Herodotean's log (Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, etc.)

[Herodotean]

Busy! What was it like reading Euthyphro entirely in Greek?

Delightful. I'd read it a few times before, but not recently. It helps that it's one of Plato's easiest dialogues, so I could fly through it. This time I was particularly struck by how funny it is, with Socrates' mock deference to Euthyphro's "superior" knowledge of piety, and Euthyphro's utter failure to understand (1) the sarcasm, (2) what Socrates is even asking, and (3) that he is completely out of Socrates' intellectual league. And the ending is priceless: "Oh dear me, look at the time! I must be off!" "But wait, Euthyphro, how on earth will I ever get out of this indictment Meletus has brought if you don't teach me what piety is?!"

[Le Baron]

Yes, it is a good one. Also the first I read of Plato.. (not in Greek though, Latin translation at school).

[Herodotean]

Latin

• Thomas Aquinas, ST 1.2 (5 pp.). I encountered the famous Five Ways in this Quaestio. As Ed Feser (2009: 63) notes, however, “The Five Ways themselves are merely short statements of arguments that would already have been well known to the readers of Aquinas’s day, and presented at greater length and with greater precision elsewhere.” Indeed, Feser’s own book devotes 55 pages to explaining the Five Ways, which take up barely a page and a half in my Latin edition of the Summa, and to correcting modern philosophers’ misconceptions about them.
• Thomas Aquinas, ST 1.3
• Miraglia, Fabulae Syrae 70–74
• Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2.13–22
• Virgil, Aeneid 2.413–end

Greek

• Herodotus 1.46–91
• NT: Matthew 6–7
• Philostratus, Heroicus 35.7–end (28 pages). I read the Heroicus on twelve different days spread over three weeks, averaging about 1800 words per session.

German

• Coles & Dodd, Reading German: skimmed chapter 6
• Some academic prose

Spanish

• A few pages of Pérez-Reverte, El italiano, which I found thanks to Kanewai on the Spanish Book Reading Resource thread.
• Dos Vidas: 15, part of 16. Its true soap-opera colors are now shining through.
• Historia de España: most of Episodio 4. On the Tartessians, Phoenicians, and Greeks in Spain. I understand a higher percentage of the narrator’s speech than I do the actors in Dos Vidas, but there’s a lot less (visual and linguistic) redundancy in a podcast than in a telenovela, which makes it easier to get lost.

Persian
Persian deserves better from me. This week, though, I’ve started Assimil again. So far, I’ve reviewed Lessons 1–3.

[Herodotean]

Latin (reading) Super Challenge: 11 pages ahead (a loss of 12 pages from last week).
Greek (reading) Super Challenge: 36 pages ahead.

Latin

• Gasparri Catechismus Catholicus 139–52
• Pontanus, Progymnasmata Latinitatis 18–30
• Virgil, Aeneid 3.1–385
• Valla Elegantiae 17–19
• Gellius, Noctes Atticae 2.23–25

Greek

• Plato, Phaedrus 244a–269c. My main focus this week; 80% done. I should wrap it up next week.
• Herodotus 1.92–103. About halfway through Book 1.
• Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri 1.1.1–1.2.7
• Some of Iliad 2
• NT: Matthew 9

German

• Some academic prose
• Caught up on the Routledge Frequency Dictionary Anki deck
• Some YouTube (mainly WDR Reisen)

Spanish

• Pérez-Reverte, El italiano: a few more pages.
• Dos Vidas: rest of 16, part of 17

[Herodotean]

Recently, I got tired of having multiple languages in my YouTube subscriptions. Even with separate playlists for each target language, there were too many languages clamoring for my attention each time I opened the app or the website – and the German titles and descriptions of one channel’s videos were being automatically (and obnoxiously) translated into English. At the same time, I was becoming annoyed by Chrome’s constantly asking me, every time I logged into a different Google account, whether I wanted to browse in a separate profile.

You can perhaps see where this is going – and perhaps you’ve already done what I did. It occurred to me that I could create a separate Google account for each language and access them in separate Chrome profiles: that would allow me to have only German videos in my German Google account, only Spanish videos in my Spanish account, etc., etc. It also meant that I could consciously decide to watch videos in a particular language – say Spanish – switch to my Spanish account, and see only (or almost only) content in Spanish. I was particularly happy that, as it turned out, YouTube stopped auto-translating titles and descriptions when the video’s language matched the account language.

Now my YouTube watching is much more immersive: after I switch to the Chrome profile for a given language, all my subscriptions are in that language, along with almost all my recommendations, and the YouTube interface is also in that language without my needing to change my browser’s language or my operating system’s.



As you can see from the image, I can also add bookmarks that appear only in that Chrome profile; when I specifically choose to study German, the German-related bookmarks are prominent. If I had those bookmarks in my regular browsing profile, they’d be buried.

None of this is earth-shattering, and many of you may have been doing this for a long time already. But I thought I’d write it up since it’s made such a difference in my online language habits.

[einzelne]

How would you define the difficulty of Erasmus' Colloquia? Structurally, it looks like a perfect intermediate reader.

[Herodotean]

How would you define the difficulty of Erasmus' Colloquia? Structurally, it looks like a perfect intermediate reader.

On the whole, they're not too difficult. I think many of them are easier than, say, Roma Aeterna, with its lightly modified Livian style, and some of them may be easier than Miraglia's Fabulae Syrae, but they're certainly harder on average than what I've read of Corderius. Intermediate students would need some help with the cultural background and with Erasmus' penchant for imitating Plautus and Terence.

[einzelne]

Intermediate students would need some help with the cultural background and with Erasmus' penchant for imitating Plautus and Terence.

When I just start reading in my TG, I always use translations as a crutch (turning books into a DIY follow up of Assimil). It saves a lot of time and keeps you motivated.

[guyome]

I've found Petrus Rabus's notes to the Colloquia to be quite helpful. That would of course depend on the reader's level, but they clear up a lot of the unfamiliar vocabulary, allusions, puns, etc.

1747 edition

[einzelne]

I've found Petrus Rabus's notes to the Colloquia to be quite helpful.

Your knowledge of old Latin books is, as always, impressive. What's your secret?:)