Emily Fleming

For all that the Greek readings in Saffire & Freis’s textbook possess real charm, spending more time with those texts has made me realize how tricky it would be to re-draft my little historical reader to align with its vocabulary progression. The trouble is that the stories are just so very short, often on the order of about 100-200 words long. And for all that I like very much the idea of the Thesaurus at the back, the amount of unfamiliar vocabulary in them is probably just too overwhelming for a beginner student. The NT selections are not so bad on this front as the ones from Heraclitus; at least, the NT verses selected tend to feature much more internal repetition of words. I acknowledge that the Thesaurus sections were chosen mainly for their foregrounding of certain grammatical structures, and that the authors of Ancient Greek Alive don’t (presumably) see vocabulary acquisition as a goal for that section. But that makes no sense. When you read, it matters whether or not you know what most of the words mean. When most of the words in a sentence have to be glossed for you–and the same is true of the next sentence, and the one after that–it is hard to see how a student will be able to internalize the grammatical structure with which they are being presented. This is just silly. The same, by the way, is true of the lines from Sappho which constitute the student’s second poem to be memorized–and this for a poem that’s already in Aeolic.

I still think this book would work okay for a student who loved to memorize and found it quite easy to do: you would simply have the student more-or-less memorize the folk tales as well as the Thesaurus selections. If a student was willing to memorize everything, then they’d eventually end up able to read Greek. However, this textbook offers nowhere near enough material–and too much of it, much too difficult–for a student to learn by reading. Even then, I still think that a student would learn better from reading exponentially more Greek.

The lists of “vocabulary to be learnt” are a little misleading in this regard: they don’t at all prepare you for the Thesaurus readings. They teach you most of the words that show up in the folk tales. I think that’s a shame, to decide that students have to struggle through texts they’re wildly under-prepared for, and then fail to even incorporate the rewards of those struggles into the rest of the text.

I think, if I were really committed to writing a reader to go with this textbook, what I’d need to do is to give up altogether on the idea of history per se and go back to the epistolary idea. You would want to write pretty much one letter for every single chapter of this book. I don’t know whether the fictional baby Greek letters I’ve written are sufficiently charming for students to enjoy reading one every day or not. It would require a lot of creativity, to figure out a new letter to write that fits well with every single day’s vocabulary. Also, the vocabulary is distributed with great unevenness across the days, but it’s not uncommon to encounter a day with twenty or even thirty new words, counting the vocabulary in the Thesaurus. And should one include the vocabulary in the Thesaurus, to begin with? If you don’t, what’s the point of the section to begin with?

Maybe it would be a good creative writing exercise for me to try and make the epistolary reader happen as a companion volume to AGA. But that removes the prime advantage of the historical reader, i.e., it was supposed to make it easy for teachers to find things to talk about in Greek, in the classroom, every day. If I go back to epistolary reader, it’s no longer the case that one could count on having the option of a safe, easy, informative discussion topic for every single class. And I liked the idea of learning Ancient Greek through History, darn it. It meets a real need, I think: students do tend to be woefully ignorant of the ancient world in which Greek speakers lived and wrote and traveled.

So I don’t know that I really will throw out the idea of an LGPSI historical companion reader after all. For all that I think Saffire’s little stories are so charming and re-readable, I think the vocabulary in the early chapters of this book is simply too difficult to adapt that way.

Simply turning up to the UNCA library on Tuesday to wander through the shelves for a couple of hours seems to have filled me with new life, academically speaking. I found two books that had been misshelved by a row or more (and only checked out one of them). I serendipitously encountered a book on my TBR list, George Steiner’s After Babel, and brought it home with me. I was reminded of the kind of research I want to be able to read (competently, critically), and the kind of research I want to be able to do.

And, not least, I checked out a book which may change the direction of my Ancient Greek introductory graded reader project: Paula Saffire and Catherine Freis’s Ancient Greek Alive. I checked it out for the novelty of the Greek reading material it contained; extremely simple folk tales are part of a healthy diet for language slackers like me. The next day, having read through the nine introductory scripts and the first ten lessons, it struck me: this is the easily the sanest vocabulary progression I’ve ever encountered in a textbook. Very restrained when it comes to nouns: e.g., one learns only μήτηρ & παῖς together in their first story, and the other family nouns you’d expect (πατήρ, ἀδελφός/ή, υἱός, θυγατήρ) are saved for other chapters. Same deal with parts of the body: you get ὀφθαλμός & χείρ quite early, δάκτυλος soon after, but there’s never a frantic attempt to cram in, say, οὖς, κεφαλή, πούς, πρόσωπον, as well. To me, this seems to be the most sensible decision, given how slowly vocabulary is really acquired, and how many other words you need to learn.

Verbs, for example. You need a lot of good verbs to tell any kind of a series of interesting stories, and many of the best verbs for writing beginner stories are irregular. By the end of Script #9, Saffire & Freis have gotten us off to quite a good start: ἀκούω, γιγνώσκω, ἀναγιγνώσκω, γράφω, δακρύω, ἐθέλω, ἐσθίω, ἔχω, κάμνω, λαμβάνω, λέγω, μανθάνω, μεθύω, πίνω, χαίρω, ἐρωτάω, ὁράω, γαμέω, καλέω, νοσέω, ποιέω, φιλέω, βούλομαι, ἔρχομαι, φοβέομαι, δείκνυμι, δίδωμι, εἰμί, εἶμι, κεῖμαι, ἀνίσταμαι, and οἶδα. That is a terrific set of verbs to be working with during the first few weeks of class. Do students know all of them equally well? No, they do not. But they have seen them before and will see them again, because that is a fantastic list from which to plan classroom activities or write extra reading material. I don’t know that you can be properly impressed by the vocabulary review list on p.25 until you’ve spent time with other Ancient Greek curricula. It’s just so–elegant. And sensible. I am a very firm believer in not sheltering students from common irregular verbs until they’ve been at the language for a semester or (worse) almost two: they simply don’t get enough practice time with -μι verbs if you don’t touch them until the year is almost over. No, give them a couple of -μι verbs right from the start, and lots of opportunities to use them.

And the authors haven’t been overly precious about avoiding any kind of verb form for which the students haven’t been given a complete paradigm & grammatical explanation. The 1st & 2nd person plural forms are, I note, exempt from student production for a while. Although this is painful, I can recognize that they are simply not as important for students in either classroom conversation or in storytelling, and sacrifices (temporarily) have to be made. But the teacher’s scripts contain not only all six personal endings and the imperatives a TPR partisan would expect, but also the 1st person plural present active subjunctive. There are also a handful of aorists scattered throughout these introductory scripts, mostly in the imperative & infinitive to contrast aspect, but a handful to indicate past tense (“ἔμαθον τὸ ποίημα”, e.g.). Again, I think all this is healthy for a student. They can (and will) learn to produce and analyze these forms later. But at the very beginning, to be exposed to them in a meaningful context is what they need.

It also hurts a little to have such a tiny set of prepositions (I see ἐπί, ἐκ, & δία listed, and I am fairly certain I remember a glossed ἐν from a later script), but I can recognize this also as a sensible temporary sacrifice. Getting comfortable with personal endings for verbs & case endings for nouns/pronouns should reasonably come first, and internalizing those deserves time. Thankfully, Saffire & Freis have also chosen the path of wisdom in allowing some of their two dozen starting nouns to come from the third declension. Again, students will internalize this if given sufficient space to do so, and it’s better to start them as you mean to go on.

I suspect one of the reasons this book isn’t more popular is the authors' approach to the content of the AG readings: “Being a purist I was unwilling to water down or otherwise distort Greek material. I admired the Greek texts for their beauty and vigor, and did not want to tamper in the least….I went to the children’s library…picking out any stories I thought were funny, intriguing, or both. These I translated into Ancient Greek” (p.xv). Thus AGA’s Ancient Greek readings are mainly “original” Ancient Greek content, which has little or nothing to do with the Ancient Greek world. I more or less share Saffire’s disinclination to simplify authentic texts drastically enough for a first-semester student to be able to read them, which is why I am working on writing my own. Not because I identify as a purist (I don’t); I just think that the texts become less intrinsically interesting after passing through that layer of translation and de-authentication. Once you’re reading an adaptation rather than the real thing, and the satisfaction of touching someone else’s words across the millennia is gone, the adaptation in question needs to be tremendously compelling on its own terms for me to feel any kind of intrinsic motivation to read it.

But AGA also contains a handful of authentic short poetic excerpts to be memorized (Sappho, Archilochus, Mimnermus, Homer, and a couple of Anacreontea), along with a Θησαυρός section at the back of the book, containing brief prose excerpts from the New Testament, Heraclitus, Xenophanes, epitaphs and related snippets (some from Greek tragedians, most from Lattimore’s 1962 Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs), Diogenes, and other famous sayings. This kind of encounter with authentic texts is, I think, far more compelling than an adapted version. I also think that memorizing sentences (in this case, authentic sentences with interesting content) is much more valuable from an SLA perspective than is memorizing vocabulary lists. I think a teacher could do much worse than to ask students to memorize some of the Θησαυρός selections–or perhaps to make artistic posters illustrating them with nice calligraphy. From what I’ve seen of the folk tales so far (through about chapter 10), they are also engaging enough that I would feel I was being reasonable if I asked students to create little illustrated picture books of the stories. This sounds like a small thing. But compare a random Nasrudin story with a random reading from another Greek textbook: do you honestly think that these stories land the same way? The folk tales (again, thus far) have sufficient charm that I would not find my time wasted if I were to read them in any language. The same simply cannot be said of other Greek textbooks.

Of course, there isn’t anything like enough enough Ancient Greek material for students to read in this book. I don’t have an estimate yet, but to put a wild round number on it…maybe ten thousand words total from these readings? Fifteen? I am not certain that it is as high a figure as twenty. And this, mind you, is for a book that’s meant to cover two semesters of Attic Greek. For all the joy of rereading and memorizing–which again, is vastly more plausible for Ancient Greek Alive than for any other AG textbook I’ve laid eyes on–that is still not the kind of input that any student trying to learn to read Greek fast needs. To try and get from zero to large quantities of authentic texts (even the “easy” ones) in a year is an ambitious goal. I don’t think this book alone is likely to get you there.

Nevertheless, the texts in the book are worthwhile (okay, maybe I’ll admit to ambivalence about the skit ὁ ἰατρὸς ἔρχεται), and the sequencing of vocabulary and grammar is almost shockingly sensible. And any teacher who picks up this book is going to have already accepted the major sticking points that I suspect many teachers will encounter with my Ancient Greek reader: namely, that the content doesn’t have enough to do with Ancient Greek, and that they’re just not sold on (or not sufficiently comfortable with) the idea of speaking Ancient Greek in the classroom. “Here’s tens of thousands of words of extra reading for your students to do, relying largely on the vocabulary & grammar that they’ve already learned; they could be doing this instead of (or in addition to) tedious translation exercises or memorizing vocabulary lists & verb paradigms” sounds like a pretty soft sell for the teacher who’s already decided on Ancient Greek Alive as a textbook.

No, the textbook isn’t free–and I suppose that is not quite my original vision. But it is eminently re-usable; you could get by with classroom copies, if you were on a tight budget. It isn’t Koine–which I still tend to think is the most sensible place to start with AG language instruction, since that’s the dialect most of the intermediate-friendly texts are written in. I don’t love the layout, visually, and I am not sure I’m sold on the whole idea of starting with uncontracted verb forms (though I am intrigued). I also prefer macrons in first-semester texts, although I think a competent teacher could get away with genuinely teaching vowel quantities through their pronunciation; that’s probably preferable to cluttering up the text with more diacritics, even if it makes me (not at all a competent speaker) nervous. Thus far I am not blown away by the historical context English readings–they’re okay, but I could name other textbooks whose historical sections I prefer.

But despite these quibbles and questions, I still think I’d do better to scrap my existing vocabulary list and take up with this one. That’ll be a little bit of a project, to organize the AGA vocabulary by chapter and then to start rewriting οἱ λιθικοὶ αἰῶνες. The end result, however, seems likely to be one which is more widely adopted by others, and which and fits more smoothly into the way I actually plan on teaching: in a classroom, face to face with human beings.

Finished reading: Breakneck by Dan Wang 📚

Slipped into the acknowledgements is the author’s own comment, “Breakneck is written from a perspective that makes most political scientists tart and many historians grumpy.” So at least Wang knows what is coming. I was not entirely grumpy while reading this book, drawn to it as I was by a mention of “process knowledge” in a review. I think that Wang’s descriptions of various aspects of the Chinese “engineering society”–some coverage of manufacturing in China, the one-child policy, zero-Covid–are clear, moving, and informative, and I’m glad to have read them. Wang’s argument about how an engineering outlook has dominated the decisions of the CCP is overall quite persuasive. I’m grateful for how this book (in serendipitous connection with some other recent reads, including Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and this particular response to it) has helped me to think about what a humane economy might look like, by studying one particular economy which is so frequently inhumane.

But given the book’s probable influence, I’m bothered by the inadequacy of Wang’s description of the US as a “lawyerly society”. First of all, even if I didn’t know anything about American history, I’d like to think that I’d still notice that Wang portrays the “lawyerliness” of the US as largely dependent on more-or-less progressive elements from the 1970’s onwards. (For this view he appears to depend largely on Paul Sabin’s 2021 Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism, a book which I haven’t read; I therefore can’t confirm how well Wang’s “lawyerly society” corresponds to Sabin’s arguments.) And yet it’s quite clear, not only from what I know of the US but from examples cited in the book, that America’s lawyerliness is nothing new; on the contrary, it’s part of how the country has always been. It’s perfectly sound, of course, to study that that legal culture has evolved in the last fifty or sixty years. What is not sound, historically or even logically, to totally ignore centuries of America’s legal culture, something that (as Wang notes) seemed noteworthy even to de Tocqueville. And as a result, we know that Wang’s causes (the regulatory responses to the efforts of individuals such as Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, and those they inspired) simply cannot be the actual cause of the “lawyerly society” Wang describes.

I happen to think I can tell you what that cause is, as can anyone who’s familiar with either Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Frontier in American History or Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire. It’s pretty straightforward. America is in large part defined by its series of new frontiers, and by the series of new resources generated by that ever-recurring expansion. The frontier is fundamentally the meeting-place between a place with established laws and a place without them–and it is therefore a place where the laws are fundamentally up for a bit of debate, or negotiation. From the 15th century onwards, the New World has in one or more ways been continually the subject of legal grey areas: is this land Spain’s to exploit, or Portugal’s? (No need to worry about the people who already live there, of course.) Which company will the king charter to operate in the colony? Who is authorized for trade?

And the establishment of a new nation in North America is an example of this trend (let’s start a new country out of all these states! let’s have some continental congresses to decide how it runs, shall we?), not a counterexample. A new constitution is set up–but a constitution on the edge of what its people regard as a frontier. And so the treaties that the US signs with various native tribes nations are, of course, always provisional in a legal sense–always up for renegotiating or simply ignoring, when convenient. There are no real penalties for breaking agreements at the frontier.

The nation’s physical frontier admittedly closed a little later than Turner was able to realize, as can be attested to by residents of Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, for a long time the Philippines, et al. But by that time, the US was well on its way to capitalizing on technological frontiers. After all, agreements not to use nuclear weapons can’t be expected to precede the existence–or deployment–of actual nuclear weapons…can they? So in a similar fashion to nuclear technology, laws and agreements for governing the use of new technology has lagged behind the actual development and use of new technology, right up through the history of computers. Even today, we are still figuring out what laws make sense where various forms of artificial intelligence, including social media and LLM’s, are concerned.

And this, I submit, is not generally because human beings just aren’t smart enough to figure out the ways that existing laws would apply to new territories or new technologies. It is in fact because Americans are smart enough to see the opportunities for creative interpretation or amendment of existing legal frameworks, that we are able to set aside the legal norms we already have in favor of developing new ones specific to a new domain. The FDA was not established (in 1906! C’mon, Wang! where is the Progressive Era in your book?) because everyone in the stockyards suddenly forgot whether or not it was appropriate to sell diseased meat; they exist because the development of railroads & refrigeration enabled the meatpacking czars to profit from selling diseased meat at a hitherto undreamt-of scale. Similarly, when today’s chatbot founders have the opportunity to increase profits by providing mental health services, they’re only interested in doing so as long as the existing responsibilities of actual mental health clinicians don’t apply. I don’t think it’s a very challenging moral ambiguity as to whether one can train an LLM on someone else’s creative work without that person’s explicit permission. The protracted cover-ups of the missteps in the chemical revolution also violated pre-existing norms. What was lacking during the several decades 3M continued to manufacture PFAS after discovering that it was extremely harmful and steadily accumulating in human beings was not actually the EPA’s rather recent “4 ppt” guidelines for PFAS in drinking water. What was lacking was a conscience, and the willingness to apply existing rules about poison to new chemicals.

I’ll cut the diatribe off there, I suppose, because this book review is too long, and I want the reader to understand that my frustration is not mere historian’s pedantry. My grumpiness about Wang’s fundamental misunderstanding of the frontier’s role in America’s lawyerly society results from the fact that his book is a call to action. He presents a parallel problem with twin solutions: China could do with more lawyers (or with placing a higher value on the law, anyway), and the US could do with more engineers (or the same, valuing engineers more highly). It’s true that engineering is a kind of power to remake the world, and that those who are properly equipped can do something apparently similar with the law. But despite his stated sympathies with the ways that “lawyers are servants of the rich”, Wang doesn’t really have any idea how and why that is sometimes so much the case in the US.

If Breakneck were to live up to its promise, Wang would have needed to explore the gap between a lawyerly society and a law-abiding society. Because being a lawyerly society has obviously not transformed the US into a society that is particularly good at sticking to its laws, when a new physical or technological frontier appears on the horizon. In the last few decades of globalization, we have become experts at evading our own trade, labor, & environment laws by simply outsourcing that labor & manufacturing to countries where it’s easier to abuse one’s workforce or one’s environment. This is blatantly immoral. It is an astonishingly creative interpretation of US laws to simply pay Foxconn to treat their workers like animals or machines.

Ultimately, I agree with Wang, that the US should rely much less on Chinese manufacturing. But bringing manufacturing back to the US is going to be a brutal project. The American workforce is, I suspect, mostly not going to be willing to work under the same conditions as the average worker in Shenzhen–nor is it feasible to pay Americans at Shenzhen rates. Reimagining manufacturing as a safe and humane industry will require vast wisdom and insight, not just a new supply of the process knowledge that has rusted in America. It will require vast numbers of Americans to possess and exercise a conscience. It will also probably require vast sums of money. No one is going to make a really good fortune off of disentangling American supply chains from China under humane working conditions. And meanwhile, what are we going to do about Americans whose monthly budgets are counting on Wal-Mart and Dollar General prices, if Wal-Mart and Dollar General prices go away?

Someone could write a really good and useful book about what it would look like for American manufacturing industries (to say nothing of, say, American agriculture) to disentangle themselves from the Southeast Asian sweatshops, the Chinese factories, etc on which they rely, and to humanely increase the US’s manufacturing capabilities. That would be a wonderful call-to-action book to be able to read.

The book that Wang has actually written still offers excellent look at the way the Chinese government turns its people into numbers, for the purposes of trying to engineer an ever-better society. It has serious limitations as a book for thinking about America’s future, however, because of its limited comprehension of America’s past. American laws proliferate because Americans have always left room for a few lucky folks to strike it rich by creatively ignoring the laws we already have. If Wang’s prescription is applied to US engineering without an accompanying change in the American conscience in respect to the frontier, we can confidently predict that such a libertarian impulse will simply facilitate the same kinds of exploitation to which we have grown accustomed.

How to fix the American conscience is an even more difficult project than how to revive American manufacturing. Absent a conscience, of course, the easiest route to reviving manufacturing is super easy, barely an inconvenience: you just create wartime conditions that a significant portion of the population is on board with. Indeed, since chatter about the antichrist flutters around the tech world these days, it is worth noting that war offers precisely the right theater for the contradictions of the one opposed to Christ. War exists in the place where social norms and laws–alliances, kinship groups, governments, justifications–crash like waves into the lawlessness of cruelty, destruction, and death. And while you may not hear much about it from billionaire libertarians (who have profited enormously from the aforementioned American attitude towards legality at the technological frontier, as it happens), the anti-Christ is not only the specter of an all-encompassing government that feigns to offer the unity of Christ’s church. In 2 Thessalonians, in fact, the source for the figure of the restrainer (τὸ κατέχον), Paul refers to the one opposed to Christ as a man of lawlessness. Which is a less useful picture of the Antichrist for a libertarian billionaire, perhaps, than the leader of a totalitarian one-world government, but quite useful for the person who wishes to understand the tenuous role of legality whenever Americans find a new frontier.

From the Christian perspective, the negative vision of the Antichrist–able to enact and manipulate laws, yet himself lawless–is of course not the option. The Christian prescription is a positive one: the American conscience, particularly at geographic or technological frontiers, needs Jesus Christ. While that prescription is simple to name, of course, it is not so simple to accurately describe. To meditate on the nature of law in the Bible is as rewarding as the psalmist states, but it is not so simple to state in a few words the relationship between fickle, flourishing humanity and the graven tablets of the law. The positive vision of the law has its origin and its fulfillment in Jesus Christ, and to contemplate law in the eternity of Christ is to know what one needs to do. It is also to know what there is in the good that is not so precisely captured by the law.

That call to action is not very likely be received by Tyler Cowen quite as rapturously as was Breakneck (“The best recent book on China, on China and America, and, arguably, the best book of the year flat out.") It does, however, offer the hope that America’s future might be something other–something better–than America’s past and present. And I agree wholeheartedly with Wang that change is needed. May we find true wisdom as we consider what that change might look like.

A standout from https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ai-economics-for-dummies on the the new frontier for creative bookkeeping. As with all the previous frontiers for creative bookkeeping, we shall no doubt one day look back on such innovative thinking with admiration, joy, and gratitude.

Not that it was the main point of Terry Goodier’s “The Boring Internet”, but shout out to the 7 Inch Soul station at SomaFM for tonight’s dance-around-the-kitchen groove

🍿 Catching up on a few of the Oscar nominees recently: Frankenstein Song Sung Blue Blue Moon Sinners

Οἴονταί τινες, βασιλεῦ Γέλων, τοῦ ψάμμου τὸν ἀριθμὸν ἄπειρον εἶμεν τῷ πλήθει…. Ἐντί τινες δέ, οἳ αὐτὸν ἄπειρον μὲν εἶμεν οὐχ ὑπολαμβάνοντι, μηδένα μέντοι ταλικοῦτον κατωνομασμένον ὑπάρχειν ἀριθμόν, ὅστις ὑπερβάλλει τὸ πλῆθος αὐτοῦ–Archimedes' Arenarius, tr. Mendell: “Some people believe, King Gelon, that the number of sand is infinite in multitude….There are some who do not suppose that it is infinite, and yet that there is no number that has been named which is so large as to exceed its multitude.”