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Latinum Institute's Blog – July 2009 Archive (12)

Why Shakespeare tickles the Brain - and thoughts on Latin

Research at the University of Liverpool has found that Shakespearean language excites positive brain activity, adding further drama to the bard's plays and poetry.

Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 27, 2009 at 3:32am — No Comments

Power of Tar Heel Reader

A colleague of mine in the Neo-Latin world, was recently publicly expressing his skepticism of the Tar Heel reader project. Why, he said, don't you publish through a regular publisher? I tried to explain the utility of digital books, their application to the modern classroom, interactive white boards, and, most importantly, the ease of their distribution.

Can printed Latin children's books be found in bookshops up in the Outback? or small Pacific Islands, or in China?

The map… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 27, 2009 at 3:30am — 1 Comment

Ruminations on Chatrooms

Before Schola, the only other chatroom that regularly had people in it, was this one. This only sees action once a week, and has a devoted group of followers. It is necessary to register to use it. It is well worth a visit.

We need to remember how few people there are who have the ability or desire (different things!) to write

in Latin at conversational pace -… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 26, 2009 at 5:47am — No Comments

Another useful website DOTSUB.COM

Today, I stumbled across a webiste that could possible prove very useful - it has affinities with the tarheel reader site:

It is called dotsub.com

http://dotsub.com/

Latin appears on the drop down menu of languages, but no-one has made any Latin resources yet.

The site is very simple to use - possibly even easier than tarheel reader: It has videos (which can be searched by category). You can easily write… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 21, 2009 at 3:00pm — No Comments

CENSVS LATINVS — ANNI MMIX —

Eduardus GLL sodalibus s. p. d.

Diu quaeritur quot ei sint, qui aliqua ratione Latino sermone utantur, vel quibus in orbis terrarum regionibus sermo maxime usurpetur, vel denique qui libri nostra aetate magis ad sermonis usum faciant. Hae quaestiones studium excitant non tantum eorum, qui in linguam Romanam incumbunt, verum etiam eorum qui generatim et universe litterarum atque linguarum et complurium ceterarum disciplinarum, quae ad artes humanitatis pertinent, sunt studiosi. Ad has… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 20, 2009 at 4:42am — No Comments

Thoughts on Latinum

The way I see it, the Latinum project is a Language Revival Project, similar to that put together for Hawaiian, and other dead languages, such as the Miami language.

The project has specifically been modelled after successful aspects of these revival projects - including now children's literature on the http://tarheelreader.org site, the chatrooms on http://schola.ning.com , the visual vocabulary sites on the http://imaginumvocabularium.blogspot.com , news aggregation sites such as… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 19, 2009 at 7:31am — No Comments

Colloquia

The first 50 dialogues of Corderius' colloquia are now on Latinum.

These have been formulated for students, so each line of dialogue is given alternately in Latin, then English, then again in Latin.

This lets the student listen, check their understanding immediately, then listen again to pick up new vocabulary/grammar.

100 dialogues will be recorded from this author, giving a useful… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 18, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments

Conversation as an important part of language development

Conversing Helps Language Development More Than Reading Alone

ScienceDaily (June 29, 2009) — Adult-child conversations have a more significant impact on language development than exposing children to language through one-on-one reading alone, according to a new study in the July issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of

"Pediatricians and others have encouraged parents to provide language input through reading, storytelling and simple narration of daily events,"… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 16, 2009 at 4:30pm — No Comments

Getting Busy in the Locutorium

Things at the locutorium in Schola are picking up - Saturday was out busiest day yet, with 21 participants dropping in to the locutorium to chat actively ( we have a lot of 'lurkers', but they don't figure in the stats unless they actively contribute)

The chatroom has an archive, which keeps records for a few months. On Saturday, over 1 000 lines of Latin were composed off the cuff… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 13, 2009 at 6:02am — No Comments

Schola

Those who have been using Schola for a while, the site has had a bit of a make-over. It now looks much calmer, and the chat interface seems to be an integral part of the site, not an add-on.

It had become increasingly evident that the most oft used part of the site was the chatroom - on Sunday past, for example, the chatroom was busy continuously for a several hours....so the meebo chat interface has been moved to a more central… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 6, 2009 at 6:21am — No Comments

Latinum Update

Latinum has been making me work hard - server trouble has meant a whole slew of episodes suddenly 'died' as the episode url's became unstuck.

I have had to delete a couple of hundred episodes, and am in the process of re-uploading..... Users are helping me, by notifying me of dead links - my priority is the Adler Course - most of which has now been repaired. I was hoping Latinum would just steam on, without too much maintenance needed.

Here is the map of site visitors for the last 2… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 5, 2009 at 6:30am — 1 Comment

Collegium Poetarum

In London, we are trying a new experiment - we have noticed members come along to the Circulus Latinus, but who don't have the skills to speak conversationally, but who are still very interested in Latin, as a 'performance language', for want of a better term.

We have decided to resurrect the ancient Collegium Poetarum online as an NING group, to seed something new. We will be holding our first meeting in London this… Continue

Added by Latinum Institute on July 3, 2009 at 4:00pm — No Comments