Vocabulary
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Improving the Perseus Vocabulary Generator (Greek)
Perseus Tufts has a terrific lemmatizer, a program that parses words in a text and organizes each of those unique words into an ordered list. The actual dictionary system and repeated words that the lemmatizer provides, however, makes the lists it produces practically unusable for students who want to upload the vocabulary list into a…
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Learning & Testing Vocabulary
Learning vocabulary isn’t simply a matter of learning what roots mean. However, many or most of your students will assume it is. You need to be sure they know that vocabulary is both lexical and morphological. Take amō, amāre, amāvī, amātus. This string of words does not mean “I love.” Only amō means that, and…
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Fixing the Lexicon
As I see it, there are three big problems with the correspondences we make between the target language (Ancient Greek or Latin) and English. (1) English definitions are so out-of-date or obscure that students need to look up the English in order to understand the definition. Perhaps there was a time when immo vero could…
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Macrons
Why Macrons Matter There are some obvious places where macrons matter, e.g. the ablative singular of the 1st declension (Rōma versus Rōmā), infinitives in –ere versus –ēre, the future perfect –eris versus the perfect subjunctive –erīs, and so forth. Sometimes they help distinguish similar looking words, like peritus versus perītus, os versus ōs, and cecidī…
Classics Teaching 