Locutorium Scholae

Colloqviminī, O Sodālēs Latīnophōnī, in hōc novō Locūtōriō Virtuālī (chatroom) cum aliīs SCHOLÆ sodālibus.

LOCŪTŌRIUM VIRTUĀLE SCHOLÆ

Sī in līneā Interrētiālī cum Scholā nunc es, inscrībe, sīs, nōmen tuum et agedum: Intrā in Scholæ Locūtōrium Virtuāle, fenestrā hūjus Locūtōriī in angulō qvadrī vīsíficī (screen) apertā relictā qvō facilius perspectēs qvis alius in Locūtōriō sit cum qvō confābulārī (chat) forsitan velīs.

Memor estō illīus sapientis et vétĕris prōverbiī:

"Piscātor patiēns prǽdam suam capit."

"Qvōmodo illūc intrābō", fortasse interrogās. Preme cyberpressōrium (mouse) tuum super internexum rubrum(red link) qvī suprā appāret, et qvadrātum confestim vidēbis ubi "Screen Name" (nōmen cybernēticum) legēs. Dēlē deinceps "Screen Name", et ĭbĭdem intrōdūc, ope plēctrológiī (keyboard), tuum usōris nōmen. Deinde prĕmĕ cyberpressōrium super spatíŏlum qvod iuxtā est, ubi ánglicē legitur: "Log In" (= inscrībe hīc nōmen tuum ut in situm intrēs). Postrēmō prĕmĕ cyberpressōrium ĭbĭdem, et ecce: DICTVM FACTVM!

Nec cryptogrăphēma nec inscriptiōnem ēlectrónicam tuam est necesse intrōdūcere! Qvid potest simplicius esse?

In Locutōriō Virtuālī Scholæ, porrō, cum aliīs collŏqviōrum partĭcĭpĭbus pŏtĕrĭs commūnĭcāre, micrŏphōnum aut machĭnam phōtographĭcam tēlārem adhibēns, aut - sī vétĕrem, venerābilem, expertam, atqve, insuper, ā mājōribus trādĭtam commūnicātiōnis viam māvīs qvam illa technológiā modernā excogitāta artifícia - ad simplĭcem scriptiōnem, in mŏdum mŏnăchōrum mediævālium, confúgiēns.

LOCŪTŌRIUM VIRTUĀLE SCHOLÆ

Comenius Project

Latinum’s Comenius Project

"A Rosetta Stone for Unlocking the Latin Tongue"

Project Outline August 2008

John Amos Comenius  ( March 28, 1592 – November 15, 1670)  was a European Educator from Moravia, who wrote an important series of school textbooks for learning Latin. These were textbooks covering the complete curriculum, as he devised it. The textbooks were written in Latin, and come in a gradated series. The aim of these textbooks was to get the students to become fluent in Latin, as school was taught in Latin - but the textbooks were not all LATIN textbooks, but general schoolbooks, covering the subjects we now recognise as history, politics, the sciences, &c.

 The goal of learning Latin was combined with general scholarship, so the reader was not just learning the language, but useful information about the world as well, at the same time.

As such, these books are of enormous utility to the student of Latin, as they cover areas of knowledge with which we are somewhat familiar, and they provide a wealth of vocabulary, and knowledge about real things in the world – while at the same time giving us an insight into the mindset of the Renaissance, in a manner that no amount of academic study can give us – for by studying the course outlined by these textbooks, we become one of Comenius’ students, and are transported back in time. At the same time, we build up and strengthen our Latin.

Comenius' textbooks were very famous, and some editions remained in active classroom use until the early 1800's. Most editions are bilingual (Latin plus some other European language, including Hebrew and Classical Greek), some are trilingual or more, with the text running in parallel columns -  such a text is a veritable Rosetta Stone for learning Latin. One of the online texts you can access has parallel translations in German, Polish, French, and Czech.

 The Magna Didactica 

LEVEL ONE
Orbis Sensualim Pictus 

The first text Latinum will present will be  Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus.
We will use the first American edition, in English and Latin, as this is available on Google Books. The book can be purchased as a reprint.
  

Versions:
Orbis Sensualium Pictus - Anglice - Latine. (1810)  available at Latinum in audio Orbis Sensualium Pictus - Anglice - Latine - newer imprint of above text. available at Latinum in audio
Orbis Pictus   Die Weldt in Bildern, Swet w Obrazych, Swiat w Obrazach, Le Monde en Tableaux. (1833)
Variant Text:
Nouveau Orbis Pictus - Germanice - Latine - Francogallice (1832)

This book is Comenius' foundation textbook, and it covers in a very basic format, all the main areas of knowledge as they were understood in the seventeenth century – biology, physics, geometry, trades, philosophy, music, recreation, law, politics, etc. This book was written for six to seven year olds, but it serves quite well for adults as well, although each topic is of course only treated in the barest of outlines. 

Each lesson is an ‘object lesson’, and all the words given are illustrated in drawings that accompany the lesson, aiding in memory and understanding. The lessons are interesting historically, as they describe the processes of long extinct trades, adding to your store of Latin words related to everyday life.

 

In order to progress to Comenius’ higher level textbooks, it is necessary to master the vocabulary in the Orbis Pictus – and going through the book seven or eight times will be necessary – possibly more. The Orbis will give you a vocabulary of a few thousand words.

LEVEL TWO
The Vestibulum

The next text in Comenius’ series is the Vestibulum to the Janua Linguarum. This is a simple text, of a slightly higher level than the Orbis Sensualim Pictus. Comenius also wrote an essential introduction to Latin Grammar, to accompany it. He wrote two versions of the vestibulum, both of which are useful texts. Two versions of this text are in the Opera Didactica Omnia.
Versions:

Vestibulum in usum illustris paedagogei Albensis

Vestibulum ( Latine - Hungarice )

Vestibulum Majus.(Latine-Germanice)  

LEVEL THREE
 I will use 1796 text of Johann Georg Lederer: Der Kleine Lateiner, for level 3. This text follows the outline of the Orbis Pictus very closely, while introducing some material some material from the Janua, and thus serves admirably as the ‘next step up’. This text is in German and Latin, but is similar enough to the Orbis for a beginner to assimilate after studying the Orbis.

Comenius' Latin-Latin dictionary.

This dictionary was especially written for the vocabulary contained in the Janua and the Atrium. There are two editions, one for the Janua, one, more advanced, for the Atrium. The Lexicon Januale is in the  Opera Didactica Omnia.
Several Editions of the Lexicon Atriale  will be appearing on Google. The first one to appear online, is, unfortunately, a poor scan, with the edges of many pages sliced off.  It, is, however, still very useful. Laura Gibbs has started a project to transcribe the dictionary, to create an online, fully searchable text. several people are already contributing. This is a very important project, as no 'pocket' Latin-Latin dictionary is available, either in print, or online, apart from this scan. As part of your Latin studies, I urge you to contribute, and help transcribe a few pages, lines, even one entry, of this dictionary. Every little will help to get this up and online as soon as possible.

LEVEL FOUR

 
The Janua

The Janua Linguarum Reserata Aurea uses the same chapter outlines as the Orbis Sensualim Pictus, but the material is fleshed out in much more detail. The text, reprinted so often, comes in several verrsions, as Comenius composed variant texts, and the editions from different places and times have important differences, but they all follow the same chapter structure. 

Versions:
Latin, French, Dutch 

Latin, Classical Greek, French

Latin and Classical Greek ed. Theodoro Simonio

Latin, German Italian and French. 

Latin, German, French, Italian ed. Duez.

French-Latin 

 Copies of the Janua Linguarum can also be viewed as scans at the Comenius Library in Japan. (Before the first google editions appeared in late 2008, this was the only way to view these texts).

This text with its parallel translations is a veritable Rosetta Stone for unlocking the Latin language. I will be using the critical edition of the Janua. The earlier editions of the Janua are simpler than later editions, so I may present this text in two versions, a lower level and higher level version.

Comenius also wrote an intermediate Latin Grammar, composed in accessible Latin, for students of the Janua Reserata. This material is now available online in the two versions of this text are in the Opera Didactica Omnia.

LEVEL FIVE
Schola Ludus

This section will be the Schola Ludus, where the material of the Janua Linguarum Reserata is presented in short dialogues and ‘plays’ – although these are not dramatic plays, but rather expositions, using conversation.I will use the critical edition of the Schola Ludus. The colloquies in the Schola Ludus develop the educational themes in the Janua in more depth. This text is available online as individual photographs of the pages, and can be found listed here. 
Schoal Ludus also exists in the Opera Didactica Omnia.
  

LEVEL SIX

A text composed of 700 sentences, all in alliteration, for ease of memorisation, called
" Vestibuli Lat. Lingvae Auctarium". This text is also avaiable in the  Opera Didactica Omnia.

  LEVEL SEVEN
Atrium

The Atrium. The atrium contains Comenius' Higher level Grammar, and advanced philosophical discussions of the material initially introduced in the Vestubulum and the Janua. See the  Opera Didactica Omnia.

LEVEL EIGHT
Latin authors in the original. 

Comenius thought a student should not open any works of original Latin literature, until fluency had been developed. He estimated this would take three years, if conducted FULL TIME in a school only following his curriculum.  Part time, you are looking at six - ten years to attain the level of fluency that Comenius would have expected from his students.

Hesitation and umming as a language teaching tool

The piece of research cited below is interesting - I had in my own language teaching built in things to deliberately give the student time to think, but the idea raised here, is far more elegant.

Speakers naturally do um and ha when speaking. 

If when giving a language lesson, the um is deliberately introduced before the item that the teacher wants to draw attention to, this can be a very elegant teaching tool -  if not over-used.

I will trial it in my forthcoming lesson, and see what eventuates. Used too much, it would, of course, be annoying.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2011) — A team of cognitive scientists has good news for parents who are worried that they are setting a bad example for their children when they say "um" and "uh." A study conducted at the University of Rochester's Baby Lab shows that toddlers actually use their parents' stumbles and hesitations (technically referred to as disfluencies) to help them learn language more efficiently.

---

becomes a much more difficult task and the child is apt to miss what comes next, says Richard Aslin, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and one of the study's authors.

"The more predictions a listener can make about what is being communicated, the more efficiently the listener can understand it," Aslin said.

The study, which was conducted by Celeste Kidd, a graduate student at the University of Rochester, Katherine White, a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester who is now at the University of Waterloo, and Aslin was published online April 14 in the journal Developmental Science.

The researchers studied three groups of children between the ages of 18 and 30 months. Each child sat on his or her parent's lap in front of a monitor with an eye-tracking device. Two images appeared on the screen: one image of a familiar item (like a ball or a book) and one made-up image with a made-up name (like a "dax" or a "gorp"). A recorded voice talked about the objects with simple sentences. When the voice stumbled and said "Look at the, uh…" the child instinctively looked at the made-up image much more often than the familiar image (almost 70 percent of the time).

"We're not advocating that parents add disfluencies to their speech, but I think it's nice for them to know that using these verbal pauses is OK -- the "uh's" and "um's" are informative," said Kidd, the study's lead author.

In the study, the effect was only significant in children older than two years. The younger children, the researchers reasoned, had not yet learned the fact that disfluencies tend to precede novel or unknown words.

When kids are between the ages of two and three, they usually are at a developmental stage where they can construct rudimentary sentences of about two to four words in length. And they typically have a vocabulary of a few hundred words.

The study builds on earlier research by Jennifer Arnold, a scientist at the University of North Carolina and a former postdoctoral fellow at Rochester, which found that adults also can use "um's" and "uh's" to their advantage in understanding language. Additionally, work by Anne Fernald at Stanford University has shown that it's not the quality but the quantity of speech that a child is exposed to that is most important for learning.

Language Learning and Methodology.

The piece of research cited below is interesting, in that is seems to reinforce the idea that a learner must do a lot of reading in order to learn how to structure a language.

It also illustrates the danger of using - in a language such as Latin - adapted texts, unless the learner is explicitly made aware that the texts are adapted to English word order, as there is a danger that this word order will be generalised.

Thus,if an adapted text is used - for example, in an interlinear - it is vital that the student moves to the original text as soon as possible.

The text is also encouraging for teachers - for example, the rule in Latin that an adjective always follows a monosyllable probably need not be explicitly taught. With enough examples, the rule will be learned.
We can say bonum vinum, or we can say vinum bonum (with a preference to the adjective coming before the noun in many cases) , but bonum sal is always sal bonum.

New Research Demonstrates Language Learners' Creativity

ScienceDaily (Apr. 4, 2011) — New research published in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), shows that language learning goes well beyond simple imitation, and in fact that language learners are quite creative and remarkably smart. Not only are learners able to generalize grammatical restrictions to new words in a category -- in this case, made-up adjectives -- but they also do not learn these restrictions in situations where they can be attributed to some irrelevant factor.

But how is the restriction learned in the first place? Drs. Boyd and Goldberg show that witnessing ablim used after nouns (i.e., postnominally, as in the hamster that's ablim) makes participants even more likely to avoid its use before nouns in their own utterances. While this may sound like learners are simply imitating the adjective uses they see in the language to which they are exposed, the authors go on to show that learning is savvy, and only occurs under certain conditions.This point is driven home in an article, "Learning what not to say: The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production," to be published in the March 2011 issue of Language. When authors Jeremy Boyd of the University of Illinois and Adele Goldberg of Princeton University asked adult speakers to produce sentences containing made-up adjectives like ablim, they found that people avoided using ablim before the noun it modified, unconsciously treating it like real adjectives that sound similar -- e.g., afraid, which also cannot be used before the noun it modifies (i.e., the afraid cat is a less preferred formulation than the cat that's afraid). This result indicates that speakers readily generalize a restriction against this use -- referred to as "prenominal" -- to adjectives that they've never heard before.

For example, in an analogous learning situation, when children see an adult with his right hand in a cast play a video game using just his left, they do not assume that there is a restriction on how the game can be played -- i.e., that one can only use one's left hand. They immediately infer that the adult would use his right hand (or both hands) if he could, but that the cast is preventing him from doing so. In similar fashion, when a new group of participants witnessed ablim used postnominally, but this time in a context in which there was a reason for its postnominal use that had nothing to do with ablim itself, participants did not learn a restriction against ablim's prenominal use. This indicates that learners carefully evaluate the input they receive, and that learning only occurs when the input is deemed informative.

This research demonstrates that speakers do not learn purely by imitating others, but bring sophisticated and creative resources to bear on the process. This is especially true when it comes to language, where the fact that children routinely produce sentences to which they have never been exposed indicates that they are not simply imitating what they hear.

I'm about 20% on my way through Bellum Helveticum

by Karavinka on 2011-02-07, 20:35

http://www.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=32605

My work contract expired as of Jan. 31 and I've been sleeping a lot since then. And the Chinese New Year fell on the first week of February this year so I had to waste my time visiting relatives etc, losing the precious time that I could have used to... not to learn Latin but to be with my gf.  I still spent some time with Latin and I wanted to make a note before I take off to Jeju, a resort island off the southern coast, in a few hours.

Well, anyways. As of Feb. 8:

* Wheelock's Latin, Loci Antiqui and Loci Immutati : I read through the passages while making a vocab list. Didn't spend too much time with this, though. Both these sections and the reader volume seem too heavy on Cicero imho.

* Chamber's Latin Alive and Well : finished! It is actually awful like Wheelock, and many sentences and some reading passages are shared between the two. However, Chambers was nice enough to add review sheets (with answer keys) every few lessons, and he has more English to Latin exercises. (I don't think I just have the confidence unless I can produce it somehow) Most readings are adapted from classicals, heavy on Livy and Caesar.

* I'm about 20% on my way through Bellum Helveticum, a Caesar-based textbook available online with podcasts from Latinum. There are as many (if not more) English to Latin than just passively reading Latin, starting from a simple noun clause to full sentences. The podcast is helpful as well: though I'm not intent on speaking Latin, I still want to feel at least somewhat natural when I read out loud. I never knew there was elision in Latin. (Gallia est .. to Galliest.., according to the podcast.)



@KingHarvest: Yes, Eutropius reads differently from, say, Nepos or Caesar. But I'm still glad that it exists and there must have been some reason when the Renaissance schoolmasters picked it as the pupil's first Latin author... Thanks for the comment, I'll take a look at Augustine.

Bilingual Readings on Latinum

In 2011 I started a new section of Latinum - composed of bilingual readings of the Classic authors, using the system of texts produced by Hamilton and Underwood, and those produced by John Taylor for the University College London.
These are the links to the current selection - comprising several hours of audio material.

BILINGUAL AUDIO

1. Bilingual Caesar - Invasion of Britain 
2. Bilingual Celsus - De Medicina 
3. Bilingual Cicero - Orations 
4. Bilingual Nepos - De Viris Illustribus 
5. Bilingual Ovid - Metamorphoses 
6. Bilingual Virgil - Eclogues 

These texts have been edited with the syntax adjusted to make an English interlinear possible - thus they are to be considered as intermediate texts, and once the listener has used them to get to grips with the material, they should commence reading the original text, with the words in the intended order.

Bilinguals and Language Learning

An interesting piece of research came out a couple of days ago, about those who use a second language, and perception.

I think it is of great interest to second language teachers: especially those who focus on translation - it should, I think, give pause for thought.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110314132531.htm

Reading over this article, my conclusion was that those students who remain in the 'translation zone' with their Latin - only comprehending it through translation, rendering the Latin into English, and then processing the translation, not the Latin, as their primary source text, are greatly retarded in their ability to understand the subtle gradations of semantic meaning -  the true meaning of Latin words - whose  sematic properties only become apparent through use within the language, on its own terms. 

Constant translation and working with a text in translation would,I think, hamper this process. Perhaps it would take place, but imperfectly, as semantic fields between languages only imperfectly overlap.

This applies I suspect to grammatical structures as much, if not more than to vocabulary.

For example,  the use of the ablative - constantly translating ablatives into their myriad of sub categories - attempting to shoe-horn them into English - probably retard the student's ability to reach an intuitive understanding of ablative usage within Latin - and this understanding only comes through the mechanics of the language itself, on its own terms, without translation.

Through, as many have said, "much reading".

Now, I am not saying some translation is not needed - a modicum of translation can speed up the learning process at the beginning. Interlinear translations can even speed up the process of intial language acquisition, be enabling the student to get through screeds of text in a short time - but the translation is necessarily limited - It can give the 'ball park' of new vocabulary. Some words transpose neatly. Canis and Dog, for example. Many key concepts do perhaps not, such as res publica, virtus, and a host of others. 

Any thoughts?

Evan.