Gregory Crane Tufts University March 25 Gregory.Crane@tufts.edu
Tufts University will offer two different sections of introductory
Ancient Greek in fall 2022, each of which takes a complementary
approach. Both sections of the class have been designed to exploit
increasingly powerful digital tools for understanding Ancient Greek and
other languages — the skills that you learn will also help you exploit,
and go far beyond, what you can do with translation, whether those are
literary translations by human beings or the product of systems such as Google Translate or DeepL.
Both sections build directly on an emerging new version of the Perseus
Digital Library. Neither section has any prerequisites.
The first section will follow a textbook and will teach you to
produce, as well as to understand, ancient Greek. It will, however, also
give students far more exposure to ancient Greek source texts from the
opening weeks of the semester. The second section, which will be online
at a time to be determined, will focus on exploiting increasingly
sophisticated digital tools to analyze ancient Greek sources.
Figure
1: the first line of the Iliad with exhaustive annotation in a new
reading environment being developed for the Perseus Digital Library,
with translations and glosses into English and Persian. More than 1
million words of Greek has this level of linguistic annotation.
The first section follows a traditional textbook but exploits a range
of digital methods to enhance the experience of learning Ancient Greek,
providing substantial immediate feedback as you practice traditional
exercises. Instead of translating Greek into English or English into
Greek and then waiting days for correction, you will be able to receive
substantial feedback. We will also spend as much time possible seeing
how the vocabulary and grammar are used in actual Greek sources and
minimize use of artificial textbook Greek. The goal is to give you
active as well as passive command of the Greek. This section is better
suited to your needs if you feel you may wish to go beyond first year
Greek. It will meet Mondays and Wednesdays 3:00-4:15 PM local time.
This section will be primarily in person but will be open to those
who wish to participate remotely. If you are at an institution where you
can cross-register with Tufts (such as Boston College or Brandeis), you
would not have to travel across town — scheduling may prevent you from
taking your local introduction to Greek or you may wish to participate
in this novel approach. Those seeking credit should be able do so
through Tufts’ University College.
Figure
2: A translation of Iliad 1 by Amelia Parrish (Tufts ’21) designed to
be aligned at the word and phrase level with the Greek original to
expose the working of the source language.
The second section will meet online at a time to be determined. It
will focus entirely on reading and is designed for those who may have
only one year — or even one semester — to study Ancient Greek. This
second section represents a more radical departure from traditional
approaches as it focuses on annotated texts themselves and could be
applied to any corpus with sufficient annotation. After one semester,
practice with digitally enabled tools will allow you to compare a
translation of Homeric epic to the original Greek, to explore what the
words really mean in Homeric Greek (end not just how they are
translated), and to engage with the epics on your own. In the second
semester, you will be able to move on to more syntactically complex
sources such as Plato.
If space allows, we would particularly encourage participation in
this online section by students from outside of Tufts. We want to
understand how to apply this more radical departure from traditional
pedagogy. We are building on work done by Farnoosh Shamsian, Phd student
at the University of Leipzig and participants in this class will be
contributing not only to her research but to an ongoing reimagining of
how we work with historical languages.
Figure
3: Metrical analysis for the Iliad and Odyssey (and much else)
published by David Camberlain, with a recording of Camberlain reading
those lines: see the original with recording at Hypotactic.com.
We are aware of no modern language programs that will provide such
transferable skills. You will not only learn how to work with sources in
Ancient Greek but will have tools to analyze Latin as well as modern
languages such as French, German, and Italian but also Croatian and
Latvian, Arabic and Mandarin. Our goal is not to help you check into a
hotel or order dinner. Our goal is to allow you to work directly and
quickly with not only Ancient Greek primary sources but with scholarship
about these sources in a variety of modern languages. Our goal is to
transform who can participate in traditional scholarship about the
Greco-Roman world and then to enable new forms of scholarship and new
intellectual communities that were never possible in print culture.
Description of this version of Greek 1 as it appears in the course book for the Department of Classical Studies at Tufts University.
Greek 1: Fall 2022 Introduction to Ancient Greek Section 1: Monday/Wednesday 1:30-2:45 Section 2: To be scheduled. Gregory Crane, Professor of Classical Studies, Editor-in-Chief, Perseus Digital Library Christopher Petrik, Tufts ’24 Farnoosh Shamsian, Phd Candidate, Leipzig University
The
rise of digital methods and, increasingly, of machine learning has
begun to enable a transformation in the study of Ancient Greek. What you
can learn in an introduction to Ancient Greek can be far greater now
than was ever possible before. At the same time, what you can do with
what you learn will take you much farther now than was possible before.
Tufts University has been at the forefront of this transformation. In
taking Ancient Greek, you not only can benefit from this work but will
have an opportunity to contribute yourself, creating during the course
of first year Greek materials that will serve other language learners
and advanced researchers alike.
You will have more exposure to
authentic Greek in this introductory class than has ever been.
Exhaustive annotation exists explaining the function of more than a
million words of Ancient Greek while a new generation of translations,
designed to clarify the working of Greek for those who do not know the
language makes it possible to see how grammar and vocabulary actually
work in some of the most famous works of Greek literature, from the time
you learn your first words. The very same methods that you learn to
begin working with Ancient Greek have been applied to dozens of other
languages
A major barrier to learning historical languages has
been the slow pace and limited reach of the feedback that you receive.
You do an assignment one day, hand it in the next, and then see how you
did in the next class, two days or more later. When you practice what
you have learned, you will often be able to get immediate feedback and
then be able to practice what you have learned until you have mastered
it.
We offer two different sections, each with a
complementary approach aimed to serve different audiences. The first
section builds off of a traditional textbook, offering all exercises
online with immediate feedback. Class time will be devoted to questions
that you cannot resolve on your own and to seeing how what we have
learned in class helps us begin to understand real texts. Students will
also begin working with short passages from the Iliad and Odyssey,
Sophocles, Thucydides, Plato, and the New Testament. The second section
is designed to support those who may be able to devote only a year or
even a semester to the study of Ancient Greek. You will learn enough of
the grammar to understand the basic working of highly inflected
languages such as Ancient Greek (and Latin and Russian and many other
languages) but you will spend most of your time learning how to apply
the rich set of tools available to help you read Ancient Greek – and
many other languages. If you do choose to continue your study beyond the
first year, we will provide you with a framework by which you can do
that.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
Posts
Stumble It!
No comments:
Post a Comment