In the spring of 2021, the Princeton faculty approved two changes in the Department of Classics:
The “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, was eliminated, as was the requirement for students to take Greek or Latin. Students still are encouraged to take either language if it is relevant to their interests in the department. The breadth of offerings remains the same, said Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics. The changes ultimately give students more opportunities to major in classics. -- Princeton Alumni Weekly, May 2021, "Curriculum Changed to Add Flexibility, Race and Identity Track"
The motivation behind these changes is (in my view) admirable. Students from non-traditional backgrounds are even less likely to have had access to Latin in secondary school than their peers, putting them more frequently at a disadvantage in acquiring Greek and Latin and this posing a structural barrier to their ability to major in Classics. This can be defended as a tangible action to mitigate structural racism.
Learning Greek and/or Latin and then reading substantial amounts of text in the original is difficult. Departments already had to support majors who began Greek and/or Latin in college since before I started as a first year student in the fall of 1975. It is not by any means easy to develop that mastery unless students begin immediately and even then it is challenging. Many other departments already have Classical Civilization tracks that do not require study of the languages.
I see at least two other core problems: the current meanings ascribed to Classics and/or Classical Studies and the fundamental problem of studying Greco-Roman Culture without direct and effective access to the sources in the original language.
The first involves the definition of Classics and Classical Studies. As of July 2021, the webpage for Princeton Classics still introduces the program with the following statement:
THE PRINCETON CLASSICS DEPARTMENT investigates the history, language, literature, and thought of ancient Greece and Rome. -- Princeton Classics
Harvard adopts an almost identical defintion of Classics ("the study of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures in all their manifestations": https://classics.fas.harvard.edu/) but Harvard makes its case even more precise. In case anyone fails to take the point, Harvard has a Department of the Classics. The Harvard Department website invites undergraduates with the following graphic:
Classics and Classical Studies exclude Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, Classical Persian, the languages of Ancient Egypt, the languages of the ancient middle east such as Sumerian and Akkadian, not to mention the K'iche Mayan of the Popol Vuh.
I myself now cannot see in this usage of Classics -- or the Classics -- anything other than a blunt assertion of European Cultural Exceptionalism. I have in the past argued in print CITS against the equation of Classics and Classical Studies, but I spent decades dimly aware that this usage of Classics and Classical Studies was at best an eccentric anachronism. I don't think that I had ever really taken in how poisonous this usage has been.
If I ever want an example of structural racism, I can look at my field (and in the mirror): individual professors in the field may labor tirelessly to advance social justice while oblivious to the fact that the name of their field reflects assumptions of European cultural superiority.
Here we have two basic choices: change the names that we use or change our behavior to reflect a more inclusive vision of Classics and Classical Studies.
Assumptions:
First, those who choose to learn Ancient Greek in general and Homeric Greek in particular are volunteers and are making a statement about their intellectual curiosity. Whatever their age, they are not conscripted into an industrialized classroom. Instructors in structured, for-credit courses will need to provide exams and assign grades but all instructors of Ancient Greek act as coaches helping learners acquire the skills that they seek.
This assumption is an important one. Far more people study Latin than Greek and Latin can seem the obvious starting point for innovation. But the very numbers of Latin and students have posed challenges. Latin curricula are often more highly structured and bureaucratically constrained. Instructors have little extra time and little clear incentive to experiment with new methods, especially since major change often leads to poorer performance in the short run.
At this stage, we need learners who are active collaborators in developing new methods. They need to be willing to try methods that may not work or that may not yet have sufficiently well-developed front ends to reach their full potential. They need to work with automated assessment tools that are not perfect and they need to be ready to work in good faith with instructors and developers to improve the system.
Second, those interested in Ancient Greek should be able to pursue this subject, insofar as humanly possible, in their own language, without recourse to English or to any of the traditional big European languages of scholarship on the Greco-Roman World (typically, English, French, German and Italian). There are several reasons for this.
One major reason to study Classical languages such as Ancient Greek and Latin -- as well as Classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, Classial Persian or the K'iche Mayan of the Popol Vuh -- is to transcend our immediate cultural backgrounds. Ancient Greek and Latin belong to no one and to everyone. The equation of Classical Studies with the Study of Greco-Roman Culture may be deeply problemtic from a 21st century American perspective, but to subjects of the Elector of Saxony in the 18th century, for example, the study of Greco-Roman Culture and the use of Latin as a means of communication were assertions that, while they might butcher, and be butchered by, the Austrians, the French, or the Prussians, they belonged to a larger culture that transcended their immediate conflicts.
Nationalism eliminated the use of Latin as a European lingua franca. Speakers of languages such as English, French, German, Italian and Spanish might congratulate themselves on being able to work in their own vernaculars, but for the other languages of Europe -- and in the 21st century, the EU officially recognizes 19 other languages -- the shift away from Latin was a cultural disaster. Speakers of languages such as Croatian, Dutch, and Polish needed to choose another European language to reach an international audience and, in so doing, to accept cultural hegemony.
When I began studying Latin and then Ancient Greek, half a century ago, my textbooks were all in English. If I had been asked, I believe that I would have understood that there were others in countries such as France, Germany and Italy who were also studying these languages, but such students would have been a complete abstraction. I believed that the United Kingdom seemed to have a more developed system so that at least some students of Greek and Latin started younger and proceeded farther in their linguistic training than was feasible in the United States. But I don't recall ever hearing anything at all about students of Greek and Latin beyond the English speaking world.
Decades later, when I finally had some data about who was studying Greek and Latin in different countries, I was not intellectually surprised, but I was still emotionally shaken, to see that English-speaking students of Greek and Latin were not only a minority overall but were, in absolute terms, at best in fourth place. In 2014, Emily Franzini, then a researcher working with me at the Alexander von Humboldt chair of Digital Humanities at Leipzig, published statistics on students of Greek and Latin.
When, decades later, Emily Franzini, a collaborator of mine at Leipzig, surveyed available data about how many students were studying Greek and Latin, she demonstrated that the vast majority of such students did not speak English. The numbers are, of course, up to ten years old and curriculum changes have begun to change (usually reduce) the numbers in the succeeding decade. We were not able to get results for larger English speaking countries such as Australia and Canada but, outside the English speaking world, we also were not able to get data for what would probaby have been major numbers in Spain and Greece. We had no figures for Latin America, although we do not have reason to believe that these would have had a major impact (fostering Greek and Latin in the Western Hemisphere ia a major goal of our work).
I was not intellectually surprised by the findings but the numbers nevertheless shook me emotionally. While the study needs to updated, I do not believe that the following conclusions would change. Each of the observations below was a surprise to me and I believe that my preliminary impressions were typica of those who grew up studying Greco-Roman culture in the United States:
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I did not expect that the number of those studying Latin in the US would not only far exceed the number of those in the UK absolutely (120,000 vs. 15,000) but also on a per capita basis (375 students per million in the US vs. 234 in the UK). The much closer figures for Greek (2,210 in the US vs. 2,000 in the UK) reinforce the general impression that the US has many more schools that teach Latin but the smaller number of institutions that teach Latin in the UK are substantially more likely to offer Ancient Greek as well. Anecdotal evidence, preliminary observation and historical precedent suggests that Greek and Latin remain subjects in a smaller number of traditional, elite schools.
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In comparison to the US, the number of those studying Latin per million through secondary school is almost 100 times greater in Italy, 30 times greater in Germany, and c. 20 times greater in France, Flanders (the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium), Austria, and Croatia. The gap in numbers of those studying Ancient Greek is even higher: 12 times more often in Germany, 16 times more often in Austria, and 73 times more often in France. The rates in Croatia and Flanders are 104 and 126 times -- more than two orders of magnitude greater. And in Italy, with its system of Classical Secondary Schools (the Liceo Classico), the ratio exceeds 1,6000 -- more than three orders of magnitude.
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It had simply never occurred to me that the vast majority of those studying Ancient Greek and Lati at the secondary level would come from countries outside the English speaking world. In the figures that we collected, more than 96% of those studying Latin and 99% of those studying Ancient Greek through secondary school spoke -- and studied those languages -- in languages other then English. To say that these are large numbers is inadequate. Given our data, the number of those studying Ancient Greek and Latin in the English speaking world is a rounding error in the totals across continental Europe.
Secondary school enrollments can, of course, be deceptive. The vast majority of those who study Greek and Latin thoguh secondary school forget these languages -- some as quickly as they can. Most of those who study Greco-Roman history, literature, and philosophy at the post-secondary level have had no Greek and Latin. If data suggested that 2,000 students pursued Ancient Greek through secondary school, the Modern Language Association's 2016 Report on Enrollments in Languages other than English listed 13,264 students of Ancient Greek at the post-secondary level in 2016 (p. 48).
Nevertheless, the figures support a number of conclusions.
First, the numbers of those studying Ancient Greek and Latin in the English speaking world is very small and relatively minor absolute changes in those numbers could greatly expand and invigorate the study of Greco-Roman culture. In my view, there are at least two ways to pursue this goal. One method is technological: I will describe below methods under development that are designed to increase the intellectual rewards from studying not only Ancient Greek but also other languages, especially languages where we wish to explore complex textual sources (rather than scenarios dominant in language education such as ordering dinner or talk to business partners). The other is cultural. Many of those who would be interested in Greco-Roman culture dismiss the subject because they see in it an expression of European cultural hegemony -- and, indeed, the vast majority of those who study Greek and Latin are (as seen above) in Europe.
Those of us who live in nations such as the United States advance the position of Ancient Greek and Latin not by arging for their uniqueness but by framing them as two prominent members within a wider range of historical (or, if we insist, classical languages). The more we provide due support for other languages such as Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, early modern Persian, the K'iche Mayan and the languages of Ancient Egypt, the more we can tangibly dissociate Ancient Greek and Latin from associations of Eurocentrism that have clearly alienated many of our fellow citizens. The study of ancient languages is not, at this point of decvelopment, a zero-sum game where people choose to study Sanskrit or Classical Chinese instead of Greek and Latin. The goal is to expand the role of ancient languages from its current small base by relegitimizing this practice in a variety of ways, with reframing Greek and Latin alongside other historical languages as one key mechanism.
Second, we need to develop infastructures for the study of historical languages that are designed from the start to be deployed across multiple modern languages and cultural settings. There are pragmatic reasons for this approach: if the vast majority of those working with Ancient Greek and Latin do so in languages other than English, English speakers should seek ways to benefit from that activity. Of course, professional students of Greco-Roman culture already have a mechanism to achieve this goal: they learn (or are expected to learn) enough French, German and Italian that they can read scholarship and, ideally, understand oral presentations in any of these languages. While the languages are all, of course, European, this system has challenged participants to push beyond the anglophone bubble and given them the tools to experience European culture from different European perspectives. This differentiates the study of Greco-Roman culture (along with the history of Music, Religion, and Art) from the study of dominant national languages (which focus, by nature, within the national culture) and from the so-called STEM disciplines (in Germany, the acronym is MINT), in which the language of international publication has shifted to English.
In adapting our infrastructure for the study of Greco-Roman culture to different cultures, we are performing a task that in industry is called localization. Every industry with global ambitions must address the problem of serving speakers of many langauges and in many cultural backgrounds. Such a practice, when applied to sources from and about the Greco-Roman world, raise a wide range of challenges and provide us with an opportunity for new dialogue and access to new perspectives.
If we move beyond European languages and cultures and we want to demonstrate that we are truly not marketing European cultural exceptionalism, we need to think in terms of cultural exchange, where we help support others learn Greek and Latin even as we move to learn the languages and cultures of others.
Thanks to my Iranian collaborators such as Fatima Fahimnia, Maryam Foradi, Saeed Majidi and Farnoosh Shamsian, we have an opportunity to explore the challenges of teaching Ancient Greek in English and Persian and of learning the language of Classical Persian Poetry in English. Farnoosh Shamsian's work is particularly important. She had been teaching Ancient Greek in Iran. A German DAAD scholarship allowed her to begin a Phd in Digital Humanities at Leipzig that focuses on the problem of teaching Ancient Greek in both English and Persian. We combined this work with earlier efforts to support the study of Classical Persian poetry in English.
Iranians have a particular and complex relationship to Ancient Greek culture. What Europeans call the Persian wars are, in Persian, called the "Athenian Wars," conflicts that the Athenians helped provoke by participating in atrocities in the Ionian revolt. A Persianized version of Alexander the Great appears the Shahnameh and his role remains controversial. In 2014, then Phd student Maryam Foradi created an online poll in Persian on Iranian attitudes towards Ancient Greek culture. The preliminary results reflected deep and abiding disdain for the Greek who had invaded Persia.
At the same time, Greek sources remain crucial to the study of Ancient Iran. Cyrus the Great, in particular, remains a fundamental and controversial figure in Iran: for some he represented Persia's distinct history and greatness; for others, Cyrus points to harsh imperialism of the pre-islamic period. Xenophon's account -- problematic as it is as a historical source -- provokes heated debate. And yet, no direct translation exists from the Cyropaedia -- and from the vast majority of Greek sources -- directly from the Greek. Available tanslations are translations from another language or, at best, base themselves on two different translations. In a nation with more than 80 million inhabitants, even a tiny percentage of motivated students could, given the appropriate digital infrastructure, could develop into a substantial number.
Supporting the study of Ancient Greek in English and Persian allows us to explore challenges of cultural exchange that differ from those when we support multiple languages from Europe. We cannot, for example, communicate about Homeric epic without reference to the Persian naational epic, the Shahnameh, "Song of Kings." Iranians have (even) less experience with the Homeric Epics than their counterparts in the West but they are taught in school that this thousand year old epic saved the Persian langauge from giving way wholly to Arabic (as happened to Coptic and, in many places, Berber). Teaching Homeric epic to Iranians requires that we make an effort to acquaint ourselves as best we can with the Shahnameh -- at the very least, we need to be prepared to ask about how the Homeric epics do or do not remind our Persian-speaking counterparts of an epic tradition that comes from far beyond Europe.
This leads to a third conclusion. We cannot promote the study of Ancient Greek in a context such as the Persian speaking world unless we also promote the sudy of Classical Persian in English. Our work thus focuses not only on Classical Persian, particularly the poetry of Ferdowsi and Hafez, in English. In each case, we are testing the same methods and exploring the feasibility of creating a multilingual framework for cultural exchange. Poetry poses at once a particular challenge and opportunity: we can exploit dynamic visualization to illustrate the metrical form of any given line and then link sources to recordings of performances.
Fourth, confronting the challenge of learning a genre such as the various forms of Classical Persian poetry has had another unexpected benefit: it puts the expert in Ancient Greek in the postiion of being a novice, with neither cultural nor linguistic background. In my case, I have been studying ancient Greek for 49 years -- since befor some of the parents of my students were born. I wonder if experts in one ancient language should not make a point of teaching and learning another ancient language alongside their student, reminding ourselves how difficult this is and, in exposing our own limitations, encouraging our students to take intellectual risks and to keep learning throughtout their lives.
In my own case, I can point to at least one aspect in which the challenge of learning to understand Classical Persian radically change my perspective. I never fully appreciate how hard it is for my students to learn how to scan, much less read aloud, basic Greek meters such as dactylic hexameter and iambic trimeter.
When I find myself confronting Persian poetry with metrical analysis, the difficulty of reading poetry becomes far more tangible. In his 1898 edition and translation of Selected poems by Rumi, for example, Reynold Nicholson provides the basic metrical pattern for each poem:
Even aside from the fact that the Persian script does not record the short vowels (and thus serves more a memory aid that the Persian speaker can parse), the meter, even when read by a native speaker, is not immediately obviou -- at least not to me. The scansion for each and every syllable in each line would not be enough -- nor is it all that is possible: there is a rich, living tradition of performance, with a many compelling recordings freely available on YouTube and elsewhere online. There is no reason not to pair the text with a recorded performance.
It is easy for a practioner such as myelf to forget how difficult is it is for our students to learn how to read the basic meters of Greek and Latin with fluency and to treat poetry as poetry. Once I turn to poetry in Persian or Arabic, the problem of working with poetry in a very different language becomes inescapable and becomes a call for action. If the challenge of engaging with Persian poetry motivates us to build a system that analyses the meter and includes performances, such an approach would be of immense value even among traditional students of Ancient Greek and Latin: too often we treat Greek and Latin poetry as differntial linguistic equations to solve. We learn how to parse the poetry by rule and far too infrequently can we read even basic hexameters and trimeters with fluency. Emotionally compelling performances of these works in the original languages far too infrequently bring this poetry to life.
DEBUGGING ENGLISH:
To be eager, anxious or ready, show eagerness, anxiety or readiness, strive or struggle,
--> to strive and struggle
Can MT guess that struggle is a verb here? probably BUT what is difference between strive and struggle in English?
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=de&text=to%20strive%20or%20struggle&op=translate sich bemühen oder kämpfen -- kämpfen capture struggle? or does it pick up the right word sense? You don't KAMPFEN to do something. You just fight.
https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=ar&text=to%20strive%20or%20struggle&op=translate --> Arabic: تكافح أو تكافح -- Google Translate converts both strive and struggle into the same word
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The vast majority of those who study Ancient Greek and Latin do so in languages other than English.
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If we want to develop methods that will avance the role of Ancient Greek and Latin in the intellectual life of humanity, we must develop resources that can efficiently localized into a growing range of languages.
Two technological approaches make this goal feasible.
- Mappings from the inflected form to a standard dictionary entry: e.g., information about the inflected form παρῆλθον (parêlthon, which can designate first person singular or third person plural, i.e., "I arrived" or "they arrived") is stored under the dictionary entry for παρέρχομαι (parerchomai, "I come").
- The part of speech: e.g., parerchomai is a verb. STANDARD PART OF SPEECH
- The paradigm by which forms of this particular word are generated: the form parêlthon follows the pattern of the second aorist Greek verb which takes the ending -on in both the first person singular and third person plural. The first aorist uses the ending -a for first singular and -an for first plural.
- Grammatical endings of regular words:
- Stems of regular words:
- The presence or absence of the verbal augment:
- The presence of preverbs: