Critics have argued that the Active1 approach to Latin is not, in fact, an effective way to learn the language. This misconception appears to stem at least in part from misunderstandings regarding teaching methodology, such as the belief that teachers who use these methods neglect grammar or do not in fact introduce students to ‘real’ original Latin, but simplified versions of the texts created by the teachers themselves. As someone who learned Latin primarily through the Active Method, I can attest that this is an unrealistic representation. These methods are not used at the expense of formal grammar instruction; they are a different way of teaching grammar that also stresses the importance of acquiring a large vocabulary for the purpose of more fluent reading. Nor do such courses never progress to the reading of authentic Classical Latin. I will use online descriptions of Active Method courses to demonstrate this.
In English medical vocabulary Greek words, Latin words, and hybrid combinations contribute about 76% of the total. In contrast, they contribute only about 40% of general vocabulary, the rest being largely derived from Old English and French. Furthermore, many fewer other languages contribute to medical than to general vocabulary. The development of English general vocabulary was influenced first by the Roman invasions between 55 BC and 43 AD, followed by over 360 years of Roman presence, and then later, after the Romans had left, by the arrival of St Augustine as Archbishop of Canterbury in 597 AD, bringing Latin from Rome. The arrival of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, at the end of the 6th century AD, brought Anglo-Saxon or Old English into the general mix, and the Norman conquest in 1066 added Old French. In contrast, the domination of Greek and Latin in medical vocabulary was partly due to the influence of Greek science, mathematics, and philosophy and partly due to the fact that many Latin words derived directly from Greek. Studying classical languages exposes us to classical thought in both sciences and humanities. It teaches us about history. It helps us in acquiring a rich English vocabulary and understanding how our language is constructed. It trains us in logic and systematic thinking. Its rich and highly entertaining literature and mythology is much better read in the original than in translation. Furthermore, having read it we are better equipped to understand the classical allusions that occur in later authors.
The Roman and Greek roots of jurisprudence, philosophy, sociology, and many other branches of scientific knowledge make it natural for modern researchers to turn to ancient terms and stable expressions and use them in their own scientific texts and public speeches. This fact actualizes the problem of the accuracy of translation and interpretation of terms and phraseological units, comparing their historical and modern meanings, which is directly related to the literary quality of modern authorial opinions. Purpose: based on specific examples of the use of ancient terms and phraseological units in scientific literature, we propose for public discussion the issue of the correctness and utility of this usage. Methods: the historical method is used to describe and analyze natural historical transformations in legal vocabulary and phraseology; the specific legal method allows to assess the meaning of various legal terms and proverbs in specific national legal systems; the method of comparative law makes it possible to evaluate the functioning of similar phenomena of legal reality in different states; the method of structural-systemic analysis and synthesis is used to evaluate the meaning of individual terms of Latin and Greek origin in the system of law and legal science. Result: the article concludes that the incorrect use and spelling of foreign-language terms and phraseological units not only does not contribute to a better theoretical content of modern scientific research, but can also play the exact opposite role in them.
The subject of the research is 10 mnemonic lists presented in the "Art of Memory" section of Bruno's treatise "De umbris idearum" (1582). The author examines each of the 10 lists in detail. The article begins with general information about Bruno's work, a review of literature, and the state of research on the problem. Special attention is paid to identifying the goals and practical tasks of creating the lists and the principles of their formation. The author demonstrates how to use the lists for "memoria verborum". It is explained which techniques Bruno proposed for encoding words that include closed syllables or consonant clusters. The article is accompanied by a translation of the lists from Latin into Russian. Methods: The main research methods are the author's translation of Bruno's lists, the method of historical-philosophical reconstruction, and the hermeneutic method. Results: The original structure of the lists was reconstructed, and the goals of their creation were identified. The main principles of their construction are shown: 1) The 150-line lists are arranged according to a "group of five" scheme and marked with two-letter elements. Each of the 30 "groups of five" has 23 Latin letters, four Greek letters, and three Hebrew letters as the first element. The second element uses a repeating pattern of 5 Latin vowels. 2) The list of characters and the list of actions are divided into "groups of five” indicated by the aforementioned vowels, according to their occupations, from the simplest (agriculture) to science and philosophy. Each " group of five " is led by a "standard-bearer" who is responsible for one of each of the 30 letters of the three-language alphabet. 3) All lists are constructed according to 5 sets of mnemonic elements: 1. characters (agentes), 2. actions (actiones), 3. characteristics (insignia), 4. objects (circumstantia), and 5. additional objects (adstantia). Novelty: In addition to the historical-philosophical reconstruction of the lists, the novelty of the research also includes the first translation of these lists from Latin into Russian, performed based on critical editions of the text, and the provision of clear examples of list usage accessible to the modern reader. The results of the work can be used for further research into the mnemonic component in the works of Giordano Bruno.
Grammar refers to the system of rules that governs the structural organization and the semantic relations among linguistic units such as sentences, phrases, and words within a given language. In natural language processing, there remains a notable scarcity of grammar focused evaluation protocols, a gap that is even more pronounced for low-resource languages. Moreover, the extent to which large language models genuinely comprehend grammatical structure, especially the mapping between syntactic structures and meanings, remains under debate. To investigate this issue, we propose a Grammar Book Guided evaluation pipeline intended to provide a systematic and generalizable framework for grammar evaluation consisting of four key stages, and in this work we take Luxembourgish as a case study. The results show a weak positive correlation between translation performance and grammatical understanding, indicating that strong translations do not necessarily imply deep grammatical competence. Larger models perform well overall due to their semantic strength but remain weak in morphology and syntax, struggling particularly with Minimal Pair tasks, while strong reasoning ability offers a promising way to enhance their grammatical understanding.
In Western criticism and philosophy, Renaissance discussions of imitation have often been seen as both a legacy of Greece and Rome, and as the foundation of modern theories of art and literature. This investigation shows that the discussions of imitation that spread throughout the Renaissance were indeed adopted from Latin Roman discussions of poetry and rhetoric, but they have no connection to the famous Greek philosophical concepts of mimesis/imitation that are found in the work of Plato and Aristotle. Indeed, European concepts of imitatio/ imitation, as this study shows, developed their conceptual potential before Plato’s and Aristotle’s discussions of mimesis became familiar in Europe. Furthermore, Renaissance discussions of imitation were not theories of art and literature, as is commonly believed. They were simply an educational pedagogy that organized the appropriation of the canons of description of classical Latin into the vernaculars. The peculiarity and the scale of this pedagogy become evident when located within its geopolitical context. In the early modern era, neither the dead Latin language nor the vernaculars were equipped to manage the wealth or the administrative and cultural needs of ascending European states. Like Rome at the height of its power, European states were emerging empires in need of a language and a culture. And just like the Romans resorted to the imitation of Greek masterpieces in order to develop their language, Europeans advocated the imitation of Latin masterpieces to develop their vernaculars. But while the Romans resorted to imitatio often with resentment and bitterness at the impossibility to match the Greek achievement, European humanists considered imitatio to have been a resounding success [sic]. By adopting the Roman practice of imitatio, European cultures appropriated and internalized Roman ambivalence without solving or even identifying it.
The article presents linguistic arguments in favour of a following hypothesis: a Church Slavonic translation of Caesar Baronius Annales Ecclesiastici (from the Polish adaptation made by Piotr Skarga), preserved in a 1689 manuscript (being kept in RSL, f. 256, no. 15), belonged to Moscow Chudov Monastery translators. By comparing the language of the manuscript at the lexical level with the translations reliably attributed earlier, the author discovers several parameters common to this version of Annales and Chudov translations, particularly, the translation of Piotr Skarga The Word for Mercy sermon and the New Testament translation accomplished by Epiphaniy Slavinetskiy. The common features are as follows: the widespread use of composita (compounds) not supported by the Polish text; equally widespread use of verbs with the -stvo- formant; the choice of words of Greek origin as equivalents for lexical units of Slavic and German origin; elimination of Latin borrowings, familiarized in the Polish text, and their translation through Slavic derivatives. Among the lexical units, there are non-trivial formations not recorded in lexicographic editions. In each of the positions mentioned, one can observe free variability that complicates the overall picture and introduces the Church Slavonic version of Annales to the centuries-old tradition of the ancient Slavonic translated Christian literature.
Since its earlier theorizations in the 1990s, interculturality has gained increasing prominence in the field of foreign language pedagogy. Interculturality calls for the acquisition of a complex set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that makes any separation between language and culture in foreign language teaching untenable. This article examines the potential of literature for an intercultural approach to Chinese language teaching in Italian upper secondary school, also known as ‘high school’. A reflection on what constitutes Chinese culture and the place of literature in the teaching of Chinese provides the background against which an empirical pedagogical experiment is presented. The teaching experience involves the use of a Chinese authentic literary text to promote an intercultural approach to two seemingly unrelated topics: Chinese New Year travel rush and sexual harassment. The activity shows the affordance of literature for developing an intercultural approach to diversity and complexity beyond simplification and orientalizing epistemologies.
Sangam literature and archeological studies today suggest that the ancient Tamils had trade relations with the western countries like Greece and Latin countries. Similarly, they had maritime communication with East Asian countries. This contact and cultural spread was easy because South East Asian countries are located directly east of Tamil Nadu. The continuous tradition of maritime and seafaring activity has resulted in the spread of the Tamil people over a number of scattered regions. Wherever they have gone they have carried with them their love of language and their social and cultural activities and the continuing attachment to these traditions has kept alive the emotional loyalty to Tamil Nadu from which they originated and made them feel part of an international community linked by the bonds of Tamil culture. This article briefly explains the migration of Tamils in South Eastern countries and the impact of Tamils in those countries.
Reading Christian texts today: reasons, methods and purposes. In light of the challenging situation of classical languages and litera ture and Christian studies in today’s social and cultural context, the author’s lectio aims to answer two questions (why do people read Christian texts? how to read them?) through a tripartite path: a) Christian texts, related to Latin and Greek classics, in Western culture; b) today’s school and ancient Christian literature; c) studies of ancient Christian literature in the university research: Bari’s and Fog gia’s contribution. The survey, which naturally refers in the first place to the Italian reality, presents valid considerations for the overall condition of the Christian studies today.
Nikolaos Mylonas, Nikolaos Stylianou, Theodora Tsikrika
et al.
Interpretability is a topic that has been in the spotlight for the past few years. Most existing interpretability techniques produce interpretations in the form of rules or feature importance. These interpretations, while informative, may be harder to understand for non-expert users and therefore, cannot always be considered as adequate explanations. To that end, explanations in natural language are often preferred, as they are easier to comprehend and also more presentable to end-users. This work introduces an early concept for a novel pipeline that can be used in text classification tasks, offering predictions and explanations in natural language. It comprises of two models: a classifier for labelling the text and an explanation generator which provides the explanation. The proposed pipeline can be adopted by any text classification task, given that ground truth rationales are available to train the explanation generator. Our experiments are centred around the tasks of sentiment analysis and offensive language identification in Greek tweets, using a Greek Large Language Model (LLM) to obtain the necessary explanations that can act as rationales. The experimental evaluation was performed through a user study based on three different metrics and achieved promising results for both datasets.
Large language model (LLM) services have recently begun offering a plugin ecosystem to interact with third-party API services. This innovation enhances the capabilities of LLMs, but it also introduces risks, as these plugins developed by various third parties cannot be easily trusted. This paper proposes a new attacking framework to examine security and safety vulnerabilities within LLM platforms that incorporate third-party services. Applying our framework specifically to widely used LLMs, we identify real-world malicious attacks across various domains on third-party APIs that can imperceptibly modify LLM outputs. The paper discusses the unique challenges posed by third-party API integration and offers strategic possibilities to improve the security and safety of LLM ecosystems moving forward. Our code is released at https://github.com/vk0812/Third-Party-Attacks-on-LLMs.
Domain-specific languages that use a lot of specific terminology often fall into the category of low-resource languages. Collecting test datasets in a narrow domain is time-consuming and requires skilled human resources with domain knowledge and training for the annotation task. This study addresses the challenge of automated collecting test datasets to evaluate semantic search in low-resource domain-specific German language of the process industry. Our approach proposes an end-to-end annotation pipeline for automated query generation to the score reassessment of query-document pairs. To overcome the lack of text encoders trained in the German chemistry domain, we explore a principle of an ensemble of "weak" text encoders trained on common knowledge datasets. We combine individual relevance scores from diverse models to retrieve document candidates and relevance scores generated by an LLM, aiming to achieve consensus on query-document alignment. Evaluation results demonstrate that the ensemble method significantly improves alignment with human-assigned relevance scores, outperforming individual models in both inter-coder agreement and accuracy metrics. These findings suggest that ensemble learning can effectively adapt semantic search systems for specialized, low-resource languages, offering a practical solution to resource limitations in domain-specific contexts.
The paper offers textual notes, including new conjectures, on the scholia on the Alcestis of Euripides (Hyp. Alc. (a), schol. Alc. 1, 54, 55, 56, 59, 65‑7, 70‑1, 75‑6) and presents the first edition of an unpublished note on Eur. Alc. 65.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, History of the Greco-Roman World
The paper investigates the Fascist exploitation of Horatian poetry by analysing the speech held by Ettore Romagnoli in 1935 on the bimillenary of the poet’s birth. Romagnoli’s oration must sacrifice to the demands of the oriented reading of Horace’s work promoted by the regime themes and attitudes characteristic of the poet (the reflections on time and the precariousness of human life, the search for self-sufficiency and aurea mediocritas, the rejection of dogmatism). Instead, the intellectual who moves from a secluded position to full adherence to the new Augustan establishment is exalted, at the cost of historical and literary distortions.
Greek language and literature. Latin language and literature, History of the Greco-Roman World
Ahmed Abdelali, Hamdy Mubarak, Shammur Absar Chowdhury
et al.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly influenced the landscape of language and speech research. Despite this progress, these models lack specific benchmarking against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models tailored to particular languages and tasks. LAraBench addresses this gap for Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Processing tasks, including sequence tagging and content classification across different domains. We utilized models such as GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, BLOOMZ, Jais-13b-chat, Whisper, and USM, employing zero and few-shot learning techniques to tackle 33 distinct tasks across 61 publicly available datasets. This involved 98 experimental setups, encompassing ~296K data points, ~46 hours of speech, and 30 sentences for Text-to-Speech (TTS). This effort resulted in 330+ sets of experiments. Our analysis focused on measuring the performance gap between SOTA models and LLMs. The overarching trend observed was that SOTA models generally outperformed LLMs in zero-shot learning, with a few exceptions. Notably, larger computational models with few-shot learning techniques managed to reduce these performance gaps. Our findings provide valuable insights into the applicability of LLMs for Arabic NLP and speech processing tasks.
Jionghao Lin, Danielle R. Thomas, Feifei Han
et al.
Research demonstrates learners engaging in the process of producing explanations to support their reasoning, can have a positive impact on learning. However, providing learners real-time explanatory feedback often presents challenges related to classification accuracy, particularly in domain-specific environments, containing situationally complex and nuanced responses. We present two approaches for supplying tutors real-time feedback within an online lesson on how to give students effective praise. This work-in-progress demonstrates considerable accuracy in binary classification for corrective feedback of effective, or effort-based (F1 score = 0.811), and ineffective, or outcome-based (F1 score = 0.350), praise responses. More notably, we introduce progress towards an enhanced approach of providing explanatory feedback using large language model-facilitated named entity recognition, which can provide tutors feedback, not only while engaging in lessons, but can potentially suggest real-time tutor moves. Future work involves leveraging large language models for data augmentation to improve accuracy, while also developing an explanatory feedback interface.