Saturday, March 07, 2009

Internet resources for Latin study


*Internet resources for the study of Latin and Greek:*

* *

Perseus:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection.jsp?collection=Perseus:collection:Greco-Rom
an


Texts, translations, grammars, dictionaries,....



Diogenes: http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/

An excellent dictionary and morphological tool for Greek and Latin



Textkit: http://www.textkit.com/

Provides a lot of Greek and Latin learning materials, grammars,
dictionaries, textbooks, annotated texts and more.



Latin Library: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com

The Latin Library has many Latin texts for downloading.



Forum Romanum: http://www.forumromanum.org/<;http://forumromanum.org/index2.html>

Deals with many aspects of Roman antiquity and has a useful index of Latin
texts and translations.



Marc Huys: http://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0013314/greekg.htm

Has a fantastic collection of websites related to the study of Greek.



Philippe Remacle <philippe.remacle@skynet.be>: * *http://remacle.org/

Provides classical texts with French translations.



The Little sailing: http://www.mikrosapoplous.gr/en/texts1en.htm

Has lots of Greek texts with various translations.



Chicago Homer: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/homer/splash.html

Excellent for the study of Homer and the Homeric Hymns



*Audio resources*:



ARLT: http://www.arlt.co.uk/dhtml/catalogue.php

The Association for Latin Teaching has produced beautifully read Latin (and
some Greek) passages. They are aimed at GCSE and A-Level students and their
teachers, but are nonetheless great for anyone else interested in the
subject.



Harvard: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~classics/poetry_and_prose/poetry.html


Latin and Greek recitals with texts and notes - very nice.



Wilfried Stroh: http://wiredforbooks.org/aeneid/

Wilfried Stroh dramatically recites the whole of book IV of the Aeneid (Dido
and Aeneas).



Stanley Lombardo: http://wiredforbooks.org/iliad/index.htm

Stanley Lombardo reads all of the first book of the Iliad.



And for a bit of neo-Latin:



Radio Finland: http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii/audi/

Has Nuntii Latinii, a weekly news bulletin in Latin with a Finnish accent,
and


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It is possible to use the Perseus site

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection.jsp?collection=Perseus:collection:Greco-Rom
an


to generate vocabulary frequency lists.
You can select a particular Latin work in their online library, or a
group of works,
or all works by a particular author or all the books in Latin they have.
This produces a list of the words that make up the top xx% (selectable)
of the running text in the selected works. For example there are only
about 275 different words that make up 60% of the running text in
Sallust's History of the Catilinian Conspiracy (there are a few more
than this but the list will include proper names as well), and 400+ that
make up 70%. The number of words increases rapidly as you increase the
percentage.

The list can be made to include a brief definition of the word (the
Perseus lookup is not super on this, there were about 70 words in the
list I generated that had no definition supplied - this is because many
words have too many uses or meanings to easily pin down, or because the
various forms could have been more than one word).
This can be a good place to start for deciding which words you may want
to learn next.

I suggest you include only the word, the weighted frequency value, and
the definition in the table you generate and sort it by frequency so the
most common words are at the top. (there are a lot of technical
statistical things that the lists can include, you will want to turn
those all off in the setup parameters.)

Note that the Sallust text in question contains about 10,000 running
words and 1300 of them occur only once in the whole book, so don't
expect any rapid improvement in the trouble of having to look up lots of
words when reading actual Latin texts :-)

I always suggest finding a good textbook version for the text you are
interested in reading that has lots of vocabulary and grammar
annotations, preferably on the same page as the text. For people just
finishing Wheelock or the equivalent level of textbook. I suggest you
seek out a more advanced 3rd or 4th year text book before trying to
attack original texts on your own. 3rd year books usually introduce you
to Cicero, 4th year books usually attack the Aeneid. Traditionally, 2nd
year Latin courses used to read Caesar's Gallic War and other easier
materials. Even though Wheelock covers most basic important grammar, it
doesn't really include enough reading practice at a controlled level to
have really enabled you to have fully assimilated a lot of the grammar
and vocabulary that it covers, and it really only has a fairly small
total vocabulary.
Most people who have worked through Wheelock on their own probably have
not really actively mastered the included vocabulary but will only have
a passive recognition of many of the words in the second half of the
book. Students who have used it in a classroom context with quizzes and
tests and who have been forced to actually memorize the vocabulary and
master the grammar, are in better shape, but everyone can benefit
greatly from a significant amount of supplementary reading, especially
of the slightly simplified and heavily annotated type. To really master
new vocabulary you need to see the words over and over in various contexts.

The best modern language textbooks always use a large amount of very
carefully designed reading materials which are scientifically designed
to present you with new vocabulary a certain number of times in the
first lesson, and repeat these words again over and over in subsequent
lessons a specifically controlled number of times, until they become
your friends :-)
Latin and Greek textbooks tend to throw a bunch of words at you and then
if you are lucky you will see each word once in that lesson, and some
words may only pop up once or twice in the rest of the book (Reading
Greek in an exception in the earlier sections, but it fails to hold up
as it gets to more advanced sections in its rush to dump you into
authentic unedited texts.

The Perseus site is a bit awkward to figure out sometimes and the lists
it generates require downloading and manipulating. I usually select all
the text in the table on the web page and copy it into my clipboard then
paste it into a spreadsheet (MS-Excel) and then import that into a
database (MS-Access), then you can do further processing, adding in the
missing definitions and eliminating the words you already know (which
will be a fairly large number probably)

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