Category: Latin
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Autonomy of Means revisited: the Internet
Last May I wrote a piece for this blog entitled “Autonomy of Means and Education”. The choice of phrasing was drawn from Charles WIlliams, “Bors to Elayne, on the King’s Coins”. I’ve recently had reason to revisit the question again, from a different direction. I’ve just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet…
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Latin pronunciation for the continuing student
On bulletin boards and in magazines dealing with classical homeschooling, one question that arises over and over again is, “What sort of pronunciation should we use in teaching Latin?” The options usually boil down to two: the reconstructed classical pronunciation, and the Italianate ecclesiastical pronunciation. Both have their champions, and the discussions that follow in…
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Making Sense and Finding Meaning
My intermediate and advanced Greek and Latin classes are largely translation-based. There’s a lot of discussion among Latin teachers about whether that’s a good approach, but much of the dispute is, I think, mired in terminological ambiguity, and at least some of the objections to translation classes don’t entirely apply to what we’re doing. What…