JCL Club 2013-14

Welcome back to campus or, for those new to HW, welcoming to campus! I'm sure you all are as excited as we are for the new school year, and we're happy to announce that our JCL club meetings will resume on Tuesday, 9/10 in HC310. All are welcome to join the club and participate in our activities — Latin is not a prerequisite!

We have another exciting year of activities, including a fall trip to the Getty Villa (details forthcoming; cf. the video on the installation of the "Lion Attacking a Horse" exhibition below). Additionally, the CJCL state convention will be held on April 4-5 (the last weekend of spring break), so be sure to mark your calendars.

Best of luck with the new academic year, and we'll see you all very soon!

Digital Classical Texts

In reading the Getty Museum's recent blog post about an ancient Greek curse tablet dating to about 100 BCE and found in Morgantina that's now on display at the Villa, I noticed in the post a link to a website devoted to curse texts from Roman Britain.  It's an excellent site worthy of use in Latin classrooms for multiple reasons, with several interesting curse texts that are fairly easy to read (if not strange), and it can now be placed beside the rest of the digital "Vindolanda" tablets, which are also available online.

Given the current push toward digital texts in classrooms, it seems like a good time to share other online resources for reading Latin with the goal of discovering others.  The gold standard, of course, is still the Perseus Project, but the Latin Library is also very useful.  A short list is given below:

• Perseus Project
• Latin Library
• Vindolanda Tablets Online
• Curse Tablets of Roman Britain

Are there any other digital resources for Latin (or Greek!), including dictionaries, that Classics students have found interesting and useful?  Please comment, if so!

Convention Et Cetera

Now that the end of the calendar is approaching, it's time to start thinking about some of our spring activities, including the CA JCL convention, which will take place at the Sage Hill School on Friday, 3/15 (the Ides of March!) and Saturday, 3/16.  The school has put together a fantastic convention site and Facebook group page that are both worth exploring.

For those of you interested in playing competitive certamen at the convention, your team will need to qualify at CARCER, which will be held Saturday, 2/16 from 10am-2:30pm at the Willows Community School in Culver City.  All competitive certamen teams should plan on attending.

We've got two more extracurricular exams on the horizon:  the National Latin Exam during the week of March 11th and the Medusa Myth Exam during the week of March 18th.  Registration for both exams is due toward the end of Jan., so we'll start taking names for them after we return from the holiday break.  Enjoy it, and we'll see you all soon!

Welcome to HW JCL!

Welcome to the Harvard-Westlake JCL Club blog!  We'll be using this blog to share news and events about the Latin program at Harvard-Westlake.  All are welcome to follow and comment on blog posts here.

I created this blog with a twofold purpose in mind:  to get my students thinking about Classical culture outside of a classroom and to give them an opportunity to improve their digital literacy in the expression of their ideas.  To that end, I will encourage them to keep their own blogs in a similar fashion, with posts on anything related to the Latin language, Classical literature and myth, art, history, architecture, etc. that they see in their daily lives. This is an experiment, and I don't know how successful it will be.  Ideally, though, we can work towards a deeper appreciation of our Classical heritage together.

A Little Latin Reader

Thanks to its recent BMCR review, I recently got word of English and Irby's new Latin reader, A Little Latin Reader (Oxford) and received my copy a few days ago.  I don't intend to fully review the book here, but I'll offer a few brief thoughts on it.  The reader is designed to give students an early introduction to real Latin (in opposition to "textbook" Latin) and is organized topically by points of grammar, e.g. the dative case, the perfect tense, indirect statements, cum-clauses, etc.  Each grammatical topic heading contains a few short passages with a brief self-contained vocabulary, giving the reader over 200 passages in total.  The authors have designed the book to be a versatile tool in accompanying grammar instruction, and in this respect, I think it's an excellent resource.

As Pollio notes in his BMCR review, the choice of passages and fullness in commentary could always be debated, and while I would have preferred to see more Imperial prose, I'm very happy with the selection.  In particular, I'm especially happy that the authors have included a number of epigraphical texts that are worth reading.  In fact, non-literary texts are receiving more attention than ever at the intermediate level, as is also the case with LaFleur's excellent Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes, and I hope that the trend continues.

It's certainly true that the minimalist commentary accompanying each text is little more than a plain vocabulary and as such won't help students with points of grammar, language, and style.  But while this fact will prevent the reader from becoming a primary textbook, it will also allow teachers to tailor the discussion to their own interests and force students to analyze the texts themselves.  A quick browse through the selections reveals an abundance of "nonstandard" forms that are ripe for all sorts of discussions, e.g. anc (34.4 and 38.1), cīves (43.1), deicō (15.1), līberum (27.3), negāstī (33.3), praetereis (45.2), sexs (34.3), etc., in addition to the usual points of literary interest.  In all of my classes I'm going to use the book exactly as the authors suggested, namely, as a springboard both for further discussion on selected topics and for sight-reading.  At $15.95 it's a bargain.

Two Notes on Dialectology

I just came across this article on the divergence of American English in the Great Lakes region.  I'm not familiar with the dialect, but its vowel system is apparently diverging from standard American English more quickly than other dialects; cf. words like cot and caught with different vowels, unlike in my own dialect.  It's interesting to me to think about dialects in relation to (literary) Latin, which showed practically no dialectal variation across the empire for hundreds of years.  Latin, of course, did have "dialects", much like English does today, but the data are hard to find, given the authority of the literary language.  It's a fun and worthwhile exercise to point them out to students on occasion.

Secondly, the Gray-Atkinson model of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) branching and question of its Urheimat has resurfaced in the past few days, with the same claim that PIE began to break up around 8000 BCE.  The claim reported now is that the homeland must have been located in Anatolia.  Other than the above NYT story, most of the articles I've seen (except this one) fail to mention that Indo-Europeanists largely reject this model, instead projecting the break-up to 4000-5000 BCE and placing the homeland near or in the steppes of the Ukraine, based on scientific analysis of the linguistic data (which the Gray-Atkinson model doesn't do).

Being a historical linguist, I'm fascinated by language change, but it's rather difficult to illustrate in introductory and intermediate Latin courses, especially from the historical perspective.  But demonstrable language changes like the Northern Cities Shift near the Great Lakes could help illustrate more far-reaching changes like those we see in the developments from PIE.  And perhaps we can also arrive at an understanding that glottochronology isn't as easy as plugging words into a computer without really considering the data.

The Hobbit in Latin

Mark Walker's Latin translation of The Hobbit is available for pre-order (available September 13).  My students have enjoyed the bits of the Latin Harry Potter series we've read in class, and I'm now eager to have a look at Hobbitus Ille. With the release of the new Hobbit movie this December, I'm expecting that there should be a good deal of interest in the book.