Rusticatio Mexicana
Usually I’m not too enthusiastic about Neo-Latin, but I thought this was simply too cool. I picked up a copy of the Duckworth/Bristol Classical Press 2005 Academic Catalog, and they announce Andrew...
View ArticleBe happy I won’t be teaching Latin or Greek
Since I’m currently studying in a Classical Studies department where literary criticism, history, and philosophy are the only acceptable topics for a paper, and historical linguistics is often seen as...
View ArticleExtreme sound change
I am fascinated by cases where multisyllabic words are worn down to a nub. In his textbook Historical Linguistics (London: Arnold, 1996) Larry Trask gives the following as the introduction to an...
View ArticleWhen Hungarian was almost Romance
In the second volume of a Festschrift for Oswald Szemerényi published in 1979, I found Adam Makkai’s paper ‘Latinate Diglossia in Finno-Ugric’ that is one of the few examples of ‘speculative...
View ArticlePrebendary
It occasionally happens that a word newly encountered, which I suppose to be completely defunct and perhaps even a hapax legomenon, is met again soon after somewhere very different. While reading...
View ArticleThe Praenestine Fibula debate doesn’t go away
Several years back Michael Weiss, an Indo-Europeanist at Cornell, offered on his website a fine outline of the evolution of Latin grammar from PIE to the classical era. Weiss recently published this...
View ArticleGreek and Latin verse composition
For the past several weeks I’ve been working with North and Hilliard’s classic Greek Prose Composition to brush up on my Greek. It has only now occurred to me that if all those composition workbooks I...
View ArticleLinguistics and classical teaching
The Winter 2007 issue of The Classical World featured a collection of papers under the heading ‘The Linguistic Edge: Using Linguistics to Enrich the Teaching of the Classics’: Joshua T. Katz, ‘What...
View ArticleA schoolboy mnemonic that’s still fresh
One of my regrets when studying Classics was that I didn’t learn very many of the old schoolboy mnemonics that helped successive generations learn Latin and Greek paradigms. The only one I really...
View ArticleThe lesser-known W. Sidney Allen
Any student of classical languages with a linguistics bent will delight at discovering W. Sidney Allen’s books Vox Latina and Vox Graeca that reconstruct the pronunciation of Classical Latin and Greek,...
View Article’lentil’ as a Romance loan into Common Slavonic
While reading Ronald O. Richards’ The Pannonian Slavic Dialect of the Common Slavic Proto-Language, where the author reconstructs Pannonian Slavic on the basis of loans in Hungarian, I was struck by...
View ArticleBe happy I won’t be teaching Latin or Greek
Since I’m currently studying in a Classical Studies department where literary criticism, history, and philosophy are the only acceptable topics for a paper, and historical linguistics is often seen as...
View ArticleExtreme sound change
I am fascinated by cases where multisyllabic words are worn down to a nub. In his textbook Historical Linguistics (London: Arnold, 1996) Larry Trask gives the following as the introduction to an...
View ArticleWhen Hungarian was almost Romance
In the second volume of a Festschrift for Oswald Szemerényi published in 1979, I found Adam Makkai’s paper ‘Latinate Diglossia in Finno-Ugric’ that is one of the few examples of “speculative...
View ArticlePrebendary
It occasionally happens that a word newly encountered, which I suppose to be completely defunct and perhaps even a hapax legomenon, is met again soon after somewhere very different. While reading...
View ArticleThe Praenestine Fibula debate doesn’t go away
Several years back Michael Weiss, an Indo-Europeanist at Cornell, offered on his website a fine outline of the evolution of Latin grammar from PIE to the classical era. Weiss recently published this...
View ArticleGreek and Latin verse composition
For the past several weeks I’ve been working with North and Hilliard’s classic Greek Prose Composition to brush up on my Greek. It has only now occurred to me that if all those composition workbooks I...
View ArticleLinguistics and classical teaching
The Winter 2007 issue of The Classical World featured a collection of papers under the heading ‘The Linguistic Edge: Using Linguistics to Enrich the Teaching of the Classics’: Joshua T. Katz, ‘What...
View ArticleA schoolboy mnemonic that’s still fresh
One of my regrets when studying Classics was that I didn’t learn very many of the old schoolboy mnemonics that helped successive generations learn Latin and Greek paradigms. The only one I really...
View ArticleThe lesser-known W. Sidney Allen
Any student of classical languages with a linguistics bent will delight at discovering W. Sidney Allen’s books Vox Latina and Vox Graeca that reconstruct the pronunciation of Classical Latin and Greek,...
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