LGPSI Vol 1: μῦθος τῆς Ἀντιοχείᾱς

I know lots of people want there to be an LGPSI, really an Ørberg-type and Ørberg-level text for ancient Greek. And I have been trying to write one for a very long time. There is, of course, the wonderful ΛΟΓΟΣ book by ??, which I reviewed. I don't think it does that job, and I think there's still plenty of space for something like my project.

Let me talk a bit about my aims, goals, methodology, before I discuss exactly what I'm releasing today.

So, what is this LGPSI project anyway?

I originally began writing an LGPSI (lingua graeca per se illustrata) shaped and formed by the phenomenally well-written LLPSI by Hans Ørberg. Those early efforts were founded upon translation, which was fine, but as I have grown in ancient Greek proficiency, spent years teaching, and read in SLA theory, my own approaches have changed.

I am not even convinced that a direct method which is designed to showcase grammar step-by-step as Ørberg did, is the best way. And this latest version reflects that.

Nonetheless, my LGPSI is designed to be a kind of "extensive graded reader which introduces grammar slowly, and with attention to being comprehensible from the context and minimal helps". I don't think it's currently in the state that I could hand it to anyone and say, "here, this will teach you Greek", but nor I am convinced that you should try to learn ancient Greek just from a book.

Some design principles: Volume 1 will be 50 chapters, of roughly 1,000 words each. It's designed to be constrained both vocabulary and grammar. The vocabulary is shaped in reference to a frequency list that includes key Attic prose texts as well as Koine literature (primarily the New Testament). It's narratively-driven, which means if nothing else it will be a pleasant (I hope) 50k ancient Greek novella.

Because, unlike Ørberg, each chapter isn't attempting to introduce, then exemplify all the morphology of, step-by-step grammatical features, that means there are forms in early chapters which may seem odd there. On the other hand, because the text is designed to maximise comprehensibity, exposure, repetition, and so-on, large swathes of the early chapters are written to have as gentle a slope of increasing difficulty as I can manage.

The story itself is set, or at least begins, in 4th century Antioch. I've wanted to write in this setting for a number of reasons. It allows exploration of a late antique setting, as well as linguistic diversity. The text begins in what I would call a slightly high-register version of Koine, but as it goes on you'll encounter different features, and settings and speakers, who use more Koine, more Attic, and later more Ionic dialects of ancient Greek.

Today

First things first. The "base text" as I'm calling it, which is just the plain text that I've written, is available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. That means that you're pretty free to use it, so long as you don't (a) make a commercial version or try to profit, (b) that you attribute authorship, (c) that all derivative products carry the same license.

You can access and read LGPSI 2.0 directly from its public repository.

A formatted version of chapters 1-10, with some marginal notes, some minimal illustrations, and a glossary is available to purchase here for $5. It's not really a version with a lot of 'extra' content, at present. The marginalia and image-notes are just part of the work in progress. Rather, think of this as a way of supporting the ongoing development of this work. This version, including layout, design, marginal notes, is all rights reserved.

What if I don’t know any Greek?

Look, honestly I don't think you could pick this up with zero knowledge and learn Greek from it. It's not LLPSI. I do think you could easily use this alongside any existing course, and I also think you could teach with this (I am) provided you know what you're doing. As it develops, I do believe it will be able to be used either with a teacher, a class, or independently.

What if I don’t know the Greek alphabet?

This text isn't really accessible if you don't know the alphabet. There are a number of decent resources, especially videos, to learn the alphabet. I do have in mind to produce a module-zero that will teach you to read and sound out words. It's hard to learn pronunciation from a book.

What kind of Greek does LGPSI teach?

LGPSI at present teaches ‘Koine Greek with Attic sprinkles’. It does this for several reasons. Firstly, the vast bulk of ancient Greek literature is written in Koine. Students who study Koine are well situated to access this material. Secondly, for those whose interest is primarily biblical and related studies, Koine is the idiom of primary interest. Thirdly, a significant portion of Koine writers deliberately and conscientiously employ a high-register of Koine that contains Attic features, for which reason you will find plenty of Attic influence in this text. Fourthly, the historical setting of the main storyline is late antiquity. I believe that students whose main interest is “classical literature” and “classical Greek” will still be well served by this text.

As I said above, as you go on in the text you will (eventually) be exposed to more distinctive elements of Attic, Koine, and Ionic style, grammar, and vocabulary. Essentially I aim to bridge the gap between the silo'd approaches of Koine vs Attic, and equip students to move between dialects. This will become more evident in planned volumes 2 and 3.

Where are the margin notes and illustrations like LLPSI?

They are... in development. My main focus has remained working on the main text, because that's the critical thing. I am adding margin notes as I teach from the text, and discover what students need help with. Most illustrations will need to wait for a print edition and an illustrator.

What about LGPSI 1.0?

LGPSI 2.0 takes and cannibalises v1.0, but it's not the same. Some of the early chapters are similar, and characters are the same, but the story is moving in different directions and the sequencing and presentation of material are too. LGPSI 1.0 will remain available and static, if you were using and enjoying it.

I found a mistake

Please tell me about it: thepatrologist@gmail.com

I think you could improve X, Y, Z.

Please tell me about it: thepatrologist@gmail.com

Acknowledgements

A lot of people have helped me work on LGPSI over the years. I can't possibly thank them all, but I do want to highlight the contributions of a few. James Tauber has been a continual source of encouragement, and responsibly for all my (successful and aborted) forrays into digital humanities. Secondly, a big thanks to both Eric Sowell and Sarah McCuan, who apart from many other helps, have been driving forces in providing digital tools and data-analysis, as well as encouragement, to drive this forward and to make this possible. Thirdly, thanks to my Patreon supporters, you get little for what you put in, but I'm thankful for your support. Thirdly, a big thank you to my students, including those directly involved in my LGPSI classes. Road-testing this with students is invaluable feedback.

Roadmap

Look, you know and I know that I get excited, promise big, and under-deliver. So, I'm working on writing this as best as time allows, and volume one will be done when it's done, and I'd like that to be 2027.

I do have a volume 2 and 3 mentally sketched out as well, both 50k Greek novellas that take the stories of these characters, and the language, in new directions. So, please read, give me feedback, encouragement, etc., The more excited you are, the more excited I am to keep writing.

Kevin Grasso begins his new Greek grammar with an apology, in both senses, for yet another Greek grammar. I don't think he needs to apologise, especially when I was asked recently whether any published textbook supports my position on voice or aspect and I couldn't list any. But it's true that new grammars do need to make their case for existing.

Before we get into this and subsequent posts, let me say that I consider Grasso a fairly close ally in pedagogical philosophy. I don't know Kevin personally, but I have been warmly supportive and yet continue to be critical of Biblingo. I think Grasso has a very sound linguistics, ancient Greek, and pedagogical basis for what he does, even though I disagree with him at various points. And I think we share far more than we diverge on, not least our general aims and hopes for ancient language pedagogy. So my critical comments in these posts should be read as friendly wounds (I hope).

So, what is new/distinct about Grasso's grammar (okay, let's not call it that! What about RGD). He outlines 5 features in his preface:

1. He doesn't have years of experience in Koine Greek teaching, but in linguistics, and so his point of reference is linguistics not the silo'd world of "New Testament Greek". Big tick from me on this.
2. It's not "morphology" followed by "exegesis", it's a book written with the conviction that "Greek should be taught primarily as a language to be used." Two ticks from me.
3. It incorporates science on learning itself. That involves cognitive learning strategies and SLA theory. Another tick.
4. The 'workbook' for this textbook is Biblingo. It's designed to complement that.
5. It's open access. I downloaded it for free. Big kudos for this. It's free, which makes it priceless.

I want to stop and comment on point four. I think Biblingo falls short of its promise, because to be frank it really feels like a glorified version of "sentence-level flashcards" with pictures and audio. I don't think that is enough of a learning environment to genuinely create enough communicative input for learners to really get somewhere with that alone. In fact, I think this is probably the problem with most app-based learning - apps can only do so much, and Biblingo can't bear enough weight on its own to sustain learning. I'm welcome to hear push-back on this, but I think Biblingo isn't living up to its own ideals, or its promises.

I suppose this is the point that I tell you that I have a Biblingo account, paid out of my own money. I have no other association with Biblingo.

But these are indeed very good reasons for a new textbook, and I'm excited to see what this one holds. So, onward we go.

In the introduction which follows, some of the same points are touched upon, but more with the user in mind. I do not a mention of a 4-volume deeper work in the future, a comprehensive grammar of Greek and Hebrew. Well, we will wait for that!

Still in the intro, Grasso introduces linguistics. Bravo. Every NT student needs to understand basic linguistics, and often they don't encounter anything like linguistics in their grammar textbooks. He goes on to explain in simple but not dumbed-down language what the major subdomains of linguistics are. I particularly enjoyed this sentence:

"Students are often frustrated with Greek not because Greek is itself difficult, but the methods employed in Greek classrooms are known in SLA to be poor ways of learning a language. These sections have been written to educate you on how to learn languages efficiently and effectively, so that you can be empowered to take control of your own language learning." (p. 11)

Lessons 1-9

I don't intend to give you anything like a page by page treatment of the book, you can read it for yourself. What I will do is group some of my observations by section, for easier reference.

The presentation of each lesson is relatively brief. It's descriptive, and the actual "learning material" of this textbook is really Biblingo, and associated materials. Each lesson introduces a number of 'unrelated' grammar topics. This is better pedagogically, but it means you can't easily use the textbook as a reference grammar. On the whole, the adoption of a linguistics-grounded approach is very welcome. And so, for instance, we talk about verbs taking "arguments" instead of the clumsy and unhelpful language of direct and indirect objects or the like.

After lesson 3 we get what I think are interlude sections. They cover a variety of topics and are deeper dives, and the first is SLA. It is so pleasing to see a Greek textbook take SLA theory seriously, engage it, explain its principles, and teach students how to learn a language. Part of the massive problem Greek, Latin, and other historical languages have is that the whole edifice and tradition of teaching and learning them has little to no engagement with SLA. Much of this is shaped by Paul Nation's 4-strand approach. If I could quibble, I'm not sure that Language-focused learning "is essentially the grammar-translation method." Grasso also spends some time here contrasting his/Biblingo's methodology against a traditional LFL/GTM model, and on the other hand a living language methodology, exemplified by the Biblical Language Center, and the Polis Institute. Both excellent examples of that methodology. He does identify problems with their approach, three:

1. "Immersion guarantees input, but it does not guarantee meaning-focused input" (p.40) or, said otherwise, staying in the target language makes it difficult to ensure differentiated instruction where all students are understanding enough of the input.
2. Lack of LFL. BLC doesn't do explicit LFL, and Polis does it in the target language.
3. Little attention to fluency development, that is deverloping automaticity and speed.

For these reasons, Grasso/Biblingo (a) includes LFL material because they believe that some amount of explicit grammar instruction is useful. (I agree). And (b) specific fluency-targeted activities. I don't do that because I think there are a number of complicating factors with, e.g. timed activities.

On p47-48 we are first introduced to aspect. Grasso treats aspect as a relationship between Eventuality Time and Reference time, and uses imperfective/perfective labels for this. I think this explanation probably makes good sense to students and he includes more detailed explanation elsewhere.

Interlude 2, after chapter 6 (they come every three chapters) provides a more systematic introduction to accents, which have been treated throughout. Again, it is pleasing to see a textbook not neglect accents but rather give them due space (side-glance at Duff who deletes them from his Greek text).

In ch 7 we get introduced to the medio-passive voice.I don't entirely agree with the treatment here. Grasso goes into more depth in the interlude "Syntax B" (p. 256-262). I think his position is based in solid work, and involves thinking about arguments and roles, and how that differs for middle and passive voice. At the same time, there's no discussion or reference to Rutger Allen, Suzanne Kemmer, or Rachel Aubrey, which are the kinds of works that have shaped my view.

He also discusses the term "deponen(t/cy)". In Grasso's view, it's right to set aside the traditional sense of "middle in form but active in meaning", but given that broader linguistics is happy to use "deponent" to mean "middle in form with no active counterpart form", argues that we should not abandon the term but reclaim it in line with how it's used in broader linguistics. I suppose I am not terribly opposed to that, but given how often and how incorrectly deponency has been taught, it probably behoves NT Greek teachers to, a-hem, set aside the term for a spell.

Interlude 3 gets us into Lexical Semantics, with a discussion about how to think about, and analyse, nouns and verbs. Grasso introduces us to aktionsart and argument structure. Again, not terms you hear in most first year textbooks! He gives examples an explanations of telicity, stativity, duratives, and so on.

Given that this is a 620 page book, I think that's enough for part one of my review. I look forward to reading more and discussing it with you all.

Like many teaching situtions that I find myself in, much of this was not of my own creation. I was brought in as a relatively last-minute instructor, only got access to the syllabus to rewrite it about two weeks before semester began, and inherited students who had already been using Duff. The class was small, and online.

Duff may not be the worst textbook, but it is certainly the worst Greek textbook I've ever 'used'. Duff's goal is to teach you the bare minimum and only the minimum to enable to you translate New Testament passages. That's why he eschews accents (but not breathings?), and leaves all sorts of things out that probably belong in a first-year grammar textbook. His grammatical treatments oversimplify, occasionally misrepresent, and in some cases are simply wrong (mostly outdated). In terms of imagined pedagogy, I think Duff expects you to do all the usual Grammar-Translation things: memorise the vocab and grammar rules, and then apply them like alchemy: the vocab is your raw resources, the grammar is your magic, and the transformation is turning Greek sentences into English ones, and vice versa.

What to do with such a textbook? How to teach from it? Well, I ended up in something of a hybrid position, and I think that's the best I could manage in the situation. It's hard to shift students who have started with one pedagogical method to embrace another, and harder still when there are certain "inherited givens" in a course.

I did mostly jettison actually teaching Duff, presenting them instead with grammatical overviews drawn from my own years of teaching but covering the same ground. That meant, for example, that my students were given a much more up-to-date treatment of aspect and voice, which are two main areas that older books just are wrong about.

I tried, too, to have them read sections of my Galilaiathen reader, and to teach some basic Greek sentence-based-questions, to at least move them towards a more communicative approach. I think in this I was hampered by overall time available.

Beyond that, I encouraged the reading of as much comprehensible NT greek as possible.

I think one of the problems with all university-style language courses is the factor of time. And I have long thought the following about it, and written as much here and there. In what I think of as a 'standard' college type program, a notional 3-hours of contact with an instructor is meant to mean a further 9 hours of individual study, for 12 total hours per week. That's what the handbooks lay out for humanities subjects. That's why 4 subjects should be a full-time load, because that would be a 48-hour week. Sure, no arts student is doing that, but anyway. Of course, in the sciences the expected independent study time is less, because you are filling up more of the notional 12 hours with labs and pracs and so on.

Language shouldn't be timetabled like other humanities subjects. It should fill up those 12 hours with language activities: reading, listening, watching (a/v material), conversing, and some writing. Those hours should be communicative. In my ideal world, actually teaching explicit grammar is probably the smallest slice of those 12 hours, and it's not using "prime teacher time", it's off-loaded to students working through grammatical explanations on their own time and then bringing questions to the instructor. Instructor-led time is best used for in-language communicative work.

Of course, funding this is also likely impossible. But if you were a student who wanted to learn Greek, I would tell you to spend your 9 hours outside of class building a communicative eco-system to let you do this anyway.

Anyway, to return to my particular class, there was simply no way I felt capable of reframing or recasting the course to do this kind of work, and so it was left to us to do the best with what we had: a bit of communicative work, a better framework for understanding grammar, enough exposure to meaningful texts to keep progressing, and hopefully some useful tools for ongoing acquisition.

Assessment

I mostly hate assessments in formal education. I have a philosophical and pedagogical prejudice against them, informed by reading a few books on the topic, to the point that I mostly consider them a relatively-useless imposition by external forces. I won't go in to making the case against most assessment here, but I consider it largely pointless. Nevertheless, it must be done. So I took the syllabus I inherited, and tweaked it slightly as best I could. That mostly meant replacing two tasks with oral assessments.

In hindsight, having the second half of their oral final be an unseen passage was probably too demanding, or at least too demoralising. Especially since I did not give them the benefit of any vocab helps on less familiar words. I suppose it is like the experience of getting to the end of Athenaze, feeling like you've learnt all this Greek, then they give you the Acharnians and you don't understand any of it. It's not very nice to open up a random NT passage and realise you struggle to make heads or tails of it.

At the same time, perhaps it is a humbling reminder (to put a positive spin on it?) that for all your progress, you are still yet a beginner in the language and there is a long slope ahead of you.

These students, and they were wonderful and diligent ones, eager to learn, had by my calculations 72 contact hours of Greek over two semesters (so, only the second 36 with me). To contrast with my own students, if you had 72 contact hours with me you've finished all of Athenaze and taken an extra course as well, and you've spent those 72 hours being spoken to in Greek and responding. Are all my Greek students fluent speakers or readers? No. But they have all experienced a lot more hours in language.

Would I do it again?

I don't know. Perhaps with more control over curriculum design. Give me 36 hours to talk Greek at students and off-load the outside class time to grammar and to extensive reading, and we could get a lot further though. I think that's my take-away. Even within the confines of this system, there are ways we could change the structure of learning to increase the acquisition available.

My next round of classes starts next week. There are still places in quite a few classes. Let me draw your attention to two things:

1) I'm now offering a class on Athanasius' De Decretis. This replaces some other classes that are no longer running. But this one will, so if that's your cup of tea, please join us.

2) There are still some places in my super-cheap LGPSI 2 class. This will cover chapters 10-19 or 20 of the LGPSI revision I am writing. This is the class that makes me write each week, and you get the fun of being the guinea pigs who experience it first. Would love to have some more people in it for the next iteration.

(LGPSI chapters 1-10 release is on its way, I promise. I had aimed for the end of September, but I suspect it will be early October).

I wanted to call today's post this, but I knew I would regret that when searching for my own post in 3 years' time.

Specifically, what do you make of 'double' negation? Do two negatives make a positive? Sometimes...

Since I like to pick on New Testament grammars for being bad, here's some:

Duff: "Note: In Greek, a sentence is either negative or not. If it is negative (i.e. it contains οὐ or μη), then other suitable forms in the sentence will also be in the negative. That is, in Greek two negatives make a negative, not as in English where two negatives make a positive" (Duff, The Elements of New Testament Greek, 150. My current least-favourite NT Greek book)

I looked at Mounce, Decker, Athenaze, and Mastronarde, and couldn't find any discussion of these. Perhaps I was bad at searching, or their indices are substandard. I couldn't find a discussion of this in Wallace either. There's only so many textbooks I can be bothered to search through. So, enough of that...

The Rule

"If there are two or more negatives in one clause, they cancel each other if (and only if):

• the second negative is simple, i.e. not a compound form;
• both negatives belong to the same predicate"

Say a big thank you to The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek (56.3, p648). CGCG gives some fancy examples, I'm going to give you very straightforward ones from the New Testament.

Example 1: Mark 3:27a 

ἀλλʼ οὐ δύναται οὐδεὶς εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν τοῦ ἰσχυροῦ εἰσελθὼν τὰ σκεύη αὐτοῦ διαρπάσαι (THGNT)

But no-one is able to enter into the house of the big beefy guy and ransack his stuff.

The first negative is simple, the second negative is a compound, οὐδείς, and so it specifies and strengthens the first. This is the classic English double negative:

"I didn't say nothing", i.e. οὐκ εἶπον οὐδέν

Perfectly good Greek there.

But let's flip this example, and I'm going to simplify the Greek just a little:

ἀλλʼ οὐδεὶς εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν τοῦ ἰσχυροῦ εἰσελθὼν τὰ σκεύη αὐτοῦ οὐ διαρπάζει

Now the second negative (a) belongs to the same predicate, (b) is simple. Now I'd translate: but no-one enters the tuff bloke's house guy and does not ransack his stuff.

Right, now the scope of negation differs, it sounds like it's a rule that if you go into the strong guy's house, you have to steal his stuff. That's double negation creating a positive.

Example 2: Mark 5:37

καὶ οὐκ ἀφῆκεν οὐδένα μετʼ αὐτοῦ συνακολουθῆσαι εἰ μὴ τὸν Πέτρον καὶ Ἰάκωβον καὶ Ἰωάννην τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἰακώβου.

And he did not permit anyone to accompany him, except Pietro and Jacopo and Gianni, Jacopo's bro.

Here the second negation is compound, it emphasises and specifies the general negation that proceeds. Let's flip it:

καὶ οὐδένα μετ' αὐτοῦ συνακολουθῆσαι οὐκ ἀφῆκεν

And he allowed no-one not to accompany him.

Here the same predicate is involved, but the compound is first, the simple negation follows, and so they cancel out and it sounds like Jesus won't let anyone opt-out of the experience (this is when he goes into a mourning house and raises the dead girl).

Example 3

I made this one up, but it helpfully shows when you might use this kind of specifying double negation:

οὐκ ἦν ἄνθρωπος ἐκεῖ, οὐδὲ ἐγὼ οὐδὲ ἄλλος

There wasn't a person there, not I nor another.

Here it's compound negations, after the first one, and they are clarifying and specifying.

οὔτε ἀνήρ τις οὔτε γυνή τις οὐκ ἦν

Neither a certain man nor a certain woman were not there.

Here instead the negations cancel out, and we're saying something more like, "wink wink, nudge nudge, you know who I am talking about, both he and she were indeed there".

What if I told you there were instances where you had triple negation?

I feel like the above makes a lot of sense. And once you grasp the rule, you'll stop worrying so much about negations, there's a clear pattern to these and you probably figured it out intuitively (don't drag me back into a discussion about grammar and learning!). But there's one case I want to talk about that personally does my head in. CGCG files this under "The infinitive with Verbs of Preventing and Denying" (s51.34f, p599f)

There's a nice example of this in the Italian version of Athenaze, ch 26, Ο ΦΘΟΝΟΣ ΤΩΝ ΘΕΩΝ, where Filipe says this (talking about the death of Kroisos' son:

νῦν δὴ δὲ περὶ τοῦ θανάτου τοῦ υἱοῦ ἀνεγίγνωσκον, καὶ οὐχ οἷός τ’ ἦν μὴ οὐκ οἰκτῑ́ρειν αὐτὸν καὶ δακρῡ́ειν.

This is a negated construction that is similar to a verb of preventing (because here we are talking about being unable to not do something; this is hiding in CGCG 51.37)

Just now I was reading about his son's death, and I couldn't not pity him and weep.

The construction here does make some sense, in that a verb of preventing typically takes a μὴ + infinitive: ἀπεῖπεν μὴ αὐτὴν ἀπιέναι he forbid her to leave. But the with the addition of the οὐ to the matrix verb, the prevented/denied verb (which is now not prevented, takes μὴ οὐ.

Not to be mistaken for the οὐ μή + subjunctive which expresses emphatic denial, οὐ μὴ γεύσωνται θανάτου (Mark 9:1) they will certainly not taste death.

Well, that's all I have for you on negation in Ancient Greek. Questions? Comments? Tricky cases? At least, I hope, the logic of when double negation cancels and when it emphasises/specifies/clarifies is at least a little clearer.

I'll be running two of my introductory Athenaze courses: 102 and 103, covering chs 9-16 and 17-24 respectively. I will run a new 101 course early in 2027.

I'll also be running two courses using the currently-being-written revision of my LGPSI project. Greek 182 will be my guinea pigs on chapters 11-20, while Greek 181 get the benefit of being second-round test subjects.

I have two intermediate/advanced Greek classes on offer: Athanasius' De Decretis, and an extensive-reading group tackling Juan Coderch's translation of The Little Prince.

For Latin, I have a continuing course for Familia Romana, 104, and a reading group for the second half of Iter Subterraneum.

All course details can be found from the Courses page.

If you are interested in Old Irish, I'm still working out details with Dr. Felici about possible class arrangements.

An online Old Irish class

This is an invitation or call for interest: would you like to try learning Old Irish as a spoken/living language?

I had the opportunity to talk with Francesco this week, and asked him about his background, history with languages, what lead him to this work with Old Irish, and what projects might be coming down the pipeline (answer: several!)

I also floated the idea with him of running an online class in Old Irish using a communicative approach. As I have myself experienced, one of the best ways to road-test material is to put it into practice with students and see what works, and what doesn't.

He was open to the idea, and so I said I would see if I could garner interest. And hence this post. I realise my usual readership is more interested in Ancient Greek, some Latin, and broader linguistics, but if you'd consider an online class in Old Irish, let me know below:

The 'problem' such as it presents

The phrasing of the problem, especially in the form that Hurt presented it, is the "why classical languages when indigenous languages all around us are dying?" That question immediately conflates two questions or issues which I believe we should hold as distinct before we put them in relation.

The first of these is "why learn a classical language?" Every teacher of classical Greek and/or Latin in a classroom setting has to face this question because they must face reality of convincing students, parents, and school administrations of the value of doing so. Most of the traditional reasons given so are problematic: teaching you to think critically, improving your English, making you better at 'grammar', equipping you for science or law, etc. etc.. Either the claim is specious at best, or it applies equally well to any other language in its place. Still, a case must be made positively for why, and individual reasons may vary. For my part, the simplest and broadest reason to learn a language is that it provides entry to a language's culture-of-communication. In the case of Latin, you are provided entry to the ongoing predominantly literary conversation of over 2000 years. If that's a communicative-culture you want entry to, to read its literary products of any sort, then learn Latin.

The second question is completely different, "should you care about minority language death?" And even there, there is a bundle of issues bound up in it. I think that Hurt is right in that language diversity is feature not bug, though the history of thinking "if only we all spoke the same language" persists in more enlightened (please let us all learn Esperanto) and more vicious (monoculturalist racism and linguistic prejudice) forms. It is, to my mind, a great tragedy and a moral one at that, to witness the death of indigenous languages in Australia, most of which are in tremendous peril and whose deaths can be placed directly at the feet of Australian's colonial legacy (and present).

And yet what is the connection between these two? Is it of the order "How can you say you love chickens while eating KFC?" or more of the non-sequitur of "Do you care about the destruction of the rainforest and yet you are playing basketball?"

The other problem

There is a second problem that Hurt attempted to address in her paper. The demands of the Australian Curriculum, particularly in its latest versions, imposes a requirement that virtually all subjects seek to make relevant connections to Australian Aboriginal culture, history, and content. It has been very difficult for classical languages to do so. In Latin, there are scarcely any pieces of Latin content that directly engage Australia, let alone indigenous issues. Teachers in schools in Australia have this demand imposed from on-high, and have to find a way to respond to it.

This isn't a problem I can fix for teachers in school settings. Instead I want to suggest that it's misguided and wrong.

When we talk about learning a language we are also inevitably talking about learning a culture, because language and culture are intertwined. And in becoming a user of a language, every learner co-constructs a new social identity in that language. Whether we conceive of this as an additional added identity, or the emergence of a multiplex identity, or whatever, and the sociological and psychological dimensions of this idea are not to be underestimated, to become a speaker is to become some kind of person in that language's speaking-community.

Doing so is an act of cross-cultural communication and translation, because you bring with you points of contact from your already-acquired languages and their speaker-community cultures: who you are. And you are entering into a new speaker-community. For those students who are indigenous Australians, that cross-cultural connection and negotiation already involves the kind of 'content' and 'contact' the curriculum is asking for. For those students who aren't, to insert it there is an act of tokenism and a bizarre intrusion.

Although Latin has had a continuous active spoken tradition, it does not have a living community with native-speaker transmission. Moreso, ancient Greek does not have a living speaker-community with parent-child transmission. That means there are specific issues about 'becoming' a speaker that do not apply in other contexts. Learners are co-constructing their speaker-identity in a community where (99.99%) of other speakers are also L2 speakers. This point will become important as I will return to it later.

Fixed pies

I return now to the question that I raised in part one, of what kind of connection there is between minority language death and classical languages. The contention often is if you are putting time into 'dead' languages, you are taking resources away from living ones.

Hurt addressed this in part by discussing the 'fixed pie mentality'. I.e, there's only so much pie, and so pie for Latin and Greek means less pie for other languages. Aboriginal languages are, for the most part, starving.

Furthermore, Hurt contests that this is a fallacy, or at least we should adopt a less fixed mindset. E.g., someone who learns one L2, often gets the taste for languages and linguistics, and can go on and will often go on to learn other languages. Learning/Teaching/Promoting Latin and ancient Greek doesn't have to be a zero-sum game and we shouldn't think of it that way.

I want to affirm partial agreement and resounding sympathy for this position. Yet, at the end of the day we also have to reckon with various forms of scarcity and competition. Funding resources are a fixed pie, as school-based teachers well know.

More importantly, languages compete for speakers/users and for the time and domains they utilise a language in. To truly see competent users of Latin and Greek means those learners are not 'available' or at least 'not as available' to be learners or speakers of Aboriginal languages, or other minority language users. That is a stark reality.

Yet, a far more important question is this how many of these potential students are actually potential students of Australian Aboriginal languages and contributors to language revitalisation efforts?

Language, culture, identity, and revitalisation

I am fortunately blessed in my life to have learn two minority languages with living speaker continuity: Mongolian and Scottish Gaelic. I learnt the former by living in Mongolia and learning in situ, and co-creating a social identity as a foreigner there accepted and welcomed as a teacher within a sub-community; I learnt the latter through long, ongoing study via distance, and I have a distinct social identity as a Gael and Gaelic-user. Through my studies of Gaelic, I have also pursued higher education through the medium of Gaelic, including issues related to post-colonialism, minority language politics and policy, language revitalisation, and so on. These inform my perspective on the following.

Who gets to determine who gets to learn a language? With Latin and ancient Greek I do not believe there are or should be any meaningful gatekeepers, but it is more complicated with indigenous languages. I don't presume that any and all comers are entitled to learn an indigenous language and 'make it their own'. There are questions of cultural ownership, legitimacy, and identity bound up in Australian Aboriginal languages that should not be ignored.

Furthermore, language revitalisation, or even revival, is bloody hard. Read accounts of language revitalisation efforts and you'll soon see how hard it is. I don't think we should at all underestimate this, because genuine language revitalisation requires some hardy language activists to go pretty all-in in their efforts, and take a community along with them for the journey.

So we are kidding ourselves if we think that we can somehow address this in a meaningful way by either 'helping' divert some resources from classical language teaching, or inspiring learners to go on and learn yet another language, or providing a tokenistic appropriation of indigenous cultural identity and artefacts within the classical languages curriculum.

To return to my question at the end of part one, whether you play basketball has little to no effect on deforestation of the world's rainforests. But you should care about the latter regardless. I propose that this might work itself out in three primary ways for teachers of historical languages.

Firstly, there are important histories of imperialism, culturalism, language shift and language death woven through the classical and not-so-classical histories of Latin, ancient Greek, and other major historical languages. These are points of cross-cultural contact, to discuss with students what linguistic imperialism looks like, why languages die and how they are killed, and what resistance to this might look like. It can be done in your target language and using your target language texts. Romans had plenty of things to say about doing their version of anthropology.

Secondly, you can actively draw some teaching methodologies from language revitalisation workers, including the famous WAYK. In doing so, you can draw student attention to these endeavours. You might also, nobly, seek to fund some of these efforts out of the goodness of your hearts.

Thirdly, you can raise issues around language, identity, culture, revitalisation, and world languages more broadly, and discuss with students how those issues intersect with their languages, both L1s, heritage languages, other L2s, and the language you teach. That can be, and should be, a bridge to making them aware of these and related issues pertaining to the Aboriginal Australian languages.

Hurt finished her presentation by arguing that a proper 'liberal humanities' underpinning to classical language education, that is critical thinking, engagement with texts, pursuit of justice, and so on forms the kind of people that are also committed to the foundations of Reconciliation (as understood in the Australian context), and that this ultimately is the 'point of connection'. I share Hurt's commitment to that kind of liberal humanities education, and virtue formation, and how it undergirds minority language revitalisation.

And so I have little interest in appeasing the Australian Curriculum's tokenistic efforts to make sure every subject has some bit of Australian Aboriginal cultural and historical connection. I think it's a pedagogical sham. We can do better than that, by engaging the substance of these questions and pursuing a fuller vision of Reconciliation in our society, including reparations, and a part of that may be supporting and enabling genuine efforts towards language revitalisation.

This year's theme was "textbooks", and although I missed the first session, there were a lot of papers that only tangentially touched that theme anyway. But it got me thinking, which is always good.  I have a lot of opinions on textbooks, and I also own a lot of them. But before I spout of opinions on textbooks, it behoves us to take a step back and ask what is a textbook for?

 Language textbooks have a long and complicated history. Whether it’s the colloquia of the middle ages, of 15th century primers, there has long been an interest in compiling teaching materials into a more enduring, and transmissible form. For this post, I want to look at this through a few lenses. So, textbook as repository of declarative knowledge, textbook as teacher stand-in, textbook as input delivery system, textbook as toolbox, textbook as map.

Repository of declarative knowledge

I think the first way we tend to look at textbooks is that they are the things we store the knowledge in. Here's a book of knowledge, and it's going to tell you the stuff you are supposed to know, and you will take that knowledge out of the book, off the page, and into your head. This particularly reflects a world in which books were our data storage. Where else would you store information? A book is a convenient way of writing down all the things.

It's still very much the way we often think about textbooks. That the book has all the information, in an authoritative way, and you go to the book to get the knowledge.

Teacher stand-in

But there are other ways to think about textbooks, especially language textbooks. One of those is that a textbook stands in for a teacher. If language education is about some kind of transfer or led-experience, then a textbook does what a teacher cannot. For example when there is no teacher. Or when a teacher is not up to the task. Or when there is one teacher and many learners. In these and many more situations, the textbook is written in a way, or sometimes just used in such a way, that it mimics what a teacher would do. The textbook in this way of imagining it is the teaching agent.

Input delivery system

A different type of textbook is one where the textbook itself is giving lots of in-language content. This kind of textbook contains within itself lots of material that the learner is to read (or hear) as a means of learning the language. This can work in concert with the two previous ideas of the textbook, or stand alone. But the main feature of a textbook like this is quantity of target-language material for the learner to engage with.

Textbook as map

Another way we might think of a textbook is as a map. That is, it shows us the terrain of a subject, and where we might go and how we might get there. In language, that might be the explanatory presentation of grammar, which is a map of how the language is used. But it might also function as a map in other ways, charting a course of learning as a journey.

Textbook as toolbox

In a different vein, we might conceive of the textbook as a toolbox. Not as a rigid set of exercises, but as a varied set of deployable tools that do different jobs, solve different problems, and in language learning, move us along in various and complementary ways. A textbook like this offers variety and flexibility in solving problems.

Where to?

One of the things that I think considering textbooks under different conceptual models allows us to do, is to reconsider precisely (a) how we use textbooks that already exist, but also (b) what a textbook could be. And maybe there are other ways that we can think about textbooks! Would love to hear from you - are there other ways you think about (language) textbooks? Do you have a favourite textbook, for whatever reason? Things you love or loathe?

Lately, however, I was thinking a little more about it, in conjunction with my ongoing reading of Felici's thesis. Old Irish has 66 phonemes. That's quite a lot. Scottish Gaelic does have 67 though, English around 44, I would put Ancient Greek at 25 consonants, 13 vowels, and a problematic number of diphthongs.

Of course, this depends upon your period and analysis of Greek pronunciation. Anyway, on the Old Irish side of the equation, this is one of the challenges for learners of Old Irish (including me): you need to learn a range of phonemes many of which are not distinguished or produced in your native language (L1), and you have not much in the way of audio. As I think about Felici's proposal for OI living language materials, it seems clear that extensive and high-quality audio is essential.

But lately I have been thinking a lot more about Ancient Greek as well. One of the problem learners face is typically φ/π/β and the parallel sets of χ/κ/γ and θ/τ/δ. It is much easier for most L1 English speakers to use fricatives, and then ignore aspiration on π,κ,τ, but if you want to adopt an attic restored pronunciation, then it's not that φ,χ,θ are difficult, it's that learning to de-aspirate π,κ,τ is difficult, especially in word-initial positions, and also to make sure that they remain distinct from β,γ,δ.

In the second half of 2025 as part of my Gaelic degree, we did a relatively (semi-technical but not all the way) deep dive into (Scottish) Gaelic phonology. This was done through the medium of Gaelic by the way. It was very helpful, partly because it also illuminated to me some features of Gaelic orthography.

Of course, learning how to produce particular sounds is not quite the same as learning to perceive particular sounds, and this has bearing on any L2, including Ancient Greek. So I got to wondering what sort of research and interventions exist for this.

I should have known better. There is a considerable amount of SLA work on these issues. From my relatively recent foray into that literature there are (naturally) competing theories about how these (perception and production in particular) relate, especially when learning an L2. This includes James Flege's Speech Learning Model, which if I understand it correctly posits that because an L2-learner doesn't come as a blank slate to an L2's phonemic system, how they distinguish L2 sounds depends in part upon distance/nearness to the phonemic categories in their L1. Learners need to develop new perceptual categories in order to also produce distinct sounds. Flege and Bohn's revised model argues that the interaction of L1 and L2 categories over time allows adults to form new phonetic categories.

Catherine Best's Perceptual Assimilation Model helps us because how an L2's sounds map to a learner's already existing categories, determines how difficult it is going to be to learn contrasts in the L2 sound system. E.g., because /p/ and /pʰ/ are perceived as /p/, it is going to remain hard for an English speaker to hear and/or produce them as distinct.

I don't have any experience in what I'm about to propose, but if you do I'd love to hear from you. One way to tackle this might be to apply High Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT). HVPT primarily tackles perception, not production, but it's built on the idea that exposure to multiple speakers producing 'the same' sound helps to train the learner to perceive the relevant distinctions. Because the multiple speakers have a natural degree of variation, the listener learns to focus on what is common, which is the contrasting sound they need to distinguish. There are some meta-analyses of HVPT which supports its efficacy for perception, and some research to suggest it might improve production as well (especially if you throw in some explicit articulatory training).

The problem for ancient Greek remains. You would need a number of speakers to record audio, each committed to realising the same pronunciation scheme, each with a pretty good ability to produce those distinctions, and then you'd need to organise that amount of sound into a discrete learning intervention. I don't think I have the time or energy to do that.

Which might be disappointing to hear, but perhaps it's a task someone will take up in the future. In the meantime, a little bit of attention to understanding the phonology of the language, learning to produce different sounds, and listening to whatever good audio recordings you can find, is probably the package of things I'd recommend you do.

You might be aware there are some guidelines on how many guided hours one needs to reach certain CEFR proficiency levels. For English it runs something like: A1 - 100, A2 - 200, B1 - 400, B2 - 600, C1 - 800, C2 - 1000-1200. (You might be aware of the FSI hours guide, which has never seen much verification, but it puts the hours for truly difficult languages up to around 2,200 for category 4, which is where I suspect Old Irish would end up.).

Guided hours means under immediate guidance or supervision from an instructor. So this hour count doesn't include independent study hours which are more difficult to judge. Those hours also vary slightly based on language.

There's another article I often come back to on this topic, which is Geortler, Kraemer, Schenker, 'Setting Evidence-Based Language Goals', Foreign Language Annals Vol 49, Is 3, pp 434-454, 2016. They were looking at setting benchmarks and outcomes for the German program at MSU, but their research both looks at some of this data, and puts it into the context of a university language program.

I was intrigued, reading Felici's thesis, by the comments on p134, of AVN allocating 150 contact hours for Familia Romana, and Polis Institute 120 hours to their first book. If you've seen Polis Book 1, you'll know it doesn't cover that much grammar, and there are 2 follow-on volumes. Familia Romana does cover a lot, grammar wise, and a lot of text.

By contrast, I cover all of 2-volumes of Athenaze in 60 contact hours, and all of Familia Romana in 40 hours. Neither feels truly sufficient, and I am aware both that (i) I'm relying on students putting in a significant amount of independent work to make the most of class time, (ii) the level of oral proficiency that I can expect from students after that introductory sequence ought to be relatively low.

I am not entirely sure what alternative there is in this kind of context though. Nobody except full-time students can really dedicate the time required to get a lot of contact hours, and thus exposure to living language, to develop oral proficiency to a decent level in a shorter amount of time. There are limits to what time people can devote to a language, short of making it a priority. And whether one does or not, it all requires not only time, but money.

Felici discusses his own experience with a traditional sequence of Old Irish - 100 contact hours of 4 semesters, barely enough to cover the grammar and morphosyntax itself. I think Ancient Greek begins to look easy by comparison, and Latin even more so. But none of this obviates the need for time spent in the language.

150 or 120 hours with Familia Romana or Polis book 1 is still, by the way, only really enough to probably get you to A1 or a bit beyond on the CEFR scale. If you do 120 hours as an intensive, that's 6hrs/day, 5d/week, 4-weeks. If you start to multiply that by the proficiency levels, we are talking months of full-time language study to get to the higher levels. Alternatively, at 2 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, you could get to 1000 hours in 10.4 years.

I think this kind of calculation is useful, but not that useful. Because we mostly aren't doing this kind of thing to this extent. And although 'C2 Ancient Greek' is one of my personal goals, you don't have to get to superior mastery of a language to read and enjoy Ancient Greek literature broadly. Honestly, getting students to B1 and maybe B2 will serve most people's needs. It's still just a lot of hours.

As I reflect on different materials I am developing and my own practice as a language learner and what might be possible as a facilitator of others' language learning, I think part of this must be finding ways to help learners' independent hours be better bang-for-buck. So, as an instructor I want to ask myself, "what is best practice for facilitating language acquisition during live instructor-led hours?" but as a guide and resource creator for others, "what is best practice for language learners to do on their own outside and apart from instructor-led hours?"

1. How many 'words' do you need to 'know' to reach certain proficiency milestones in Ancient Greek?
2. How many exposures to a word do you need to (a) passively recognise a word, (b) actively recall a word?
3. How many words do you need to read to reach those exposure-points for certain milestones?

If you're familiar with this kind of work, you'll know that it rests solidly on the extensive research of Paul Nation in this area. That's where I'm starting from, and I'm thinking about how this applies both broadly and narrowly, in terms of grading reading programs, and total words vs words known.

Whenever I have a question like this, I always figure that the best person to ask is James Tauber, because if he doesn't know the answer, either he knows who does, or how to calculate it, or most often "I was working on this X years ago, here's an old post about it."

Which is exactly the case here, in fact he and I discussed this 7 years' ago. The numbers differ across different corpora, but if I summarise some of the findings from that earlier work:

For the New Testament, you cross 95% at 2000 lemmas, 98% around 3000.

For all of Perseus / OGL in 2019, it's 95% at somewhere between 4-5000 lemmas, 98% at 8000 lemmas.

There's a very, very long tail in Greek literature, which means that you never stop meeting new words, The fact that it's 8k lemmas at 98.00% but then 20k at 99.75% tells you how you'll never quite get there! (

Nation does has a an attempt to correlate CEFR levels and Vocabulary sizes, which you can access on this page. There he also cites some research. Just looking at Nation's suggested vocabulary sizes, and noting that he is estimating on the high side compared to others, I think that is probably reasonably comparable to Ancient Greek. Whatever morphological savings you get from a richly inflected language, seem to be somewhat cancelled out by the breadth of Ancient Greek words.

To replicate Nation's table in brief:

A1 - 120 survival words

A2 - Most frequent 1000 word families

B1 - 2-3000k

B2 - 4k

C1 - 5-6k

C2 - 7-9k

But what do you need to learn that many words? Nation's 2014 article, 'How much input do you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words?' attempts to answer this.

Using 'buckets' of 1000 words, and corpus data, with the assumption that you need at least 12 repetitions, Nation calculates:

2k words: 171,411.

3k words: 300,219

4k words: 534, 697

5k words: 1,061,382.

6k words: 21,450,068.

7k words: 2,035,809.

8k words: 2,427,807.

9k words: 2,956,908.

So, if you want to get to the point of reading almost all of Greek literature with 98% vocabulary comprehension, you need to also probably read around 3 million words of Ancient Greek. But even to get to 4-5k lemmas, where you would have 95% coverage, you need 500k-1 million words of reading.

Here is the question I keep asking myself as a result of all this: how to provide scaffolded and graded reading to help students read the first 100k, 200k, 300k to build their vocabulary from zero to 'I can read authentic ancient texts without much help'?

More on this in later posts.