Session Summary
Sunday, April 22, 2018
9pm to 10pm EDT
Topics covered:
Session Summary:
Nicholas did outstanding in tutoring tonight. We started out the session with some housekeeping items after some conversation about his week and about his state voice competition triumph, of which he was clearly proud. I was proud of him, too. We then talked about an English paper on MacBeth he wants me to copyedit (I'm looking forward to that). We need knuckled down to Latin. We first tackled Nicholas's homework, which involved a lengthy coverage of the passive periphrastic, which is a new piece of grammar to Nicholas. By the end of our homework review it was clear to me Nicholas had a firm grasp of this important and common piece of Latin grammar. We then launched into a rather lengthy and fascinating discussion of the Romans as a people: their culture, their attributes, their complexities, and how all of that "worldview" got woven into their language (for instance, how the Romans arbitraily assigned the gender of feminine to their word for "death"—mors, mortis—and how that arbitrarily-assigned gender speaks volumes about how they saw their world. I also used the world for "homeland"—patria, patriae, fem.—to illustrate the same point. Nicholas also engaged me in a fascinating discussion about his frustration that the world for "sailor"—nauta, nautae, masc.—wasn't in actuality nautus, nauti, as its gender would indicate it should be (namely, belonging to the second declension). This excellent observation allowed me to discuss with Nicholas for a bit the history of the Latin language, namely that it wasn't by accident that the "first" declension was, indeed, the first declension, because it was the oldest declension, and, in fact, nauta, nautae was undoubtedly at one time in the word's history feminine, but the Romans, because of their worldview (that word again!), could not accept the idea of a woman having such an important role as a sailor in Roman society, so they changed the word's gender (it was too late to change the declension to which the word was assigned, because that aspect of the word had already become too entrenched in the Latin language). We then had a brief...debate, shall we say...based on Nichola's off-the-cuff use of the worn-out "Latin is a dead language" line, in response to which I asked Nicholas to remind himself of the title of my online textbook, Latin: Alive and Well. It was a friendly exchange, the result of which was we merely tacitly agreed to disagree. An absolutely wonderful and invigorating session with a young man I am quickly coming to truly admire. Thanks, Nicholas, for your good, hard work tonight and your great questions and insights.
9pm to 10pm EDT
Topics covered:
- Participles
Session Summary:
Nicholas did outstanding in tutoring tonight. We started out the session with some housekeeping items after some conversation about his week and about his state voice competition triumph, of which he was clearly proud. I was proud of him, too. We then talked about an English paper on MacBeth he wants me to copyedit (I'm looking forward to that). We need knuckled down to Latin. We first tackled Nicholas's homework, which involved a lengthy coverage of the passive periphrastic, which is a new piece of grammar to Nicholas. By the end of our homework review it was clear to me Nicholas had a firm grasp of this important and common piece of Latin grammar. We then launched into a rather lengthy and fascinating discussion of the Romans as a people: their culture, their attributes, their complexities, and how all of that "worldview" got woven into their language (for instance, how the Romans arbitraily assigned the gender of feminine to their word for "death"—mors, mortis—and how that arbitrarily-assigned gender speaks volumes about how they saw their world. I also used the world for "homeland"—patria, patriae, fem.—to illustrate the same point. Nicholas also engaged me in a fascinating discussion about his frustration that the world for "sailor"—nauta, nautae, masc.—wasn't in actuality nautus, nauti, as its gender would indicate it should be (namely, belonging to the second declension). This excellent observation allowed me to discuss with Nicholas for a bit the history of the Latin language, namely that it wasn't by accident that the "first" declension was, indeed, the first declension, because it was the oldest declension, and, in fact, nauta, nautae was undoubtedly at one time in the word's history feminine, but the Romans, because of their worldview (that word again!), could not accept the idea of a woman having such an important role as a sailor in Roman society, so they changed the word's gender (it was too late to change the declension to which the word was assigned, because that aspect of the word had already become too entrenched in the Latin language). We then had a brief...debate, shall we say...based on Nichola's off-the-cuff use of the worn-out "Latin is a dead language" line, in response to which I asked Nicholas to remind himself of the title of my online textbook, Latin: Alive and Well. It was a friendly exchange, the result of which was we merely tacitly agreed to disagree. An absolutely wonderful and invigorating session with a young man I am quickly coming to truly admire. Thanks, Nicholas, for your good, hard work tonight and your great questions and insights.