Learning Latin the Ancient Way – Reading research in the Guardian

Learning Latin the Ancient Way, Reading Classics professor Eleanor Dickey’s latest book published this week by Cambridge University Press, has been reviewed in the Guardian. The review can be seen at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/10/ancient-greek-manuscripts-reveal-life-lessons-from-the-roman-empire The book explores how Greek-speaking students in the Roman empire learned Latin, using the fragments of their Latin textbooks preserved on papyri from Egypt and in medieval manuscripts. In some ways these ancient Latin learners had an experience strikingly similar to that of modern students: they used grammars, dictionaries, and commentaries; they read Cicero’s Catilinarian orations and Virgil’s Aeneid; they memorized vocabulary; they looked up the hard words and wrote translations into their Latin texts.

Prof. Dickey's most recent book: Learning Latin the Ancient Way (Cambridge, 2016)

Prof. Dickey’s most recent book: Learning Latin the Ancient Way (Cambridge, 2016)

But in other ways the ancient Latin learners had a very different experience from that of their modern counterparts. Some of these differences come from the fact that ancient learners came to Latin knowing ancient Greek rather than English. So they struggled to learn the Roman alphabet, but they had no problems with the distinction between nominative and accusative cases. Other differences come from ancient educational conventions: ancient beginners started off with bilingual texts, easy Latin accompanied by a running translation. Of course the students could not translate the Latin for themselves as a modern learner might do, since a translation was provided; instead they memorized the Latin, rather the way a student studying French today might memorize a dialogue about ordering croissants in a café in Paris.

Indeed the texts read by ancient beginners have much more in common with material read by modern French learners than with that read by modern Latin learners. Ancient students studied short dialogues and narratives about daily life: buying clothes, buying food, having lunch, borrowing money, and visiting sick friends. Of course, ancient daily life was not quite like modern daily life, so the dialogues also cover going to the public baths, winning court cases, making excuses, getting into fights, taking oaths in temples, and coming home drunk after a Roman orgy. Just like their modern counterparts, these dialogues were written to teach students about culture as well as language; therefore they offer us priceless insight into life in the Roman empire as Romans saw it.

Learning Latin the Ancient Way provides extracts from all types of ancient Latin-learning texts: bilingual dialogues, alphabets, grammars, dictionaries, annotated copies of Sallust, word-lists to Virgil, prose composition exercises, Aesop’s fables, stories about the Trojan war, letters of congratulation for sending to successful legacy hunters, an explanation of the Roman law on manumission, etc. Portions originally written in Greek have normally been translated into English, but the Latin remains in Latin; this means that modern students can experience and use these texts as their ancient counterparts would have done (or ignore the English and treat the passages like any other translation exercise). A few passages lack word division and punctuation, to make it clear what reading was really like in antiquity.

Professor Dickey hopes that her book will be used by modern Latin teachers and students (it is suitable for learners who have already done at least one year of Latin) and that it will enable modern learners to enjoy the ancient Latin-learning materials, which are now able to be used once more for their original purpose.

Copies can be purchased from Cambridge University Press (to whom Professor Dickey is very grateful for pricing the book at an affordable £18, a sharp contrast to most of her previous books): http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/classical-studies/classical-languages/learning-latin-ancient-way-latin-textbooks-ancient-world?format=PB.

Reading Ancient Schoolroom

The Reading Ancient Schoolroom welcomed more than 100 participants to campus on 27th and 28th January. Groups from Farnborough Hill School, Leweston School, St Gabriels School, and Langley Academy, as well as numerous families and individuals, learned how to act like Roman children. Participants also read Homer from papyrus scrolls, wrote with styluses on wax-coated tablets, learned how to do mathematical calculations on an abacus and Roman counting board, wrote with reed pens and ink on ostraca, studied Latin from a textbook used by ancient Greek speakers to learn Latin, learned the Greek alphabet the way a Roman would have learned it, and recited poetry from memory. There were also opportunities to handle objects in the Ure Museum.

Participants ranged in age from 4 to 18, and all reported having a great time. Volunteers, who included numerous first-year undergraduates as well as graduate students and staff, also had terrific fun; this is good as no-one is paid for work on the schoolroom. So we are EXTREMELY grateful to all our hard-working volunteers!

More detail on the event, and more photographs, can be seen at http://readingancientschoolroom.com/2016-schoolroom/Writing 15

Congratulations to Professor Eleanor Dickey for new accolade!

Less than a month after her election as Fellow of the British Academy, Prof. Eleanor Dickey has received another prestigious honour: she has just been elected as a Fellow of the Academia Europaea.

The Academia Europaea is the European-Union equivalent of the British Academy and the Royal Society, an international learned society composed of leading experts in the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and the law. It was founded in 1988 and currently has c.3000 members, drawn from across the whole European continent. Only 24 of these are UK Classicists, so Professor Dickey joins a select group.

This honour is wholly independent of the British Academy election, as each election was based on a distinct and lengthy peer-review process. The rare double honour is testimony to Professor Dickey’s standing in the international scholarly community as well as in the UK.

 

Prof. Eleanor Dickey to give the 2014 Gaisford Lecture

Dickey photoWe are delighted to announce that our colleague Prof. Eleanor Dickey has been invited to give the prestigious Gaisford Lecture.

She will speak on the topic of

Lucian’s Shortbread Eating Primer’: how to make fun of your language textbook

Thursday 8 May 2014, 5 pm, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, Oxford.

Prof. Dickey will also give a lecture on the topic of

Education, Research, and Government in the Ancient Greek World

Thursday 8 May 2014, 1pm, Gresham College, London.

Both lectures are free and everyone will be welcome.

Eleanor Dickey joins Classics Department

Dickey photoThe department is very pleased to welcome Eleanor Dickey as Professor of Classics. Eleanor is a linguist with interests spanning Latin, Greek, and other ancient languages; her presence gives the Reading department the greatest concentration of Classical linguists in the UK outside of Oxford and Cambridge. Eleanor is American and was educated at Bryn Mawr College (BA, MA) and Oxford (MPhil, DPhil); she has previously worked at the University of Ottawa in Canada, Columbia University in New York, and the University of Exeter.

Eleanor arrived with a Leverhulme grant and will therefore be on leave for her first two years. Nevertheless she is visible in the department on Wednesdays and is enjoying getting to know colleagues and graduate students. As this is the first time in nearly 20 years that she has worked in a department containing other Classicists interested in language, she finds the atmosphere particularly congenial! (Besides, in this department are people who keep chickens and build coracles. How could one not be thrilled by that?)

Eleanor has published books on Greek forms of address (OUP 1996), Latin forms of address (OUP 2002), ancient Greek scholarship (OUP 2007), and the Colloquia of the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana (vol 1 CUP 2012, vol 2 CUP forthcoming). (The colloquia are an elementary Latin reader composed for ancient Greeks learning Latin during the Roman empire; they contain little dialogues on topics like how to buy food, borrow money, hold a dinner party, or have an argument. Working on them has been tremendous fun!) Her current project is on Latin loanwords in Greek.

You can find out more about Eleanor at http://www.reading.ac.uk/classics/about/staff/e-dickey.aspx