Amici,
I have made a couple of overtures about the possibility of teaching Latin or Greek in some way connected to the dispatch. I am still working out the details of what and how I could offer such a thing, but for now, please know that A Perennial Digression has a new column: Public Polyglossia!
Polyglossia is a scholarly term derived from Greek for the coexistence of multiple languages in the same geographic space. Ours is a polyglot world, and in the current language acquisition scene, there are now multiple avenues for learning language but often either without context or without the kind of detailed expertise in pedagogy that helps facilitate real understanding. My sense of the need for this column stems from the following observations: first, there are a lot of people who want to learn a variety of languages and don’t have the time or the access to professionally accredited means to do so; second, there are students of these languages, current or former, who could benefit from reference sheets, explicated summaries of various grammatical aspects of different languages, and sustained treatments of texts; third, there is something of an industry of language-learning digital platforms right now, but the best ones tend to serve people who to different degrees already know the tongues in question, or the subscription they ask for is prohibitively expensive (sometimes for little return), and it can be difficult for the autodidact to sift between the wheat and the chaff of these resources; fourth, I simply enjoy teaching language, it’s what I do for a living when I’m not doing this or working odd jobs during the summer, and having a dedicated place to do that keeps me in practice and gives me the chance to test out different things.
So, for example, if you are the sort of person who’d like to learn Greek, but have limited time and money and already pay for this dispatch, your reward will be its inaugural series on Greek, which will be available with your subscription and will come out in paced, clearly labeled installments (e.g., Greek 1.1: Nouns). If and when I borrow from textbooks, I’ll always cite them in the process, so you can go look up and check my work, so to speak, or work more on your own. I’ll also give some exercises at the end of each piece in this column if I’m teaching grammar.
This column is part of APD in the sense that a lot of the languages and texts I’ll be exploring, both as teacher and as student field-reporter, are related to my interests in religious studies and theology that otherwise animate the newsletter. But it will be distinctive in style and tone for its more direct focus on making language available simply and easily to the reader, without some of the more annoying features of language learning blogs (ads and misdirects and so forth).
So, once more, if you’re interested in this, a normal paid subscription to APD will grant access. Interested but not sure? There are free trials now too that can be utilized to good effect. Know someone who would be interested? Refer them, and sufficient referrals will get you a certain number of months comped.
Valeatis,
David
Very excited thanks
I apologize for this question not being directly relevant to the topic, but does anyone know how to aggregate posts in order to print them together? I read this and David Hart's substack, and would like to be able print them in batches/topic areas.