State of the Projects, Feb 2019
Welcome to the first of my new email newsletters!
I got convinced by Rick Brannan to start doing an email newsletter, as a platform for keeping people updated about what I'm up to, in terms of projects, learning, research, teaching, etc.. Here you'll hear (first?) about various things I'm working on...
If you're a casual reader of my twitter or blog, it's perhaps worth your while to understand a bit better my current work and life circumstances, which are not always transparent.
Life in Seumas Land:
I live in Sydney, Australia, with my wife and 3 year old daughter. About 2 or 3 years ago I completed a PhD in Ancient history, focused in Patristics, and since then I've been working casually across several places. In theory I work 3 days a week, and have 2 days at home with my daughter.
In practice, my work life is split across: 1) Online adjunct work for one theological college, where I tutor courses in New Testament books and in Church History. This involves a lot of marking, which is my bane. 2) Teaching Intro to New Testament Greek for another theological college. This is a local college, but the students are almost all distance/online. 3) Private tutoring and teaching of Latin and Greek. This is a split between a few local students (high school, mainly), and online. This year I expanded to some online small group classes. 4) Occasionally translation projects. [all this means I work a lot of odd hours, and late nights, you may have gathered]
Apart from that, I spend wranglable amounts of time: 5) working on my own Greek, Latin, and Gaelic in an attempt to reach fluency, er, world domination. 6) tinkering my way into Digital Humanities as much as I can, because this is the future, and because students deserve better than dead-print-pedagogy 7) Writing blog-posts at http://thepatrologist.com 8) Recording a Koine Greek podcast, https://odianuktosdialogos.podomatic.com
So, that's probably enough about that. What's happening lately, or soon?
Italian Athenaze Supplement Project
I've long appreciated the Italian version of Athenaze, with its Ørberg-style, and about double the Greek-content of the English version, but the Italian edition is (a) difficult to get hold of, and (b) impossible to use from zero if you don't know Italian. That is, it's not "per se illustrata" like Ørberg's Latin is.
So, having resolved to also teach some students from Athenaze this year, has given me the impetus to get on with providing supplementary materials in English. Since I can't read Italian, these are freshly composed, but they are grammar notes and vocabulary glosses for each chapter of the Italian Athenaze.
Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata
About 7 years ago I made an initial foray into translating Familia Romana into Greek. I got about 10 chapters in. Which was a solid effort, I think. But I came to realise that (and I actually knew from the start) that wasn't going to 'work'. Because Greek isn't Latin, and because a translation would never escape rights-issues.
Now, with a lot more experience, I've returned to this idea in a bigger and broader way. I have in mind a LGPSI book that teaches Koine (at first), provides tons of comprehensible Greek, built around the story of a family in 4th century Antioch. In my mind, there will then be alternate time-line stories set in different periods, introducing different dialects and periods of Greek as well, as part of a coherent 'universe'. The whole thing to be written along Ørbergian principles, but also 'digital-born', with all the advantages that could come from making this a text digital from the get-go.
Since this is going to tie into my teaching this year, I have inevitable plans to be working on this a lot, and collaborating.
Apostolic Fathers, Tauber-Macdonald edition
James Tauber and I have a lot of common interests, mostly around Greek, digital texts, and learning. Well, and around other things, but that's the core of what we talk about. We've been working on creating a better edition of the Apostolic Fathers. You can read about it: https://jktauber.com/2018/11/01/preparing-open-apostolic-fathers/ https://jktauber.com/2019/02/01/initial-apostolic-fathers-text-complete/
We've finished the initial text corrections, and are now looking towards lemmatisation. The final end-goal for us is for Apostolic Fathers to be in an open format that's feedable into some of our broader work on Greek text, vocabulary, learning materials
All of LLPSI in 2019 Last year I made the commitment to read all the various Lingua Latina per se Illustrata texts in 2019. You can read up on that here: https://thepatrologist.com/2018/11/14/reading-all-of-llpsi-extended-remix-edition-in-2019/
It's now getting into late February, and I've read all of Familia Romana, Colloquia Personarum, Fabellae Latinae, and Fabulae Syrae. About chapter 25 of Familia Romana the readings start getting longer, and Fabulae Syrae had some long chapters. But it's been exciting to be reading long tracts of Latin, daily, without translating. I'm eager to see how far this will go in pushing my Latin towards genuine "pick up any text and read it"
Well, that's enough for now. Welcome to the list, and I'm only ever an email away.
Seumas