The syllabus asked that we reflect in our blog about our reaction to a particular edublogger’s post. We are also supposed to post at least one response to a posting by an edublogger, either on his/her blog or on Twitter. I thought I would blog, here, about both my reaction to an edublogger’s post, and about my response to it.
The site I chose to focus on had much to do with my main content area, Latin. It is called eLatin eGreek eLearn (http://eclassics.ning.com/). I found it after a lot of searching one night back in July. I don’t know if it technically meets the criteria of an “edublogger” site, but it was one of the best sites I could find in my discipline. It is much more than just a place to blog. It’s more like a classics nexus where people can: establish groups focused on shared areas of interest; chat; originate and engage in discussion threads; post videos and pictures; and more. The site was not established by an educator, per se, but by the Director of eLearning at Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, Andrew Reinhard (Bolchazy-Carducci produces a lot of texts and tools for classical studies). Incidentally, in his profile (http://eclassics.ning.com/profile/amasis), Andrew says that we can also find him “on World of Warcraft on the Feathermoon realm as Philabovis, the affable level 80 Tauren hunter and leader of the Carpe Praedam (Latin Language) guild.” (One inside joke, here, is that Philabovis means roughly “bull-lover”, and Taurens look like minotaurs.) Also incidentally, he has been gathering signatures so that Blizzard Entertainment might port World of Warcraft to Greek and Latin. Gee would love this guy!
The blog post that I chose to respond to was actually by a member. Many members are teachers and professors (in fact I found one of my former professors there and we have “friended” each other on the site), but the fellow to whom I responded is not a teacher yet. He is an M.A. student in “2nd-6th Century Jewish studies, Hebrew/Aramaic” who says he can “speak Latin in a stumbling manner.” His post was about 19th century translations of the so-called “Imperfect” tense in Latin, and how they go about trying to differentiate it from the “Perfect” in translation. Trying to stay within the parameters of his post, I responded with a grammar-bookish post using a 19th century Latin grammar as my source, namely Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar. This was my maiden blog out in the real “blogosphere,” and I was blogging under my own name, so I was being extra cautious; I double checked everything, spell-checked, and made sure that I could back up what I said. In the end, I have to say, I felt pretty good about my post.
Then, the next morning, Laura Gibbs commented. She teaches “online courses in mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma” (says her profile), and Greek and Latin are her “hobbies.” Steering things immediately away from the dusty 19th century grammar books, she boldly stated that “we need a Latin grammar that is actually based on linguistic science, rather than forcing Latin to look like English” and “[i]nventing non-categories like ‘historical perfect’” [something I mentioned in my post] “in order to justify the choices we make when translating Latin into English…” She continued to explain that, since Latin descends from Indo-European, “which was a language system stronger on aspect than on tense”, Latin should be taught in such a way that the aspectual characteristics of verbs receive more attention. Her post got significantly more technical from there.
Now, I have to say, in some ways, I think I agree with her, insofar as I am knowledgeable enough to do so, but even up through my M.A. in Classics (Ancient Greek and Latin) at Wayne, we didn’t delve into Indo-European linguistics much. What she says has the ring of truth to it, based on my understanding of ancient Greek, but it did kind of leave me feeling a bit deflated and slightly adrift. Am I missing the boat since I haven’t studied linguistics and this Indo-European aspectual background of Latin more in depth? Would it allow me to make things clearer to high school students trying to understand Latin grammar by means of endless lists of bookish sounding terms, essentially unchanged since their being fleshed out in the 19th century grammar books? After all, it would be more consistent with how many of us understand ancient Greek. I do suspect that an aspectually-based understanding of Latin verb usages might be simpler, but I don’t know if a grammar based on this method exists. If it does, it certainly isn’t standard.
In the end, I think that this post, and Laura Gibbs' sophisticated answer to it, planted a seed for me. I will be on the lookout for ways to inform my own understanding of the Indo-European backdrop to Latin and Greek (to the degree that it has been reliably reconstructed, since we have no actual remnants of this theoretical language), so that I can improve my own understanding of both Latin and Greek grammar in a comparative linguistic way…oh, in my spare time. I guess that will have to be my “hobby.”
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