Latin Via Proverbs: 4000 Proverbs, Mottoes and Sayings for Students of Latin

Latin Via Proverbs is a collection of 4000 Latin proverbs organized by grammatical categories. It can be used as a supplement for any first-year Latin textbook or as a systematic grammar review for intermediate Latin students. For additional information, visit the BestLatin.net website

The Sisyphean myth, negative capability and societal relevance

Different forms of literature over the years have expressed mankind’s views, thoughts, notions, beliefs, and  inclinations. The feelings of futility, negativity, absurdism, nihilism expressed in the myth of Sisyphus is just one of the numerous representations that literature can offer. But not all literary expressions are posers of questions and problems. Certain concepts such as Keats’ Negative Capability suggest solutions to Camus’ Sisyphean  problem and its ilk. This paper explores this problem-solution relationship and finds complementarity and  possibility feasible

Who lied? Classical heroism and World War I

Owen’s rejection of Horace’s dulce et decorum est pro patria mori as ‘the old lie’ prompts for me two questions: 1) Who exactly does Owen think lied? And is he justified in thinking this? 2) To what extent does Owen’s rejection of Horace’s words also amount to a critique of the classical tradition more generally, on the grounds that classical conceptions of war and heroism have proved utterly inadequate to the task of articulating the horrors of twentieth-century trench warfare? I argue that Owen’s main target is a number of poets, including Jessie Pope and Henry Newbolt, who recruited sanitized receptions of the classics to exhort young men to lay down their lives for their country. However, it is not clear that any of these, or Horace himself, is actually lying. Owen as a keen student of Roman and Greek culture employed classical themes in various poems. Although classical literature offered rich and nuanced conceptions of warfare, its emphasis on the supererogatory and named individual heroes meant that new conceptions of heroism needed to be developed in World War I to cope with the conditions of often anonymous industrialized trench warfare, in which even doing one’s duty could seem heroic

Singularly Imperfect Tautonyms

Singularly Imperfect Tautonyms (SITS for short) are what I call words like NIGHTLIGHT in which a single letter in the second half of the word differs from the letters in the corresponding position in the first half of the word. Thus a single letter prevents NIGHTLIGHT from being a tautonym (NIGHTNIGHT). The SIT MENDMENT is prevented by a single letter from being a tautonymic sequence, rather than a tautonym, MENDMEND not being a word. For the purpose of this article, I do not distinguish between these two types of SITS. As a genre, SITS are only to be found amongst words with an even number of letters. Word sources can be found at the end

War Poetry: Impacts on British Understanding of World War One

The military and technological innovations deployed during World War I ushered in a new phase of modern warfare. Newly developed technologies and weapons created an environment which no one had seen before, and as a result, an entire generation of soldiers and their families had to learn to cope with new conditions of shell shock. For many of those affected, poetry offered an outlet to express their thoughts, feelings and experiences. For Great Britain, the work of Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves have been highly recognized, both at the time and in the present. Newspaper articles and reviews published by prominent companies of the time make it clear that each of these poets, who expressed strong opinions and feelings toward the war, deeply influenced public opinion. At the start of the war, Rupert Brooke’s poetry, and those like him, pushed the public to favor Britain’s involvement in the war because of their favorable and patriotic attitude towards it. Such patriotism sparked images of the way a soldier should behave and look and inserted the idea that the fate of the nation is everything. As the war progressed though, the poets began to express a darker twist on the country’s involvement. This dissenting opinion from poets like Sassoon, Owen and Graves incited irritation and anger from the British public because of their descriptive and shocking contents. Furthermore, their poetry created a new memory of the war which encapsulated its darkest, most painful realities. The influences of Sassoon, Owen, and Graves lasted much longer than did that of poets like Brooke and have shaped the memory of World War I in British history

Grammatical Perspectives on Texts

Conferenia organizada por el Departamento de Teoría, Historia, Métodos de Investigación y Diagnóstico en EducaciónGRAMMATICAL PERSPECTIVES ON TEXTS This presentation will explore briefly the contested place of grammar in the curriculum, and will offer a theorised rationale for the benefit of including grammar within the teaching of mother tongue language. We adopt an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on Halliday’s social semiotic view of how language makes meaning, and on cognitive perspectives which consider the place of metalinguistic thinking in the process of writing. Using findings from a series of studies conducted at the University of Exeter in the Centre for Research in Writing, the presentation will illustrate how adopting a more grammatical perspective on texts and through integrating reading, writing and grammar, language teachers can make meaningful connections for developing writers between language choices and meaning-making, and support them to become more autonomous, independent writersUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech