Foreign Affairs, Episode 2

Allen Wilson says:

Although belatedly, as I should have mentioned this right after the introductory episode was released, I would like to mention that it might interest anyone considering embarking on a study of Latin, who may also know who Basil Gildersleeve was or be aware of the existence of his famous reference grammar, that said grammar was originally part of a five volume series, called Gildersleeves’s Latin Series, and the other volumes of the series were a primer, an exercise book, a reader, and a composition book. All five volumes are available for free download from the Internet Archive in several file formats. I believe google Books also has all five.

Of course anyone who wishes to try using pdf or djvu scans of old textbooks to study Latin or Greek will find many available for both languages, and my advice is to download ten or fifteen different books and pick the one that seems to suit you best, but then keep the other ones, and peruse them to see if they cover anything your chosen book does not, and study those parts of them. We now live in a time when we can have many textbooks instantaneously and for free, so why not take advantage of that? Aside from the Archive and Google, Textkit also has good textbooks for both Latin and Greek.

These books can be used on tablets, or cell phones with screens large enough, but in order to avoid eye strain, my advice is to do as I have done with other books: hook your pc, laptop, or tablet up to a flat screen TV 32″ or bigger, sit well away, and bring those pages up writ large! Then zoom in on the text until it’s to your liking, and use the magnifier if you really want to see detail. You can even wear polarized shades to cut down on screen glare and further reduce eye strain, as I have also done in the past. All this may sound a little weird, but it gets the job done.

I would like to ask a question that has been bothering me for several years. In the introductory podcast, Dr Fleming discussed the reasons why we should learn Latin, including the advantages we get from studying a highly grammatical foreign language in terms of mental clarity, reasoning ability, etc. Obviously the Romans would have gotten those same benefits by studying Greek. I asked this question once before on another website, and got the expected answer, which was “no”: did the Greeks get those same benefits by studying any foreign languages? Then, to my surprise, a cocky young classics student in Britain, obviously too big for his britches and in need of a few humbling experiences, told me something I hadn’t thought of, that they would have gotten those benefits from learning to read Homer, since Homeric Greek is different enough from Classical or Koine to make this possible. Is that true? This also dovetails with another question equally important: is modern Greek really as close to Attic or Koine as some Greek nationalists would have us believe, roughly equivalent to the difference between Shakespearian and Modern English, or is this just hokum, as the classics student also told me? I did not disagree at the time since I thought he must be right, it does sound like hokum if you actually think about it. After all, Latin differs a lot from modern Italian, even if some may call Italian “Easy Latin”.