vocabulary memorization for passages to be read at sight in class the next day, and comprehension/grammar worksheets on other passages (ones not normally dealt with in class). Class itself consists mainly of sight translation, and review and discussion of previously read passages, with grammar review as needed. Testing consists of sight passages with comprehension and grammar questions (like the worksheets), and vocabulary quizzes. Written assignments focus on textual analysis as well as literal and polished literary translation.

The concept (not always executed with 100% effectiveness, I hasten to add) is that for homework students focus on relatively straightforward tasks they can successfully complete (the vocabulary preparation and the worksheets). This preserves class time for the much more difficult and higher-order task of translation, where they need to be able to collaborate with each other, and where we’re there to help them—point out word groups and head off various types of frustration. It’s a version, in other words, of the flipped classroom approach, a model of instruction associated with math and science, where students watch recorded lectures for homework and complete their assignments, labs, and tests in class. More complex, higher-order tasks are completed in class, more routine, more passive ones, outside.

There are many possible variations of this idea, but the central selling point for me is that it changes the set of implicit bargains and imperatives that underlie ancient language instruction, at least as we were practicing it. Consider first vocabulary: in the old regime we said essentially: “know for the short-term every word in each text we read. I will ask you anything.” In the new regime we say, “know for the long-term the most important words. The rest will be glossed.” When it comes to reading, we used to say or imply, “understand for the test every nuance of the texts we covered in class. I will ask you any detail.” In the new system we say, “learn the skills to read any new text you come across. I will ask for the main points only, and give you clues.” What about morphology? The stated message was, “You should know all your declensions and conjugations.” The unspoken corollary was “But if you can translate the prepared passage without all that you will still pass.” With the new method, the daily lived reality is, “If you don’t know what endings mean you will be completely in the dark as to how these words are related.” When it comes to grammar and syntax, the old routine assumed they should know all the major constructions as abstract principles, but with the tacit understanding that this is not really likely to be possible at the intermediate level. The new method says, “practice recognizing and identifying the most common grammatical patterns that actually occur in the readings. Unusual things will be glossed.” More broadly, the underlying incentives of our usual testing routines was always, “Learn and English translation of assigned texts and you’ll be in pretty good shape.” This has now changed to: “know core vocabulary and common grammar cold and you’ll be in pretty good shape.”

Now, every system has its pros and cons. The cons here might be a) that students don’t spend quite as much time reading the dictionary as before, so their vocabulary knowledge is not as broad or deep as it should be; b) that the level of attention to specific texts is not as high as in the traditional method; and c) that not as much material can be covered when class work done at sight. The first of these (not enough dictionary time) is a real problem in my view that makes this method not really suitable at the upper levels. At the intermediate level the kind of close reading that we classicists value so much can be accomplished through repeated exposure in class to texts initially encountered at sight, and through written assignments and analytical papers. The problem of coverage is alleviated somewhat by the fact that students encounter as much or more in the original language than before, thanks to the comprehension worksheets, which cover a whole separate set of material.

On the pro side, the students seem to like it. Certainly their relationship to grammar is transformed. They suddenly become rather curious about grammatical structures that will help them figure out what the heck is going on. With the comprehension worksheets the assumption is that the text makes some kind of sense, rather than what used to be the default assumption, that it’s Greek, so it’s not really supposed to make that much sense anyway. While the students are still mastering the core vocabulary, one can divide the vocabulary of a passage into core and non-core items, holding the students responsible only for core items. Students obviously like this kind of triage, since it helps them focus their effort in a way they acknowledge and accept as rational. The key advantage to a statistically based core list in my view is really a rhetorical one. In helps generate buy-in. The problem is that we don’t read enough to really master the core contextually in the third semester. Coordinating the core with what happens to occur in the passages we happen to read is the chief difficulty of this method. I would argue, however, that even if you can’t teach them the whole core contextually, the effort to do so crucially changes the student’s attitude to vocabulary acquisition, from “how can I possibly ever learn this vast quantity of ridiculous words?” to “Ok, some of these are more important than others, and I have a realistic numerical goal to achieve.” The core is a possible dream, something that cannot always be said of the learning goals implicit in the traditional prepared translation method at the intermediate level.

The question of how technology can make all this work better is an interesting one. Prof. Major recently published an important article in CO that addresses this issue. In my view we need a vocabulary app that focuses on the DCC core, and I want to try to develop that. We need a video Greek grammar along the lines of Khan Academy that will allow students to absorb complex grammatical concepts by repeated viewings at home, with many, many examples, annotated with chalk and talk by a competent instructor. And we need more texts that are equipped with handmade vocabulary lists that exclude core items, both to facilitate reading and to preserve the incentive to master the core. And this is where our project hopes to make a contribution. Thank you very much, and I look forward to the discussion period.

–Chris Francese

HANDOUT:

Greek Core Vocabulary Acquisition: A Sight Reading Approach

American Philological Association, Seattle, WA

Friday January 4, 2013

Panel: New Adventures in Greek Pedagogy

Christopher Francese, Professor of Classical Studies, Dickinson College francese@dickinson.edu

References

Dickinson College Commentaries: http://dcc.dickinson.edu/

Latin and Greek texts for reading, with explanatory notes, vocabulary, and graphic, video, and audio elements. Greek texts forthcoming: Callimachus, Aetia (ed. Susan Stephens); Lucian, True History (ed. Stephen Nimis and Evan Hayes).

DCC Core Ancient Greek Vocabulary http://dcc.dickinson.edu/vocab/greek-alphabetical

About 500 of the most common words in ancient Greek, the lemmas that generate approximately 65% of the word forms in a typical Greek text. Created in the summer of 2012 by Christopher Francese and collaborators, using two sets of data: 1. A subset of the comprehensive Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database, including all texts in the database up to AD 200, a total of 20.003 million words (of which the period AD 100–200 accounts for 10.235 million). 2. The corpus of Greek authors at Perseus Chicago, which at the time our list was developed was approximately 5 million words.

Rachel Clark, “The 80% Rule: Greek Vocabulary in Popular Textbooks,” Teaching Classical Languages 1.1 (2009), 67–108.

Wilfred E. Major, “Teaching and Testing Classical Greek in a Digital World,” Classical Outlook 89.2 (2012), 36–39.

Wilfred E. Major, “It’s Not the Size, It’s the Frequency: The Value of Using a Core Vocabulary in Beginning and Intermediate Greek” CPL Online 4.1 (2008), 1–24. http://www.camws.org/cpl/cplonline/files/Majorcplonline.pdf

Read Iliad 1.266-291, then answer the following in English, giving the exact Greek that is the basis of your answer:

(lines 266-273) Who did Nestor fight against, and why did he go?

who

why

(lines 274-279 ) Why should Achilles defer to Agamemnon, in Nestor’s view?

(lines 280-284) What is the meaning and difference between κάρτερος and φέρτερος as Nestor explains it?

(lines 285-291) What four things does Achilles want, according to Agamemnon?

Find five prepositional phrases, write them out and translate, noting the line number, and the case that each preposition takes.

Find five verbs in the imperative mood, write them out and translate, noting the line number and tense of each.