Proposal - Collaborative Classics Podcast

[Latinum Institute]

I had an idea today - a collaborative Classics podcast:
How would it work?
A new account would created at Mypodcast, for a podcast called CLASSICS. Anyone who wanted to contribute to it, would be given the username and password to access the podcast for uploading material.

What would be on it?
Anything related to Latin or Greek, from any time period. Readings from classical texts in translation or in the original, or both, episodes on a topic of interest, grammar discussions, a complete mish mash, you'd upload whatever interests you. You can publish in any language as well. Classical Civilisation, neo-latin, anything.....The result could be a really interesting show.

Anyone interested? Setting it up would only take minutes.

Evan.

[Laura Gibbs]

When I taught ancient Greek, I hired one of my students build a Greek word processor online using Beta Code, VERY easy - http://typegreek.com. That's what I always use!

[Laura Gibbs]

What I was hoping for from people's blogs was sharing TEACHING MATERIALS... I get the terrible impression that people are spending a LOT of time reinventing the proverbial wheel. High school teachers in general feel very overworked, and I think this is very much a result of the fact that they work in extreme isolation. :-)

[Latinum Institute]

When the ancient greeks wrote in Greek, did they use the stress and accent marks? I thought these were a later invention, to try and 'preserve' the ancient pronunciation? Correct me if I am wrong, I am no Greek maven. Did the ancient Greeks even use the Byzantine-cursive based alphabet we see now, or was it all 'capitals'? Ancient Hebrew was written very simply, without the vowels marks, which were invented later ( in some ancient manuscripts, Greek letters are written as superscript, above the Hebrew, for the vowels!). If one is learning correct restored Greek pronunciation, then the marks vocalising for that pronunciation become unimportant after a certain point in the student's progress - assuming the student has learned the pronunciation, and internalised it? Certainly, getting to grips with the restored pronunciation would making composing verse a more natural exercise - as indeed it should for Latin, as well. No need to learn complex rules for scansion, simply open the book, and read the poem off the page, naturally, just as an educated ancient reader would have done.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Evan, as I learned it, the Byzantine monks (to whom we owe the preservation of the Greek texts) invented the markings precisely because the tonal system had already broken down so fully that they needed the marks; it was no longer something that could be supplied as a native speaker would naturally supply it. You will not find any ancient Greek texts unmarked. Unlike the macrons in Latin (which are a rather modern invention - you see them marked sporadically in medieval or Renaissance texts, but the systematic application of long marks to vowels in all positions in a word is - I think - a very modern innovation for pedagogical purposes), the tradition of marking the Greek text is a very old one. Although someone like Erasmus used a different Greek font than what we are used to, he employed the markings for breathing and accent, while he would have found the systematic use of macrons in Latin preposterous I imagine.
The final banishment of the markings from even modern Greek is really fascinating - it is a quite recent event in the history of Greek. I want to say I remember it happening officially when I was an ungraduate in college - so sometime in the early 1980s...?

[Latinum Institute]

Surely Greek papyri from Egypt, and the Herculaneum papyri, would give us a good indication of how Greek was written in Classical times? I seem to recall that these texts look like they are written in what we now call "capitals". What the Byzantine monks did with Greek, seems analogous to what the Masoretes did with Hebrew - invent a fiendishly complex notation to try and preserve a pronunciation, where the ancient text had no notation at all. Maybe the accent-dropping in modern Greek was a reverting to the practices of the ancients, a ditching of the Byzantine? Similarly, modern Hebrew is not written with the Masoretic vowel points.

[Laura Gibbs]

The difference I think is that of course you pronounce the vowels when you read Hebrew, whether the text is pointed or not. So in Hebrew you are largely talking about a writing convention only.
The difference with Greek is that while the monks were diligently writing out the tonal accents, they were not pronouncing it with tones: it was very much like all the people who mark their Latin with macrons but do not (most often because they cannot) distinguish between the long and short vowels when they speak.

[Seumas Macdonald]

In theory I'm keen. In practice, I'm a little time-strapped. But it does sound like a good initiative.