In the ancient indo-european languages, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, vowels occur in long and short forms. Thus the sound of the languages when spoken has a rhythmic quality. The study of this is called metrics ( Read more... )

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Because I had finished the series in Japanese (w/ translations) before I left for Japan (Hell, I even gave an academic paper on it at the Pop Culture Association's annual meeting when it was in Boston), I've taken my time in acquiring back volumes of the series or buying any of it at all since I came back. I think I've also been a little irritated ( Read more... )

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This week I have mainly been getting my head wrapped around scansion, Latin poetry, and greco-roman mythology. I've been teaching mythology ever since I started the Latin gig, so that hardly needs work (it's just interesting), but it really has been a long time since I seriously got involved with Latin poetry. It turns out that as long as it's ( Read more... )

When you do Latin for a living there are a few authors that you can expect most people to have at least heard of: Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid. After that there's a whole slew of authors that educated people have probably heard of. Lastly, there are what I think of as the "small" writers. Sure, they get their own Oxford Classical Text, ( Read more... )

When I was over there, this is what all the schoolgirls were reading. I picked one up from one of my more fun-loving but subliterate students one day during the time between classes. She looked at me sheepishly as I read through a page. I remember reading it and thinking, "this reads like teenage conversation with emoticons." I handed it back to ( Read more... )

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