English
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500 or fewer words, not 1000
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roughly in order
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that are key for communicating basic concepts
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with an early emphasis on key verbs à la the Quaint Quinque, Elite Octō or Sweet Sēdecim
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that are good for telling short/simple stories (fewer “here are a bunch of animal names/body parts”, unless those nouns are used to dramatic effect in a story)
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perhaps even with a focus on the vocabulary of some highly-accessible and culturally important authentic text.
- ἆρα πάντα τὰ πρόσωπα ἄνθρωποι (ἢ ἡμίθεοι, κένταυροι, νύμφαι, καὶ τὰ λοιπά…) (are they all human, or demigods, centaurs, nymphs, etc?)
- ἆρα τὰ πρόσωπα κρείσσονα τῶν ἀνθρώπων; (are the characters stronger than human beings?)
- ἆρα τὰ πρόσωπα Ἑλληνικὰ ἢ ξενικά; (are the characters Greek or foreigners?)
- ἆρα τὰ πρόσωπα βασιλεῖς ἢ δοῦλοι; (are the characters kings or slaves?)
- ἆρα οἱ θεοί εἰσιν ἀληθεῖς; (are the gods real [in the story]?)
- ἆρα οἱ θεοί εἰσιν ἐγγὺς τῶν ἀνθρώπων, ἢ πόρρω; (are the gods near or far from human beings?)
- ἆρα οἱ θεοί εἰσιν Ἑλληνικοὶ ἢ ξενικοί; (are the gods Greek or foreign?)
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βούλομαι [Herm.]
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ποῖος [Moira/TPR]
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ὁ μῦθος [Kat.]
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τὸ πρόσωπον [LGPSI 3]
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κρείσσων [Moira]
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βασιλεύς [Herm.]
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ξενικός [Moira]
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θεός [Herm., Kat.]
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ἀληθής [LGPSI 5, Kat.]
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ἐγγύς [LGPSI 6]
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πόρρω [LGPSI 6, Kat.]
- ἐν Ἑλλάδι ἢ πόρρω/ἔξω Ἑλλάδος;
- …ἐν μακροῖς τόποις ἢ μῑκροῖς; (large or small)
- …ἐν πόλει ἢ τοῖς ἀγροῖς; (city or countryside)
- …ἐν πόλεσι πολλαὶς ἢ μιᾷ πόλει; (lots of cities or one city)
- …ἐν νήσοις ἢ ὕλαις ἢ ὄρη ἢ σπηλαίοις; (islands, forests, mountains, caves?)
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πότε…; [Kat.]
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γίγνομαι [Herm., Kat.]
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ἡμέτερος [Kat.]
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ἐν (if not earlier)
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αἰῶν [Moira]
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ἔξω (?) [LGPSI 5]
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ὁ τόπος [LGPSI 1, Kat.]
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ὁ ἀγρός [LGPSI 5]
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ἡ ὕ-λη [Moira]
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τὸ ὄρος [Herm.]
- I'm making the first element of the character into what Fate calls the 'high concept' Aspect, the thing that most succinctly expresses the core of who that character is. Hercules' high concept Aspect, for example, might be 'mighty son of Zeus'. Odysseus' could be 'clever protege of Athena', or perhaps 'wily king of Ithaca'--whichever you think is more central to his identity. Atalanta could be 'speedy huntress raised by bears'. Is Medea's identity better captured by 'magic-wielding princess of Colchis', or 'Helios' witchy granddaughter'? Discuss! Students should have been thinking about who their characters would be since the last class, when a time & place were decided.
- Fate refers to the second Aspect as a character's 'trouble'; it has some (though not complete) overlap with ἁμαρτίᾱ. It should be the Aspect of your character that nearly always gets you into, well, trouble. Is Hercules' trouble that Hera hates him, or is it that he has a short temper? Is Medea's trouble that she likes Jason? A trouble could be a character flaw, a weakness, an enemy/rival…you name it. Every character gets one.
- Or in English, what's a recent adventure your character has been on? What was their last incident/escapade? Hopefully players figure out something more about their characters' personality as they decide this Aspect. Given how condensed campaigns will have to be to fit into the classroom, a GM might want to draw on this Aspect in some characters when laying out the plot.
- Or in English, how do you know one of the other characters? Could be a relative, enemy, ξένος, rival, coworker, student of the same teacher, former neighbour, whatever. You could assign which characters have to have a connection, or you can let students choose. Again, this Aspect should clarify who characters are and give GMs something to work with in their storytelling.
- Yep, just repeat step 4: how does your character know someone else in the group? Same rules apply as above.
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ὑ-μεῖς [LGPSI 5, Kat.]
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ἡμεῖς [Herm., Kat.]
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τὸ στοιχεῖον [Moira]
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τὸ τόλμημα [Moira]
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οἶδα, οἶσθα, οἶδε [LGPSI 4, Kat.]
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ἀναγκάζω/παρέχω (???) [Moira]
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ἐπικλέω [Moira]
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δέχομαι [Moira]
A useful metaphor from John Scalzi: Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity
Currently reading: After Babel by George Steiner 📚
Language–and this is one of the crucial propositions in certain schools of modern semantics–is the most salient model of Heraclitean flux. It alters at every moment in perceived time. The sum of linguistic events is not only increased but qualified by each new event. If they occur in temporal sequence, no two statements are perfectly identical. Though homologous, they interact. When we think about language, the object of our reflection alters in the process (thus specialized or metalanguages may have considerable influence on the vulgate). In short: so far as we experience and “realize” them in linear progression, time and language are intimately related: they move and the arrow is never in the same place.
Finished reading: Ancient Greek Alive by Paula Saffire 📚
LibreOffice Writer estimates about 15,000 words of Greek text, counting the scripts at the beginning, the folk tales, the poetry, and the thesauros at the end of the book. The texts more or less all met my bar for “compelling input”, i.e., if I had encountered them in my native language, I would have found them acceptable to read. And as I mentioned in a previous post, I admire the authors' decision (borrowing a contemporary slogan) to “shelter vocabulary, not grammar”–or at least, not so severely that the results are unrecognizable as Greek. The Greek sections add up to a nice reader for students who are looking for more comprehensible input. Admittedly, it would be difficult to justify the purchase ($50 for a new paperback from UNC Press!) for a 15,000-word mix of a handful of culturally significant authentic snippets and some charming easy Greek folk tales. The best bet for the student working their way up to more fluent reading is to do what I did: check it out of the nearest university library.
Altogether, I consider the grammar/vocabulary sequence of Ancient Greek Alive as the best existing textbook for a Medulla-style curriculum in Ancient Greek. That said, the Greek text is (in my opinion) no more than a tenth of what a first-year student should be offered as reading material. If anyone is thinking of writing novice Greek texts, I would encourage them to take a look at AGA and consider trying to work with this textbook’s core vocabulary. It will probably suit you better for storytelling than any equivalently-sized textbook vocabulary list on the market.
I mentioned a few downsides in prior posts about the book. One that didn’t come up is the quality of the copy-editing in the third edition. My impression, from poking around online, is that the numerous errors in the book (mostly Greek accent typos, but with an eye-catching tangle in the English-language background section “The Personal Muse”, pp.152-3) are a feature limited to this latest edition. While I am dreaming of a world in which Ancient Greek is taught through acts of meaningful communication, I shall also express the hope that renewed interest in this textbook might result in UNC Press bringing out a more tightly edited fourth edition.
...Actually, I understand why so few teachers use Ancient Greek Alive
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.
Have we all been sleeping on Ancient Greek Alive?
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.
OK, but _why_ is the US a lawyerly society, and what does that mean?
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 an 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 only 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
Legentibus: A Review
Thus begins the second of the lengthy reviews which I promised last week without asking whether anyone wanted to read them. This will perhaps be a slightly shorter review, because it is easy to say: yes, I recommend this resource. Four and a half stars: room of room for improvement, and yet still far and away the most effective Latin resource that I have ever used.
What makes Legentibus so great? The answer is pretty simple: it’s usable. I was able to use it. I kept using it. Between the Legentibus Beginner Immersion Course and the handful of additional beginner texts outside the course, I managed to read 101,457 words (~36 hours) in slightly less than four months. That is easily the most Latin I have read since undergrad. I think I read a little more than that during my three semesters of Latin literature in undergrad–I’m pretty sure–I’m sure I was supposed to–but possibly not very much more. I emphatically confess that I did not read that Latin well; it would be more accurate to say that I Loeb’d it than read it. Alas for the G-T experience. Someday I’m going to go back and read a bunch of that stuff for real.
For now, though, I’m just going to keep reading Legentibus (or I will, after I knock out the two CLC books that I own but have never read). I’m going to see if I can make it through all the intermediate books/courses (easier with the app to estimate the total time than the wordcount, ~25 hours) by the beginning of summer. Getting through the advanced books by autumn is probably a little ambitious, but maybe I can get somewhat close.
Because it is so unusual, please allow me to underscore for the reader that I am actually confident that I will keep reading on Legentibus. The readings get harder, sure, but they also get more rewarding. I’ve been meaning to read Pugio Bruti for years; I’m now at the point where I can read it comfortably. An r/latin comment led me to glance at the beginning of Imitatio Christi; I plan to hold off on it until the vocabulary is more comfortable, but it’s not unreadable now. This is pretty exciting, to have Latin texts that I want to read within my grasp or very near to it. It is also pretty exciting to have finally finished reading Familia Rōmāna for the very first time. I have never had this kind of confidence in my own Latin reading ability before, in my entire life. I have never had so much confidence that I am actually going to keep reading Latin.
A few high points from Legentibus: the stories written by the Legentibus team are all good, and some of them are outstanding. For its length, Auda is easily the best and most rereadable narrative that I’ve ever seen for a beginning Latin student. At some point I will probably return to Victor Frans' Stories in easy Latin, Daniel Pettersson’s Fabulae Faciles, and Auda, to see what I can learn about writing compelling stories with sheltered vocabulary. The public domain stories narrated were not all equally compelling–some of them, such as Reynolds' De Stellis et Tellure, were downright dull–but the Latīnitās seemed in my view to be satisfactory, so I just sighed and read them anyway.
Another high point was the narration. I don’t often go in for English audiobooks, because it’s just too hard for me to pay attention to them. Audiobooks typically turn into this tedious endless cycle of realizing that I zoned out, then skipping back thirty seconds, then zoning out again before I’ve hit the sentences I missed, and so on. It’s just not very fun, as a way to experience a book. (I do the same thing when I’m reading a physical book, for what it’s worth, but it’s much easier to navigate going back to reread a paragraph or two, than it is to recapture whatever you missed of an audiobook. Or a conversation, for that matter!)
But the narration (mostly by Pettersson, but also Frans, Amelie Rosengren, Marina Garanin, and Diane Warne Anderson) increased my enjoyment of the story more than I expected. It’s hard for me to decide whether the narration was most impactful when it was particularly excellent per se (such as Pettersson’s on Auda, when his by-now extensive experience is applied to an obvious labor of love), or when the story was just a little bit weak (here I think not only of Pettersson on FR, but also of Garanin on Chickering & Hoadley’s somewhat uneven Beginners' Latin Stories). It is admittedly possible to guess whether Pettersson recorded a story earlier or later in the process, based on the amount of elision and confidence/skill in his Latin reading. In some ways that was encouraging to see, that we can all continue growing in our abilities, and that one does not have to be perfect to start doing worthwhile things.
The narration was also very good for me…because I tend to avoid listening to Latin. I know that I ought to be listening to lots of Latin and not just reading it, but I don’t really like the process very much at all: too overwhelming, too many words I don’t remember or don’t understand in the moment, either so slow and simple that it’s boring or so fast and complicated that I feel hopeless. So far, I have yet to listen to a Latin story on the app without following along with the text. I think however that at some point in the next few months I will give it a shot, with one of the easy stories I have already read and liked the most.
Another positive point: the illustrations. Illustrations can and should be an important part of the reader’s experience of a book, just like the narrator. I have encountered a fair number of ancient language books whose illustrations I don’t particularly care for, stylistically, though I don’t know enough about art to know whether my tastes are “right” or “wrong”, or whether I’m missing hidden virtues in certain books' artwork. I will not mention which books those are, since I nevertheless admire very much that people are still paying illustrators for books that are never going to make a lot of money; there are far too many people just using AI art in their Latin & Greek books. Amelie Rosengren’s drawings are however illustrations that I enjoy looking at. Presumably the reason the original Ørberg illustrations aren’t used for FR involves copyright law and licensing, but I prefer Rosengren’s anyway. (I also happen to prefer inset illustrations to marginal ones, at least in a language-learning context.) There are not really as many illustrations as there would ideally be for beginners, but references have been made to increasing their number. In the meantime, I appreciate that the existing Legentibus artwork has stylistic coherence and charm.
Finally, being able to look up words with two taps on my Kindle (which I still do fairly often) is probably a functionality I could learn to implement with a different Latin app. However, it is nice for a Luddite like me not to have to worry about something like that.
If I like Legentibus so much, why is this not a five-star review?
There are still some items that the team can continue to improve. First of all, and most important–I would be very interested in hearing how well the app has worked for a true Latin beginner, and not just for someone who only ever really learned how to decipher (and that a long time ago). I suspect that it would be a very difficult process, the success of which depends mainly on the student’s inherent linguistic abilities and/or their ability to tolerate delayed gratification. I think, for example, that it would have been extraordinarily difficult–maybe not possible–for me to have learned Latin from scratch using Legentibus. Okay, probably not impossible. But making Legentibus work for a beginner means repeating the readings pretty often; for a good student with a large L1 vocabulary full of helpful cognates, I’m guessing 3-4 repetitions of each text. I would not be surprised if a large number of beginners needed more on the order of 6-7 repetitions of each text to get really comfortable with their grammatical features and their vocabulary. That amount of required rereading is not a small order of difficulty for a student, I think–it is exactly what I have never been able to do with Familia Rōmāna–and it is the area in which I think Legentibus has the most room for improvement.
Again, please reach out if you think I’m wrong! If you learned Latin from scratch with Legentibus and you weren’t tired of the beginner immersion course long before it ended, I’d love to hear about your process. If you are struggling and you’re looking for more free beginner reading material, check out the level 1 difficulty stories on Fabulae Faciles, the Fabellae Latīnae, and/or the early volumes in the Cambridge Latin Course.
I do think they’re a little bit hamstrung by having chosen FR as the core text for the beginner course. When one of their authors sits down to write or adapt a new story, I assume they start with a list of the vocabulary used up to that point in the beginner course and/or FR. Unfortunately, the sequencing of vocabulary is not one of FR’s selling points. Discounting the grammatical vocabulary–since the “Grammatica Latīna” sections are heavily de-emphasized by the app and the pēnsa don’t appear–it is still normal to see about 35 new words per chapter and not unknown to see 88. (Yes, 88 new words in a single chapter! That’s capitulum XXXIV, so it’s not as though you’re going to see them again in this book.) It is simply not a terribly well-chosen list for beginners. My dream is that someday Carla Hurt & co. would come up with a Medulla list of, say:
Those are the basic goals of my Ancient Greek 101 list, which I pulled from when drafting my own introductory graded reader. The goal was to work from the vocabulary of three different beginner-ish texts to create a graded reader with a particular focus on the vocabulary of the Gospel of John. The draft is stalled out at around 6,000 words while I finish my PhD (and while Seumas Macdonald revises his LGPSI), but someday I hope very much to return to an improved version of that 101 list and my Εἰσαγωγή.
And until someone comes up with a much better Medulla list (which, pace Hurt, is in my opinion going to require ditching a commitment to any particular textbook–they’re just not that compatible in terms of vocabulary), the Legentibus team will presumably keep trying to come up with a sufficient volume of compelling content that sticks roughly to the vocabulary sequence of FR. I wonder very much how that awkward FR list is going to shape future chapters of Auda, which introduces new vocabulary at a perfectly acceptable rate and is (again) the most compelling beginner Latin text I’ve ever read. Will the Legentibus team ever shift the centre of vocabulary towards Auda, rather than continuing to try and fit new texts in with the FR sequence? I hope they consider it. If I was ever trying to work on a Medulla list, I would absolutely make Auda one of my core Latin 101 texts.
In terms of the interface: my UX is not 100% flawless. I don’t know if this is because I am running the app on a Kindle Fire (which required sideloading the Google Play store), or because the app actually has a bug that makes the navigation quite laggy. However, the convenience and comfort of having Legentibus on an e-reader are far too great for me to ever complain very much about eg slow loading, or the fact that your total number of words read won’t show up until you’ve exited and restarted the app. I have seen the odd complaint about the Latin dictionaries the app uses; I don’t know that they’re great, but they haven’t bothered me at my current level. I mention these things mainly so that the user will not be surprised or disappointed if the app doesn’t run flawlessly. I can’t speak to the desktop versions until there’s one for Linux :)
To reiterate in conclusion: as a remedial student, subscribing to Legentibus is the single best decision I’ve ever made for my Latin, and I’m pleased to be supporting Pettersson’s continued excellent work on Auda and other easy Latin stories. I still think this is a very steep curve for true beginners, but unlike with other introductions to Latin, not an impossible one. If you’re willing to reread/re-listen to texts a few times, then this app can get you from square one to reading real Latin pretty comfortably.
I’ll try and post another review once I finish the intermediate texts in the app. In the meantime, fēlīciter legātis!
Ørberg's Familia Rōmāna and its discontents
As promised, here are some thoughts (this time in English!) about volume I, Familia Rōmāna, of Hans Ørberg’s famous Lingua Latīna Per Sē Illūstrata. FR is an astonishingly ambitious attempt at three very different goals.
Ørberg’s aims in FR
First, more thoroughly than any Latin textbook I know of, FR aims to gradually teach not only Latin vocabulary but also Latin morphology and syntax, both implicitly and explicitly in Latin. Thus, a given feature of the language (i.e., imperfect indicative) is not presented at all until chapter 19, which contains something like 90 instances of imperfect verbs (active, passive, esse, in various persons and numbers) contrasted with the familiar present tense forms; then, in the “Grammatica Latīna” section of ch.19, we read in Latin about “Verbī tempora, praesēns et praeteritum”. Finally, the three pēnsa at the end of the chapter allow the reader to practice producing correct Latin in three different ways: two short paragraphs of an inflectional cloze exercise, two paragraphs of a cloze exercise focused on the new vocabulary in the chapter, and a number of short comprehension check questions (e.g., “Cūr Aemilia Iūlium nōn amābat?").
Second, the actual narrative content of FR has some vaguely didactic intention of immersing readers in the world of imperial Rome. In this respect, reading FR is a profoundly conventional experience, familiar to readers of many other introductory Greek & Latin readers. This book follows some of the doings of the wealthy couple Iulius and Aemilia, their three young children, Aemilia’s brother in Germania, and a handful of their slaves & tenants over the course of a few days. Theoretically, the reader learns some things from FR about the “typical lives” of classical Latin speakers.
Third, as a fictional narrative, FR is intended (one ought to infer) as a form of entertainment. The characters in the book kiss, tease, run away, fight, break bones, moralize, flee (presumed) pirates, write letters, drink, recite poetry and myths, and more. We are, I presume, supposed to be emotionally engaged in this: nōnne estis oblectātī?
As I said: remarkably ambitious. Without further dithering, I offer my assessment of whether or not the whole thing really works…for me, no. Not really.
What I think is most successful in FR is the morphosyntactic instruction. At about 36,000 words long, this volume alone is not a remotely large enough quantity of input to absorb all of the Latin grammar presented–especially not the features presented late in the book–but it’s not a bad start. Many of the grammar introductions are quite well done. Are they good enough for self-teaching without L1 explanations? Eh, maybe, if this isn’t really your first exposure to Latin, or if you already know a very similar language. (The grammatical explanations are useless if you don’t know corresponding cognates in some other language.) And if you’ve got a knack for picking up grammar quickly. If none of those things are true for a student, then they’re going to need other resources just to understand what’s up with the Latin grammar.
But then again, that’s going to be true for even the most talented analysts of foreign languages picking up this book as a Latin introduction, for one simple reason: vocabulary. The idea that beginning Latin students can acquire more than 1,700 Latin words from a 36,000-word text is, quite frankly, not sane. Even if you add in all of the accompanying materials (of which I accessed only Colloquia Persōnārum), you’re still trying to learn some 2,400 Latin words from an 87,000-word narrative. This is still much less than a tenth of the input most students need to acquire more than 2,000 words of a foreign language from reading.
There is of course a classic remedy suggested by FR devotees: just read it again! Read it all ten times, or twenty, or however long it takes you to internalize everything!
And my problem with the remedy is that, to be quite honest, I didn’t really like reading Familia Rōmāna once.
I have owned a copy of FR since my first year of graduate school, which began in 2018. I have even taught a few of the early chapters of FR, back in my middle school Latin teacher days. I, with my two and a half degrees in Classics, who have read (well, translated, anyway) Vergil and Cicero and Caesar and Plautus, have been trying to read this book for almost a decade. I have started it many times over the years, and I have started it many ways. Read it and do the pēnsa. Read it and skip the pēnsa. Read every chapter three times. Read it, always starting from the beginning and seeing how far you can comfortably get, then doing the same thing again the next day. Read it and copy out the text by hand. Read it and type out the text. Read the book out loud. Listen to audio recordings of the book.
None of that worked. The only thing that actually worked for me was to pick up a Black Friday subscription to Legentibus, and to make my laborious way through FR interspersed with things I actually did more or less enjoy reading. In conclusion, the key to reading Ørberg was to read many more things that aren’t Ørberg.
Why is this text so unsuccessful?
I carped a lot about the difficulty of the vocabulary in FR, but that’s not the real reason this particular book is so difficult to implement as an introduction to Latin. I haven’t yet done any analysis of ways vocabulary is introduced in the other Legentibus stories (how many new words on average in a chapter/section of equivalent size, for example; how often are those new words repeated within their first story; how much are they repeated in later stories), but I am not convinced that it’s very different from FR. My unscientific impression of the Legentibus beginner stories (by Daniel Pettersson, Amelie Rosengrin, Victor Frans, et al.) is that the truly new reader of Latin will still find the vocabulary experience to be too much like a firehose. I don’t love that texts still need to be reread (if I had to guess) something like four or five times for a genuine beginner to really get a good grip on the vocabulary.
But these texts are at least able to be reread, because they are–get this–communicating something. When I read them, I get something out of them. Most of them are narratives rather than pure descriptions; many of them are only slightly familiar to me or even new (hello, Gesta Danorum!). The content of the Latin always meets at least one of the implicit goals of FR’s content, i.e., either to teach something about the world of Latin speakers, or to entertain. And not a single one of those texts completely fails on the grounds of both information and entertainment.
The actual semantic content of FR, on the other hand, quite often fails to either instruct or to entertain. Is it too harsh to say that it usually achieves neither? Maybe it is a little harsh. Maybe it is also true. There are just not going to be a lot of readers who are so totally ignorant of Roman society that they actually learn something about it from reading this book. They’re not going to learn that slavery existed in the Roman empire, because they already knew that–and a few of the things they pick up about slavery from FR are going to be more or less inaccurate. They’re not going to learn how the human body works (ch. 11), because they already know that “humans see with their eyes and hear with their ears”. They know that “sheep eat grass”, and that “grass is found in a field” (ch. 9). They probably don’t know how the Roman calendar worked (ch. 13) or that per Donatus both adjectives and nouns are categorized as nōmina and participia count as their own species within the Romans' deceptively equivalent eight principle parts of speech (ch. 35)…but I hear that most students dislike those chapters and are therefore unlikely to read them again for the pure joy of knowledge presented without any charm, humanity, or life to distract them. Personally, I would rather put up with the ides & nones than have to read (in a language I don’t understand, and with negligibly more charm, humanity, or life to distract me) that shepherds eat bread and sheep eat grass.
It’s odd to me that FR is so remarkably deficient in both interest and charm, because Ørberg is demonstrably capable of accomplishing both, sometimes even at the same time. I absolutely prefer the faithless lovers leaping out of windows in CP to Aemilia talking about how beautiful her peristylum is (a passage that provoked one of my first notes in Latin about FR, in which I noted the similarity to Daisy weeping over Gatsby’s shirts–not a positive reflection on the text). The high point of the effort for me is Diodorus’s conversation in the taverna about De Rerum Natura while (unbeknownst to him) his house burns down. Great success! We have here a story that engages the beginning Latin student with actual Roman philosophy & literature in a meaningful conversation between believable characters, while a compelling drama is playing out. Why didn’t Ørberg do more of that in FR, and less of Iulius being “severe but not inhumane”?–also not a characterization, by the way, which I found easy to assent to.
To sum up, Ørberg only demonstrates the capacity for dark humor. He’s at his best with the tragedy and the peril (such as Aemilius’s letter recounting the recent battle and the death of his friend, ch.33). The fight between the schoolboys Ørberg pulls off, because he doesn’t really try to pretend that this is anything other than a wretched little affair of the type that children struggle not to periodically inflict on themselves and on those around them. He doesn’t ask us to pretend that Marcus isn’t acting like a little monster. The most aggravating parts of the book are the scenes which the author suggests we should interpret as comic, where we’re supposed to be unbothered by brutality, injustice, and manipulation. Ørberg would have been much more successful as a storyteller, I think, if he had been willing to tell more stories that left the reader sad, disturbed, or uncomfortable. I don’t know whether he just doesn’t have the knack for telling stories about noble humans, or whether it’s that the day-to-day lives of the Roman elite and their dependents are simply too difficult to spin that way.
What we should take away from FR: Quidnam commūnicāmus?
Grammar-translation aficionados aren’t going to be reading a review of FR, so here I address only teachers who share some of my pedagogical principles. Those of us who follow some kind of “communicative approach” have a question we should always, always, always be able to answer about our usage of Latin: what exactly are we communicating here? In FR, Ørberg is mostly not attempting to communicate anything, except how Latin works. Much of Familia Rōmāna isn’t really a story or a lesson at all; it’s just a story-shaped veil thrown over an extended example of how Latin could hypothetically work. The basic element of disingenuity there is, to me, essentially off-putting. I don’t want to read something that the author and I are both trying to pretend is a story, when in fact it is not a story at all. I don’t want to pretend that Ørberg is teaching me how eyes work, when in fact he has nothing to communicate with me except (again) how Latin works. For all that FR appears to be indispensable to communicative Latin teachers, it will always be a fundamentally frustrating tool for that purpose. What does Ørberg communicate to the reader, most of the time? An empty, language-covered box in which meaning is supposed to be found–but isn’t.
So for those who are trying to write “an LLPSI for language X”, I offer this rule of thumb. If you’re writing something that your students would legitimately never read if it weren’t in the target language–a text that is fundamentally empty of communicative purpose, and therefore also devoid of communicative value–don’t. If your text doesn’t offer something intrinsic to students–some fact, some engagement, some characters with the freedom to display a spark of real humanity, some real charm in the manner of telling–stop there. You are capable of offering students more than a simulacrum of a story. If you want students to invest emotionally, then entertain. If you want to tell them something, then tell them something they might not already know. And if you are going to offer information that only a Martian wouldn’t already possess, then for goodness' sake, write a frame narrative about first contact and commit to it, if you are going to ask a human being to spend time with your text. If you can’t imagine a context in which your readers might actually be pleased to receive your content, your so-called communicative approach is going to fail.
And when it comes to your rate of new vocabulary, do consider chopping Ørberg’s rate down by three-fourths. As Mr Ma teaches us, when it comes to intractable problems, Coupez la difficulté en quatre.
Conclusion: FR’s best use case
For my money, the most effective use to which FR can be put is not in trying to teach students how to read Latin, but in teaching them how to write it. This book is very far from being the worst way to learn how to write simple Latin correctly. It’s not the best way, either, because the best way involves an extremely well-read teacher who can identify what’s un-Latinish about your Latin and tell you how to fix it–preferably with lots of examples from authentic texts. But I think the cloze & short-answer exercises in the book are a basically effective method of allowing students to practice writing Latin with more or less ease and confidence. If you have a teacher, or if you don’t mind making thousands of mistakes, or if you love nothing more than spending hours with a dictionary and Logeion, well, great. But if you want to practice writing simple okay-ish Latin and there’s no one to teach you, then I would emphatically recommend a copy of FR over a book that gives you a lot of L1 sentences and asks you to translate them into Latin. Translation is a different skill from composition, although it does depend on the ability to compose. The way that elegant translation works is so non-mechanical that a book alone can’t really teach you to do it well from scratch. Either you start with some very odd-sounding English that was written for the purpose of being translated into Latin, or you translate into some very bad Latin indeed; in neither case is an answer key going to be of enough help.
So if you’ve been reading Latin for a year or two and you just want to get a bit of practice in producing the language correctly, FR is the first tool I’d recommend. Ørberg remains an eminent Latinist, although in this particular volume he doesn’t really have anything to say. Get a copy of FR, work through the pēnsa, write down your thoughts about the capitula and the colloquia and so on…and then one day you can try to write something that is actually worth reading.
the existence & the naming of the infinite
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.”
A nice chapter epigraph?
τὰ δʼ ὑπεναντίως εἰρημένα οὕτω σκοπεῖν ὥσπερ οἱ ἐν τοῖς λόγοις ἔλεγχοι εἰ τὸ αὐτὸ καὶ πρὸς τὸ αὐτὸ καὶ ὡσαύτως, ὥστε καὶ αὐτὸν ἢ πρὸς ἃ αὐτὸς λέγει ἢ ὃ ἂν φρόνιμος ὑποθῆται–Aristotle, Poetics 1461b16-18, tr. Butcher: “Things that sound contradictory should be examined by the same rules as in dialectical refutation whether the same thing is meant, in the same relation, and in the same sense. We should therefore solve the question by reference to what the poet says himself, or to what is tacitly assumed by a person of intelligence.”
Why write bad Latin?
Anyone who is capable of reading the Latin on this blog will be able to make the same observation of its quality: it is not very good Latin. Apart from a few outright errors, the Latinitas is so low, that reading it is largely a waste of time for those learning Latin. Readers will therefore be relieved to hear that I am not writing in Latin for the sake of producing material for Latin students to read.
Instead, the purpose of the previous Latin post, as with the similar short journal entries I have been writing privately for a couple of weeks, is to have a way of roughly assessing how the attempted revival of my Latin skills is going. Since taking advantage of the most recent Legentibus Black Friday deal, I’ve read slightly less than 70,000 words of Latin on the app. This is obviously not an enormous amount of Latin, in the scale of language learning. For me, however, that number is an enormous success–I don’t think I’ve read that much Latin in a similar time frame since undergrad. This has been just barely enough material for me to notice, one day in January, that I really had become a little more comfortable reading Latin.
That’s one of the hard things about language learning: nothing lasting happens fast. The real progress–the kind that doesn’t evaporate after a week or two off–can’t be tracked very well over the short term. I like the ways that the Legentibus setup reminds me of how much I’ve read, and of how far I’ve come. That’s been somewhat useful as motivation. I refuse, however, to set up any goals or track any kind of streak in the app. That sort of thing tends to depress me, by shoving my inevitable failure in my face. It’s also fairly artificial. I would much rather track the actual fact of my learning, than whether or not I showed up to learn precisely when I promised a computer program that I would.
Unfortunately, assessing language learning is really pretty tricky. I’ve been persuaded by the notion that assessing meaningful production is the least worthless way of trying to keep track of language learning. My rule of thumb with communicative SLA strategies is always, would I do this activity in English? And in the case of my silly little notes about Legentibus, the answer is actually yes. The PhD did finally teach me the value of reading notes. I wouldn’t mind at all being able to look back on a record of what I read, when I read it, and what I thought about it. If I can write that record in Latin–even if the Latin itself is pretty poor–then that is not a meaningless activity to perform in the language. And I’d like to think that progress in acquiring Latin may be a little less nebulous in the act of writing than it is in reading.
Involving some kind of production in my Latin revival may also be useful in acquisition. I don’t really understand the technical usage of the word ‘noticing’ among SLA researchers (who don’t all seem to agree that the phenomenon described is particularly real or important in acquisition, for what that’s worth). It does seem to be the case, however, that the act of writing forces me to ask questions about communicating in Latin that reading often doesn’t. It also forces me to review sentence constructions that I haven’t seen in a while, since the grammar remains pretty sheltered (almost no use of the subjunctive, for example) in the easy material on Legentibus.
But why post bad Latin?
Why not bury it in a dark cave, where it belongs? Why publish it?
I’ve been astonished to see just how many Zoomers' resilience in handling assignments is just as bad or even worse than my own was. The number of them who just don’t seem psychologically equipped to handle the stresses thereof appears to be enormous. Today is not the day to get into the strengths or weaknesses in The Anxious Generation-style descriptions of the phenomenon. Today, I simply acknowledge what all language teachers know: that the kids these days–bless them–have quite a high chance of going into a mental tailspin or simply cheating their way through assessments (thanks so much for your help with the latter, ChatGPT). Not all of the causes for that are under our control, but some of the solutions may be. We need to be thinking very seriously about both the purpose and practice of our assessments. The costs of pointless or ill-conceived attempts at evaluating acquisition are simply too high to ignore.
I admit that the other side of this knife is that I am atrocious at keeping up with students' busywork. I’m also pretty bad at keeping up with the important stuff. It’s vital for me to know the difference between the two. If I can be sure that I’m giving feedback to students in a way that really helps them, it’ll be easier for me to get it done. If I know that I’m only grading their tests because The Man expects me to grade their tests…I’d rather find a better way to spend my finite time and rather deficient attention.
It’s possible that the particular comments I have to make about the available readings on Legentibus (or on LLPSI) may be of interest to Latin teachers or learners. But even if those comments are basically somewhat insipid, I still think it’s interesting to put the theory of ‘routine, meaningful production is the least-worst way to evaluate language acquisition’ to a public test. This sort of little pedagogical experiment is (obviously) the sort of thing that interests me, but it seemed possible that it might interest other teachers who are trying to figure out how to make assessments more useful and more meaningful for their students. Maybe I’m not the only one who’s curious to see what my writing will look like after the next 70,000 words on Legentibus.
Furthermore, although I am not possessed of a particularly strong desire to teach Latin again, it’s entirely possible that I will find myself doing so. Should such an opportunity arise, I would much prefer to do the job with large quantities of spoken Latin. It’s a little embarrassing to be putting large quantities of bad Latin onto the internet, but I’m sure it will come in handy if I ever find myself with the need to speak the language.
And as a casual perusal of this site will reveal, I’m also taking the opportunity to dump poor Ancient Greek reading notes on the internet–although we sadly have no τοῖς ἀναγιγνώσκουσιν equivalent. The Ancient Greek notes are for a similar purpose, except that I care much more about developing a decent Greek style someday than a Latin one: I have (you’ll be shocked to learn) strong feelings about the dearth of AG reading material that’s accessible to real beginners, and one of my hobbies is trying to amend that lack. If you spot something offensive in either my Latin or (especially) my Greek, there’s no need to be shy about pointing it out.
It’s as expected that Alpha schools have simply invented a new way to fail students, but I still find it interesting to see precisely how Alpha schools are failing to teach: www.404media.co/students-…
Learned today that GE Lessing (modern discoverer of Archimedes' Cattle Problem) serendipitously relates to underlying questions about faith, proof, and miracles in my thesis. On the one hand, great! more to read! OTOH, oh dear, more to read….
χαίρετε, ὦ πάντες! So excited to finally have my own website. Can’t wait to start contributing to the wild world of microblogging book reviews in Latin and Ancient Greek!
Captain Elliott, of Persuasion
I have begun listening to Persuasion, the way that you might tear into whole-grain bread as soon as it has left the oven. A warm slice of bread is never quite going to count as health food, but it is not so very bad for you, either--and it is awfully nice. Re-reading Jane Austen is really not at all what I am meant to be doing with my life, but life at Upper Cross has proved comforting so far.
I wonder how much my impression of Anne Elliott this time around has been shaped by the current theme in my reading. I spent most of the journey back from the States re-reading parts of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. Last week I listened to sufficient samples of Patrick Tull and Simon Vance to put in a request for the latter's recording of Master and Commander (though I respect the conventional opinion that Tull's accents are more lively and more authentic). So captaincy and ships were very much at the back of my mind as I listened to Anne's management of Musgroves of all ages and stages. And indeed, there is a very particular kind of leadership in the way Anne handles the crew at Upper Cross. The bloody discipline of the Navy--very much present in what I recall of C.S. Forester's books, presumably a feature of O'Brian's which my imperfect memory of them has elided, and implicitly queried by Novik's characters--is of course an impossibility in Jane Austen's countryside. But the domestic version of good Naval order, or its absence, is near the fore of Austen's descriptions of a household's residents and their characters. And when other parties are slack, it is Anne who is relied upon: to smooth tempers, to stop her nieces and nephews from running wild, to hint at the correct or sensible action for her sister to take, to play umpire or diplomat between her sister and brother-in-law.
At least, Anne keeps the household shipshape when she is allowed to. She has little effect at Kellynch Hall, where her father and sister Elizabeth use her without even appreciating her good sense, as the Musgroves do. Here perhaps is a contrast with the captains of His Majesty's Navy and His Majesty's (fictitious) Aerial Corps: the captain of a household, who in Austen's world is a woman, gains her authority from diplomacy rather than orders. Where Anne is respected, however imperfectly, she uses her powers to keep things shipshape; where she is ignored, she is reduced to playing Cassandra. Does Captain Wentworth know anything like the struggles of a domestic captain? Does he understand the parallel between his role and Anne's? There has been no hint of it by Chapter Ten--and I suspect that the comparison may never really come into focus. But I am finding the contrast between the management of a ship and a household, however eisegetical, an interesting theme in this particular voyage through Persuasion.
Book Review: Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter
The title is misleading: this is not a review of Galileo’s Daughter. More precisely, it is a review of Alan Lightman’s review of Galileo’s Daughter. I have written up some thoughts about Lightman’s review in order to fulfill the remaining requirement for the Reader badge, as outlined in Volume One of the Rebel Badge Book. This is the first badge I’ve completed–may there be many more! And may one of them be the Writer badge, when I–Deo volente–finish the rough draft of my PhD dissertation this summer.
Alan Lightman’s review of Galileo’s Daughter is in some ways excellent. He eloquently summarizes the historical highlights of Galileo’s life, capturing the personality of the scientist well. That said, I worry he has missed the heart of the book. Lightman writes,
'The daughter's letters reveal little about the father's thoughts, yet they add texture to his world. Where we learn much more about the scientist is in the letters he wrote and received from friends, students, churchmen and other scientists.... Although ''Galileo's Daughter'' focuses on the daughter, its real center of gravity rests with the father and the gripping battle that enveloped him.'
With this appraisal, which comes in the first third of a review that stretches to nearly fifteen hundred words, Lightman dismisses what makes Galileo’s Daughter stand out from the many biographies of Galileo that already exist.
I do not think that I read Maria Celeste’s letters as texture–or if I did, perhaps I have a higher opinion of texture than Lightman does. The emphasis on Maria Celeste is interesting firstly because, at least in my opinion, Sobel does such a remarkable job of drawing out the character of the nun. In the letters, as in Sobel’s commentary on them, we see generosity and concern for others as a driving motivation for the young woman. In the details which Lightman calls ‘texture’, we see sacrifice, asceticism, piety, suffering, and the struggle of daily life. Maria Celeste’s life was difficult. I think one of the few weaknesses of the book was Sobel’s implicit lack of sympathy for Maria Celeste’s sister, Suor Arcangela. Reading between the lines, the chronically ill Arcangela was not cut out for the challenge of life under the Rule of St Clare–a challenge which was imposed upon her, rather than chosen. Did Arcangela resent the father who had hidden her away in a world of hunger, exhaustion, and illness? Sobel never asks. I could not help but reflect, though, that Arcangela might have had some justification for not desiring emotional closeness with the father who consigned her to a life of privation.
In light of Suor Arcangela’s notable silence towards her father, then, the fact that Maria Celeste was able to care so deeply for him is all the more remarkable. She seems to have brought out the best in Galileo the man, in addition to adoring Galileo the legend. Sobel’s note at one point that Maria Celeste bid fair to become the convent’s abbess is a melancholy one. What the ‘texture’ of her letters reveals is that in Maria Celeste the convent, as well as the father, lost someone of great importance too soon.
And it is the religious aspect that I think is secondarily so important about this biography, as opposed to others. In Maria Celeste’s letters we see authentic, persistent, and generous piety. The excerpted correspondence with churchmen, which Lightman suggests is more illuminating, is one which might well lead the reader to anger and frustration with the Roman Catholic Church. At least, it certainly did so for me. The texture of the letters exchanged with cardinals and ambassadors and popes is a texture of power and of nepotism. Between the cardinals and the Medici there is little to choose. Titles and estates are inherited or fought for, in the church just as in secular matters. What Sobel highlights more clearly, through her use of primary sources, than do many write-ups of Galileo, is the extent to which the scientist’s problems with the church were about the authority to interpret Scripture. The problem with the Copernican view was not that it contradicted Scripture per se but that it contradicted the official interpretation of Scripture. And as reading about this conflict reignited old anger in me, it was restorative to have so much ‘texture’ as counterpoint. Because if the Italian church of Galileo’s time had not had its Poor Clares along with its Barberinis, I would have wanted to see it burned to the ground, just as the Protestants did.
In Lightman’s view, then, it seems that reading the book without Maria Celeste’s letters would largely deprive the reader of local flavor. I think however that it is her love, her generosity, and her piety–echoed in Galileo’s affection for her and patronage of the convent–which redeems the story. The view of the Roman Catholic church would otherwise be too brutal, too arrogant, and too frustrating to deal with. As it is, Suor Maria Celeste helps me to understand why, even at the end of his life, Galileo would have been able to remain committed to the church of Rome.
Μοῖρα: The Session(s) Zero
Finally, here's the introduction to the Fate Core rules, lightly adapted and containing some beginner-friendly Ancient Greek!
The philosophy of the game emphasizes collaboration between players and the game master (GM), so even in English it's standard to start with a session zero. In this session zero, the players and GM discuss the setting for the game, what sort of thematic issues they're interested in playing out, who their characters are, and how their characters are connected to one another (which is sometimes called the Phase Trio). I can't imagine getting through half of that in a single 50-minute class period, so I've divided the session zero into a few fundamental questions.
First, what sort of story do we want to play (ποῖον μῦθον βούλεσθε)?
After introducing the new vocabulary through picture or movie talks, I would pose the following questions in Greek, supported by lots and lots of illustrating slides:
ποῖα πρόσωπα βούλεσθε; (what sort of characters do you want?)
ποίους θεοὺς βούλεσθε; (what sort of gods do you want?)
My only rule for the setting is that it has to be one in which it makes sense for their characters to be speaking ancient Greek. If students want to play as demigod heroes inspired by Homer (or Rick Riordan), that's fine. If they want to play as non-superpowered mythical heroes--also fine. They could be native to mainland Greece, or they can be foreigners who've learned Greek. I presented the idea of social class in its extremes--kings or slaves--mainly to get students thinking and talking about what kind of lives they are interested in playing out.
I'd try and use a lot of Greek during this conversation, but I really do need to know what their expectations/interests are regarding the supernatural in the story. I would not expect students to respond (or indeed, discuss amongst themselves) in Greek.
New vocabulary based on my list, as it stands:
Second, I need to know when and where students want the game to be set (πότε καὶ ποῦ γίγνεται ὁ μῦθος;)
Again, the only real rule (in my book, anyway) is that it has to be a setting in which people spoke ancient Greek. I would be surprised if students have a good understanding of how widely Greek was spoken, so this seems like a good point to give them a very quick (English) crash course in the geographical and chronological range of the language. The purpose of this session is to choose a time and place in which our story will occur, so descriptions of different eras are mainly going to be framed in terms of suggestions of what kind of storylines would be a natural fit.
πότε γίγνεται ὁ ἡμέτερος μῦθος; ἐν τίνι αἰῶνι γίγνεται ὁ ἡμέτερος μῦθος; (when does our story happen; in what age/era?)
ποῦ γίγνεται ὁ ἡμέτερος μῦθος; (where does our story happen, in Greece or far from/outside of Greece?)
ἐν ποῖοις τόποις γίγνεται ὁ μῦθος; (in what sort of places does our story happen?)
Again, lots and lots of pictures, lots of examples of where different well-known Greek narratives occur, lots of examples of well-known historical episodes. The geographical settings will be somewhat restricted by the vocabulary list; still, it's good to know what students are interested in, and therefore where the campaign(s) might spend the most time.
It would of course be less work to just tell players when and where the story is set, but I think that students are far more likely to get engaged if, e.g., they've expressed some collective interest in the Hellenistic era and then they tune in next week for an adventure set in Alexandria or Rhodes. Or, if they're all about 300 and they want to have a story that involves the Persian wars. If what gets them really excited about learning Greek is the early years of the Byzantine empire, then I will find a way to turn Procopius into a Fate campaign.
New vocabulary needed:
Third is a character generation (char gen) session (τίς εἶ σύ, καὶ τίνες ἐστὲ ὑμεῖς;)
Fate doesn't do the same complicated character sheets as D&D, for example; instead, it distills the essence of each player character (PC) into five Aspects that players get to choose--well, choose by negotiating with the GM. Each Aspect should be short (~3-5 words) and communicate something important about what that character is, does, or has; ideally, an Aspect is something that might be good/helpful in some situations and bad/a hindrance in others. I think the best Greek work to communicate the idea conveyed by Aspect in the Fate game is στοιχεῖον (but let me know, as usual, if you think there's a better way of expressing the essential elements of a character). I've combined Fate's Phase Trio mechanic with the Aspects, because I think that's the best way to ensure that the characters really are connected in ways that are useful to me as GM. More coordinated input from students on the story theoretically means less prep work for me!
τὸ πρῶτον στοιχεῖον
τὸ δεύτερον στοιχεῖον
τὸ τρίτον στοιχεῖον: τόλμημά τι νέον σον
τὸ τέταρτον στοιχεῖον: πῶς σὐ οἶσθα ἄλλον τι πρόσωπον;
τὸ πέμπτον στοιχεῖον: πῶς σὺ οἶσθα καὶ ἄλλον πρόσωπον;
I reckon that negotiating the five στοιχεῖα for each student/character, providing lots of examples from movies/TV/books for them to think about what drives characters in fiction, would take longer than one class period. Consequently, I'd just start in the process one day, and the next day I'd finish up and then discuss how the Fate rules incorporate Aspects into the mechanics of the game, i.e., by Invoking or Compelling them (which I would probably merge in the classroom). The short version (and you should really go read or watch an example of a longer version) is that I, the narrator/teacher/GM, can Invoke/Compel an Aspect of someone's character by making it a part of the story, usually in a way that makes their situation more difficult or complicated. If the player accepts the Invoke, they receive a Fate token (ψῆφος μοίρᾱς) from me, and the story carries on with that complication. If the player is unwilling to accept that consequence of the Aspect, they can reject the offer; they receive no Fate token, and the story carries on without that complication. For example, Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride carries the Aspect of 'dedicated to becoming the greatest swordsman'. After climbing the Cliffs of Insanity, Vizzini tells Inigo to kill the Man in Black. At this point, Fate invokes Inigo's Aspect of 'dedicated to becoming the greatest swordsman', and he (disadvantageously) assists the Man in Black by throwing him a rope--because he needs to test his skill with the blade against the stranger.
An Aspect of Harry Potter's might be 'abused orphan hates bullies': the Dursleys were horrible to Harry, so he refuses to stand by while someone else is bullying them. When Draco Malfoy steals Neville Longbottom's Remembrall, he Invokes Harry's hatred of bullies--and Harry has to do something stupid and rule-breaking in order to rescue Neville's possession.
As stated above, the GM can Invoke/Compel an Aspect of someone's character. (Would I phrase this in Greek as ἀναγκάζω/ἐπικλῶ τὴν μοῖράν σου, παρέχω στοιχεῖόν τι τῆς μοίρᾱς σου, or something else? Still undecided--but whatever it is, the offered plot twist would always be followed by ἆρα βούλῃ δέχεσθαι;) For the price of a Fate token, other players can however also suggest an Invoke/Compel of another player's Aspect to the GM. If the GM approves of the proposed plot twist, they will offer it, with a Fate token, to the player whose Aspect is being Invoked. The affected player can accept or decline, but either way, the player who suggests the Invocation does not get their Fate token back.
Additionally, a player can Invoke one of their own Aspects (opportunity to distinguish the use of the active and middle voices, huzzah! ἐπικλοῦμαι!) in a way that is narratively advantageous; if the GM accepts the proposal, then the cost to the player is again one Fate token. Someone playing Hercules in a combat situation might, for example, Invoke 'mighty son of Zeus' in order to attempt some epic feat of strength; in the mechanics of the game, the player would normally add +2 to a relevant roll of the dice.
Yes, there are dice rolled in Fate--but I'll cover that another day. The conversion of Fate tokens into story developments described above is referred to as the 'Fate economy'. As you can see, turning down lots of disadvantageous Invokes/Compels restricts your ability to Invoke your character Aspects for your benefit later on, so think twice before rejecting someone else's narrative suggestion.
New vocabulary required:
Apart from the rules for when and how to roll the dice, that's all the rules you need to play Fate. Tune in next time to learn how to Attack, Defend, Overcome, or Create an Advantage! While you wait (impatiently, no doubt) for my summary of the rest of the Fate mechanics, check out this teacher's blog about playing D&D in the Latin classroom.
As usual, chime in if you have thoughts or (heaven forfend) spot a misplaced accent in my Greek.
Technical Language and Hellenistic ἐξήγησις
In the last week, I have binged nearly 50 episodes of Tea with BVP, and something about the way that BVP himself uses the words 'exercise', 'activity', and 'task' set off some thoughts; a few of those thoughts began crystallizing when I reread my manifesto-like post on teaching historical languages. I included a footnote at the end of my twelve points, specifying that I was using the word 'acquire' (and indeed 'learn') the way that Krashen et al. do, to form a mental representation of a language, i.e. implicit knowledge of the language, rather than to gain explicit knowledge about the language. I reckon I could rephrase that footnote a bit more clearly. Still, what I got across--I hope--was that I was using the words 'acquire' and 'learn' in their technical sense, not the way that they usually are.
And that is what BVP does when it comes to 'exercise', 'activity', and 'task': he restricts the usage of those terms, beyond the normal English usage. The distinction between 'exercise' and 'activity' is not randomly created, because it draws on connotations and associations of the two words; that said, there are many contexts in which the two would function synonymously, or in which either would be an 'accurate' choice of word. In BVP's usage, however, the semantic range of 'exercise' and 'activity' does not overlap, not at all, because an 'activity' is a use of the language that involves communication, whereas an 'exercise' is a use of the language that does not involve communication. Nor do 'activity' and 'task' overlap in BVP's usage. A 'task' is a use of the language that involves communication to some purpose apart from the usage or acquisition of the language.
While intuition and connotations make it fairly easy to remember the distinctions BVP makes with these three words, they are not obvious ones. These three specific definitions are not accessible to English speakers, even native English speakers, unless they come into some kind of contact with second language acquisition researchers or foreign language teachers.
Even then, most contact with those who use these three ordinary words in the technical sense is unlikely to result in more English speakers acquiring these technical definitions, because these are all perfectly normal words. I doubt that any of the hosts of Tea with BVP entirely restricts their usage of these words to the above definitions. There's no way that they've all stopped using the many other definitions of the word 'exercise'; there's no way they don't talk about 'activity' unless they mean 'communicative use of the target language'; there's no way that they've given up the regular meanings of the word 'task'. Which means that even becoming drinking buddies with BVP isn't enough to acquire his technical definitions of any of these words. You'd have to come into contact with him (or anyone else who uses these words in their technical sense) within a relevant context, in order to acquire their technical meanings for yourself. In other words, we might tentatively define 'technical language' as 'the use of language with restricted definitions, within a restricted context'.
What does any of this have to do with my dissertation? Well, I've been thinking about the Greek word ἐξήγησις lately. I've been wondering whether ἐξήγησις counts as a genre of ancient Greek writing. In that sense, one might ask whether ἐξήγησις is a 'technical' word, or has a 'technical definition'. My impression--for which I should eventually come up with some concrete, presentable evidence--is that ἐξήγησις does have a restricted meaning. Sure, we gloss it as 'explanation', but when the word ἐξήγησις is used of an explanation, it comes with some pretty specific conventions and expectations.
That's just a hunch, that ἐξήγησις has a restricted meaning from the obvious one. It will take time to research and argue properly. It's pretty easy to answer the question of whether that postulated restricted definition is linked to a restricted context: yes. If we plug it into Logeion, we see that ἐξηγέομαι is a perfectly nice, normal Greek word--the 1,911th most common in the corpus--used with a variety of related meanings across a wide range of eras, places, and genres (the top listed authors are Galen, Epictetus, Herodotus, Andocides, and Aeschylus). ἐξήγησις, on the other hand? Only the 4, 578th most common word in the corpus, and with a list of top authors far more concentrated in time and genre: Polybius, Galen, Diogenes Laertius, Pausanias, and Flavius Josephus. And indeed, following from that restricted context is an extremely short list of glosses in the LSJ--'statement, narrative', or 'explanation, interpretation'.
There's more work to do another time, and more to be said about why I care that ἐξήγησις acts like a technical word (the short version is that I'm a little obsessed with Hipparchus). For now, though, I feel comfortable suggesting that there's a there there, when it comes to ἐξήγησις as a genre with conventions and expectations worth exploring further.