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What grammar curriculum we use.

A reader just sent me a question:

What grammar book/series do you use? As you've noted on your blog about your dissatisfaction with pre-packaged science curriculum, grammar is my (and my husband's) "thing", so we're probably hoping for something that doesn't exist out there (grammar is so much my husband's "thing" that when he started teaching Latin at the local Catholic seminary, he wrote his own textbook because he wasn't satisfied with any out there).

But I long-distance respect what you do, and I just thought I'd ask. We register at Kolbe Academy, entirely for the paper-trail it affords us, and then proceed to apply their "principle of subsidiarity" to substitute just about every single thing in their curriculum--either for same-series-but-higher-level, or for completely-different-book. I'm not averse to supplementing, cobbling together, etc. 

My answer:

Oh goody, here is a question I can answer.

The big disclaimer here is that H., my English-major partner in co-schooling, has always managed the grammar. She teaches it from the (free! online!) K.I.S.S. Grammar books by Dr. Ed Vavra.

(Warning: the website looks like it was designed in 1995.)

You can download workbooks from the website and then print them. We printed them double-sided and took them to a copy shop to be spiralbound, and then worked with them as if they were conventional workbooks (which makes them not exactly free, I guess, by the time you pay for binding). The grade levels are not exact and have to do more with the reading level of the texts used for analysis

I personally find it hard to navigate the website. It is probably easiest to choose which workbook to use if you just download the workbooks as .doc files from the links on this page and then open them in Word and page through them.

I don't think H. even bothered to print out the answer key pages for the books, because she didn't need them, but they are there if you want them.

Check them out and let me know what you think. I really think the K.I.S.S. Grammar is a hidden gem.  We have been particularly pleased with how well it dovetails with teaching Latin.  I recognize that a traditional, analytical grammar curriculum doesn't please everyone, but if you're doing Latin or a similarly heavily inflected language, it really saves teaching time overall, I think.

 

UPDATE:  Here is a little extra information from H. who does the actual teaching, answering a mutual friend who was asking about using it for her 10-year-old son.

 ...It should work well to learn along with the kids. The first few levels of KISS are a level of grammar that any person literate in English will be familiar with, so the learning part will be to learn the marking procedures and vocabulary if that is rusty. Once you get the hang of the marking, it should be smooth sailing. Either review the provided answer key before he does the sheet or complete the exercise yourself and use that as the answer key. ( I cheat and don't often use the answer key because of unnecessary grammar nerdiness). 

In the first level, he'll only be explaining the basic 'skeleton' of the sentence: subject, verb, and the broad class called complements which includes direct and indirect objects, predicate adjectives and predicate nouns. KISS adds to the level of analysis fairly slowly. The kids get to watch themselves being able to explain more and more of the words in the exercise as they move through the program. [Our kids, age 12 and 11] have been working through it for three years. When they began they explained only two words in each sentence. Now they have gotten to the point that they can explain all the words in most sentences, even ones written by people like Jules Verne and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

KISS doesn't spend a lot of time on explaining analysis-- it spends most of its time on making them perform the analysis, which is why I love it. 

The material covered with the program is found in the links at the bottom of the "workbooks" page that are called the Master Collection of Exercises. The material is divided into six levels, which are subdivided into concepts.

• Level One covers basic grammar, like subject/verb, prepositional phrases, adjectives and adverbs, pronouns, complements to the verb, compounding, and punctuation.
• Level Two helps the kids through problems they may have encountered when applying the concepts in Level One. It introduces concepts like understood subjects, embedded prepositional phrases, phrasal verbs, and infinitives.
• Level Three is primarily concerned with main and subordinate clauses in all their variations, and the function of subordinating conjunctions. 
• Level Four covers gerunds and infinitives (in all their grammatical functions as single words, and also when they function as ellipsed or reduced clauses in the conditional or subjunctive)
• Level Five practices everything they have previously learned and teaches the noun absolute as an extension of appositives.
• Level Six allows for integrating their grammar practice into their wider reading, writing,and literature studies.

The grade 2 workbook covers levels 1 and 2. The grade 3 workbook also covers levels 1 and 2 plus a few constructions from other levels. The grade 6 workbook covers levels 1-4.

The main difference between the grade levels is the type of text they are given to analyze. A typical grade 2 text is taken from Beatrix Potter, Thornton Burgess, etc. A typical grade 6 text may be from Howard Pyle, Longfellow, Frances Hodgson Burnett, or Robert Louis Stevenson.

The main thing to remember is that if you start with the grade 3 workbook, you *won't* repeat level 1 or level 2 when you move on to the grade 4, 5,or 6 workbook. You will skip the pages of that workbook that introduce level 1 and 2 concepts. You'll start at the level 3 exercises unless you think he needs review of the last concepts studied. They should never quit marking the things they've already learned about as they learn new things, so practice of older concepts is built-in.

...There's no particular reason to start [a 10-year-old] in [the 4th grade level] if his comprehension and vocabulary are advanced. I bet you could start with the 6th grade book. Here is the first question of the first exercise from four different grades:

Grade 2:

 1. The three little rabbits lived in the woods.

Grade 3:

1. Grethel shared her bread with Hansel.

Grade 4:

1. A King and Queen were perfectly happy.

Grade 6:

1. Her appetite grew amazingly.

So, not much difference there.

However, by the eleventh lesson in the sixth grade book the selections are more like this one:

Perseus wondered at that strange cloud, for there was no other cloud all round the sky; and he trembled as it touched the cliff below. And as it touched, it broke, and parted, and within it appeared Pallas Athene, as he had seen her at Samos in his dream, and beside her a young man more light-limbed than the stag, whose eyes were like sparks of fire. By his side was a scimitar of diamond, all of one clear precious stone, and on his feet were golden sandals, from the heels of which grew living wings.

The vast majority of the texts are taken from classics, and I can't think of objectionable material off hand in the sixth grade lessons outside of fairy tale violence like "Bluebeard", etc. I'm using a mix of 6th, 8th, and 9th grade lessons with the 11, 12, and 14 yr olds I'm teaching. Last year they all used the 3rd grade workbook, and they've had no trouble jumping from that to the higher grades material.

So there you go.

Spanish from Latin - more information.

Hannah's Google-fu proved worthier than mine this week:  when she typed search terms into the box looking for useful information to support our current project of building Spanish onto Latin, she found this in-depth article:  "Spanish for Speakers of Latin."  The author (who is not the site owner) appears to be a hobbyist rather than a professional linguist.   Probably for this reason, the article is concise and user-friendly (at least for me, a would-be language nerd).

(Because, really, I'm a would-be everything nerd who has not quite enough time on her hands.)

So the paper begins like this:

This page is intended to introduce an English speaker familiar with Latin and learning Spanish to the correspondences and differences between the two languages and the skills necessary to apply knowledge of Latin in studying Spanish.

 

1. The Historical Background
2. Orthography & Pronunciation
3. Patterns of Phonetic Transformation
4. Grammatical Development
5. Essential Derivatives
6. Portuguese

 

I am by no means an expert on the matter. I am not even fluent in Spanish. This is just my own set of observations, which may not be wholly accurate.

Come on -- doesn't that just make you want to keep going?  It does me!  

Here's a bite from each section:

Historical background:

[lots of stuff preceding it]

This is how Spanish has come to establish itself today. By a series of lucky coincidences, it has become more and more like English. First, note that the Goths, Franks, Saxons, and Vikings all spoke related Germanic languages. When these various tribes began to learn Latin, they naturally preferred ways of saying things that were closest to what they already knew. When the English were conquered by the Normans (Vikings from Normandy who spoke Old French), they subsequently replaced over nine tenths of their language with Norman French, and later imported a slew of words directly from Latin. Thus both Spanish and English derive from a base of Germanic language speakers learning dialects of vulgar Latin from adjacent regions. The upshot is that the feel of Spanish, including the structure, the vocabulary, and the very way of looking at things, is very much like English, much more so than Latin is, and far more so than, say, Sanskrit. But because Spanish is directly derived from Latin, whereas English has had Latin grafted on somewhat gradually and haphazardly, a knowledge of the original Latin still contributes a great deal more to understanding Spanish and is very helpful for dealing with both languages.

Orthography and Pronunciation has subsections on accents, vowels, and consonants.  Here is a bit from the vowel section:

The vowels of Spanish are the same as in Latin, except that all distinction of quantity is lost, and y is treated as identical to i. They are pronounced like the Latin long vowels but are generally held for only a very short time. This feature of the language allows Spanish speakers to comfortably speak at nearly twice the rate of English. English speakers should particularly be aware that there is no y sound at the end of the vowels e and i, nor a w sound at the end of o and u.

e.g.: lego as Latin lego (not as leygow)

Diphthongs are basically as in Latin, but ae and oe are written ai and oi, with the former no longer forming a diphthong.

e.g. traer as tra-ér, two syllables

e.g. traigo, as trai-go, two syllables

The letter u, when following g or q and preceding e or i, is silent, unless it has a dieresis (¨). This is the only silent vowel in Spanish. Otherwise u follows the same rules that apply in Latin, as for becoming a w sound. Note that instead of writing qü, Spanish simply changes to cu. Therefore remember that unlike Latin, qu always equals k.

The Patterns of Phonetic Transformation section includes vowel shifts, consonant shifts, initial letters, final letters.  For example:

A word beginning with a voiceless consonant followed by l, i.e., cl, fl, or pl, would usually change to begin with ll (likewise in Portuguese to ch and in Italian to chi, fi, and pi). This seems to be the origin of nearly all Spanish words beginning with ll. But in Latin, these combinations did not exist within a word, except in compounds; ll there usually derives from palatized ll within a Latin word.

e.g.: clamare → llamar

e.g.: flamma → llama

e.g.: planum → llano

e.g.: illa → ella

Grammatical Development covers a number of topics.  I thought the development of the Spanish adverb ending -mente was particularly cool, especially since it parallels the development of the English adverb ending -wise.

Vulgar Latin developed a new, simple way to form adverbs from adjectives. It was to use the adjective (in the ablative feminine singular, of course) to modify mente, in the ablative, to form the phrase with — mind, or rather with — manner. This is paralelled in English with the suffix -wise, as in likewise, clockwise. In Spanish, the -mente forms a suffix on the adjective.

e.g.: timida mente → tímidamente, fearfully (originally, with fearful mind)

e.g.: frecuenti mente → frecuentemente, frequently

Essential Derivatives tells you, among other things, how to spot a non-Latin word:

First it should be pointed out that about a fifth of all Spanish words were not derived from Latin. Most of these came from Gothic and Arabic (see the history above), though of course many others are from Basque (a peculiar little non-Indo-European language that somehow survived in a little pocket of the Pyrenees), French, English, etc.

The fortunate thing about Gothic words is that they tend to have old or everyday English cognates.

e.g.: norte = north

e.g.: guerra = war

And Arabic words tend to bear the distinctive al- prefix (Arabic for the), sometimes assimilated.

e.g.: al-manākh → almanaque

e.g.: al-roz → arroz

...and provides an extremely useful list of corresponding particles:

ille → el	ad → a	altero → otro	ad horam → ahora
illa → (el)la	de → de	nos alteros → nosotros	deunde → donde
illos → (el)los	in → en	vostra mercede → usted	inter → entre
uno → un(o)	cum → con	multo → mucho	magis → más
una → una	sine → sin	pauco → poco	minus → menos
sic → sí	per → por	tanto → tanto	tam → tan
ad sic → así	pro → para	bene → bien	tam bene → también
non → no	super → sobre	illic → allí	tam paucum → tampoco
si → si	quem → quien	jam → ya	toto → todo
et → e → y	aliquem → alguién	heri → ayer	tota via → todavía
aut → ot → o	quid → que	hodie → hoy	post → (des)pues
nec → ni	quando → cuando	semper → siempre	vice → vez
quam → que	quanto → cuanto	numquam → nuncuan → nunca	facit → hace
qui → que	qualis → cual	quomodo → quomo → como

And finally a word of encouragement: 

Once Spanish and Latin are learnt, it is no great feat to pick up at least a reading knowledge of Portuguese...

After reading through all that, I think I believe him!

This article pretty much gives me all I needed to make my "learn a little Spanish based on your Latin" project into a full-on introduction to practical linguistics.  What isn't included here, can be tracked down based on what is included here.  I'm feeling more and more optimistic about this actually working.

 

Choosing peace, or something like peace, anyway.

ChristyP sent me a link at just the right time for me yesterday.  The post, from a blog I'd not seen before (Steady Mom:  On the Journey toward Intentional, Professional Motherhood) is short enough that I'm just going to repost it.  Here you go (permalink here):

A few days ago I sat down in the morning, per my usual routine, to make my daily to-do list. As often happens, there were more items to do that day than there was time for the doing. 

Anxiety and overwhelm began to threaten me, though I tried to ignore their taunts.

Still the nagging thought kept creeping back, "How exactly am I going to get all this done?"

Suddenly God whispered to my heart. What He said surprised me, changed my outlook, and altered the entire direction of my day--of all my days. He said,

"Choose peace over productivity."

Peace is the goal of our days.

Peace is THE goal of our days.

At the top of your to-do list, write it - Peace.

If anything tries to threaten your goal, it gets crossed off immediately. Don't worship at the altar of busyness and allow the very heartbeat of your family to suffer.

Let me spell it out as a reminder for us all:

Laundry isn't more important than peace.

Cleaning isn't more important than peace.

Homeschooling isn't more important than peace.

The family budget isn't more important than peace.

We're better off getting only one thing done in an atmosphere of peace than crossing off multiple tasks weighing fretfully on our shoulders. I know, because just this morning I forgot the lesson already, and paid the price by handing over the mood of our home. It wasn't worth it.

What will our children remember when they leave our homes--how busy Mom was or how joyful she made them feel?

Choose peace over productivity.

Yes, this is nothing new.  Yes, this is absolutely a message I've heard before in one form or another and attempted to assimilate.  Something about the way it's put, though, makes me want to tape it to my bathroom mirror.  Well, I'll do the next best thing and stick the blog in my RSS reader for a probationary period to see if she says anything else I like!

She has a followup post, on What Choosing Peace Does NOT Mean:

Here's what choosing peace does NOT mean:

- staying in your pajamas all day

- reading blogs when you should be playing with your kids

- feeding your children chicken nuggets every night

- spreading piles of laundry around the house

- leaving dishes to pile up in the sink all day

- ignoring your children because you just can't take the bickering anymore

[cough, erm, yeah]

- letting mess accumulate while you chant "I'm peaceful, I'm peaceful."

...

Choosing peace does mean:

- That people are more important than tasks

- That you have adequate expectations of yourself, depending on what season of life you're in

- That you try to stop what you're doing to look your children in the eye when they interrupt you...

We will not find peace at the end of our to-do list. That effort has a name: striving. It promises peace, but in the effort required it steals the very promise away.

This is one of those things that I, personally, need to be reminded of again and again and again.  

Once for a friend's wedding shower I gave her a little hanging tile, made up of mosaic bits that spelled out, "Peace begins at home."  I was thinking mainly of raising children "peacefully" at the time -- I think my oldest couldn't have been more than two -- I was still developing my style of discipline (aw heck, aren't I still?) and I'm sure that's what I was thinking about, about raising kids nonviolently in an atmosphere of love so that they wouldn't grow up to perpetuate senseless violence.  I wasn't at all thinking about serenity in the home in the moment.  Only about somehow engendering "peace" there and sending it out into the world to do its work.

Even at the time, I'm not sure that "peace" is the word I would have used, precisely, to mean what I sought then and what I still wish I had.  (I thought it was a good choice of word for what my friend would want, though.)  It is too worn from overuse, especially in world affairs; connotes too much the relationships between and among large groups of people, and not quite enough the relationships between individuals.  Connotes for me, too much, the state of avoiding conflict rather than the state of dealing productively with conflict or even the state of living blissfully without conflict.

"Peace" isn't, I think, the name of the thing that is the goal of my days.  However, either Steady Mom and I are both longing for the same thing, to which we choose to give different names, or else her reminders are bound to produce both peace and the thing that I want.

I'm still not sure what word would be better.  Maybe I am just looking for "love" in its active sense.

Anyway, I'm going to mark this blog and read more.

UPDATE:  Melanie responds with a very insightful post.  Go read!

Spanish from Latin, update.

So I decided to move forward with my idea and experiment with building on Latin to learn about Spanish.  Or perhaps you could say I am trying to explore Latin by looking at how it appears in the Spanish language.  We're not really sure which it will be.

The first thing we have to talk about is basic pronunciation.  We have to know, at least in theory, what the Spanish words should sound like, or else we will reinforce the wrong pronunciation even when we talk about them.  

By "what they should sound like" I mean at the most basic level.  Accent on the correct syllable; a recognizably appropriate consonant sound (e.g., pronouncing the letter "z"  as /s/ and not as /z/); vowels approximately right.   I'm not talking about accent, just avoiding mispronunciation.

So I made a little chart of Latin words and Spanish words that are their cognates and that demonstrate the differences and some of the similarities between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish pronunciation rules.  For example: 

• In Latin gens (tribe), the g is pronounced like English /j/.  In Spanish la gente (race, nation), it's pronounced with a throaty /h/.
• In Latin hora (hour), the h is pronounced as in English.  In Spanish la hora, it's silent.
• In Latin signum (sign), the gn is pronounced as in English "lasagna."  In Spanish el signo, the g sound and n sound are distinct.
• Vowels are similar: A: pater/el padre (father), E: cena/la cena (dinner), I: vita/vida (life), O: oculus/el ojo (eye), U: mundus/el mundo (world) and aqua/agua (water).

So I figured I would work my way down the chart with the kids.  The emphasis is on similarities and differences between ecclesiastical Latin and Spanish.  I thought maybe Hannah, who knows more about linguistics than I, could talk to the kids a little bit about consonant shift and things -- why filius became el hijo, why pax became la paz.

But I am taking seriously the need to hear a native Spanish speaker pronounce the words, so I went looking for an online audio dictionary.  I think I will be pleased with this one:  SpanishDict.com .  It has audio pronunciations for most every word I tried, and short video examples for quite a lot of words.  The interface should be easy for the tween/teens to manage.

One useful tip:  For most nouns, you can get it to give you audio with the definite article if you type in the English and ask it to translate (e.g. if you type in "rey" it will just give you an audio file that pronounces "rey," but if you type in "king" it will give you an audio file that pronounces "el rey."  

I think we'll start with just a few words at a time -- maybe some with "b" and "v" in them, just so that we attack a tricky phoneme right away.  My plan is to  recite the list of cognates in Latin first, and then listen to the recordings for each equivalent (or closely related) Spanish word, and then recite the Spanish words.  So we'll start like this for b's and v's:

bonus, ambulare, laborare, vox, convocare, novem;

(listen) bueno, (listen) ambulante, (listen) laborar, (listen) la voz, (listen) convocar, (listen) nuevo.

(Yes, I know that ambulare is a verb meaning "to walk" and ambulante is an adjective meaning "mobile, traveling."  Ambulare was the only word having an "m-b" combination in the kids' Latin lexicon and ambulante is the closest Spanish cognate.)

I'm going to incorporate these lists into our twice-weekly Latin oral drill sessions to begin.

A language-learning idea.

So I was sitting with Melissa and we were commiserating about how to teach our children Spanish -- a language that none of us took in high school or college.  

"The problem is basically that I don't think I can teach myself Spanish adequately," I summed up.  "With Latin, there's no need to worry about slang or idiom or accent or conversation.  It's all on paper.  I've always been confident I could teach myself Latin, and because of that I've always been confident I could help the kids learn it.  And I have taught myself Latin, and I think I'm doing a pretty good job with the kids.  But I can't teach myself Spanish.  Or at least I'm not confident that I could do it well enough to pass it on."

All the available Spanish curricula start with basic words and conversation skills.  The equivalent of what I learned in beginning French:  "Je vais au cinéma avec mes amis."  But the conversational approach is exactly what I feel I can't do.  I think people should learn to speak a language from a native speaker, or at least an expert speaker.  

Now, Latin is different.  Nobody is even pretending that we are trying to learn to speak Latin.  We are learning to read it and translate it and write it.  That's what you do with Latin (and the writing is optional; several older Latin texts that I found in the library contained zero emphasis on turning English into Latin, apparently because teachers didn't think you'd ever want to express yourself in Latin; they must not have listened to any kids, who love to express themselves as many ways as possible).  All this requires is for me to stay a few steps ahead of the kids, which is not only doable but fun.  And so it was not hard to find a Latin curriculum that I could use to teach myself and teach the kids.

"Maybe," I said hesitatingly, "though, maybe we could just accept that we cannot really teach how to speak Spanish.  What if," I went on, gaining momentum as I considered it, "what if we decided to teach writing and reading Spanish, and didn't bother with speaking and listening comprehension except, you know, just what was necessary to discuss the words we were learning?"

Melissa nodded.  "That would be better than nothing," she said, "and it could prepare them for taking a real Spanish course later on."

"I guess I would want to teach it just as we taught them Latin," I mused, "very grammar-based.  But there definitely aren't any curricula for Spanish that follow the same pattern.  That one DVD-based course* was okay, it started with grammar right at the beginning; but it was aimed at much younger children."

As we talked, though, the germ of an idea began to form between the two of us.  And at one point, I got out my tablet and started taking notes, so I wouldn't forget anything.  Because I realized it was a good idea.

The Memoria Press Latin programs that we are using -- Prima Latina, Latina Christiana, and First Form Latin -- all have a component that examines Latin-derived words in the English language.  It has seemed like a bit of a waste of time, sort of an afterthought, and we really haven't used it much at all.  But what if instead of learning about Latin-derived words in English, we looked at Latin-derived words in Spanish?  What if we studied Spanish as a specimen of late Latin -- very late Latin?  What if learning Spanish became an extension of our Latin study?

All the beginner's Spanish programs start from scratch.  But we're not starting from scratch:  we're starting from a few years of Latin.   Why can't we build on what they know already?  After all -- a great deal of the effort that English speakers have to make, when they learn their first Romance language -- we've already been through that.  Verbs are conjugated.  Nouns have gender.  Adjectives can come after nouns.  Adjectives agree with nouns.  And we've already talked about tense, and principal parts, and negation and interrogation... a lot of concepts that take up time grasping for the first time have already been grasped.  They just need to know how to do in Spanish what they already know to do in Latin.

We could learn the Spanish equivalents of the Latin words we have already learned, and notice the ones which are cognates and the ones which are not.  We could look at the differences in pronunciation of the different letters (and talk about language-development phenomena like consonant shifts and loss of inflection).  

 Just as we now recite amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant, we could recite amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman (or maybe it would be amamos, aman, aman -- we want Latin American Spanish, not Castilian.  Those of you who took high school Spanish with an emphasis on American Spanish, did you bother with vosotros?).  

Spanish nouns don't decline, but we could introduce Spanish prepositions in the context of the Latin cases that encompass their meanings.

And all that time, we could try to make up for our lack of emphasis on speaking and listening by using Spanish-language music, cinema, TV, radio, in our homes.  Maybe I'll splurge and get Rosetta Stone at some point.

As for vocabulary, we could start with the same lexicon that we use in Latin -- not colors and days of the week and numbers, but charioteer and soldier and commander  and hill  and river and eternal  and heaven and lamb and law and slave and ally and message and envoy -- that mishmash of military and ecclesiastical terms that you learn when you're aiming to read, not a menu or a bus schedule, but the Pater Noster and the Gallic Wars.

And we could use those words and find out how to make Spanish sentences as well as Latin ones.

But later, when we already have some grammar learned, we could use a "vocabulary-builder" program to begin learning those basic Spanish words.  Maybe it will all go faster when we know from the beginning how to put the words into sentences.

And eventually, perhaps we will be able to dispatch our charioteers to the cinema with their friends -- in Latin and Spanish.

______________________

*I have found one Spanish curriculum that is grammar-intensive despite being aimed at elementary school kids.  That is Spanish for Children sold by Classical Academic Press.  Its methodology is very close to Memoria Press's Latin. 

More of other people's writing: WYD edition.

Great post from World Youth Day by Marc at BadCatholic.

A group of Mexican girls, here for World Youth Day, walked in and prayed with us, asking us afterwards whether we were discerning the priesthood. Assumedly, singing is a sure sign of future celibacy. Now I, in response, wished to say, "Maybe, but I am in love with a girl right now." But that's a hard sentence to form, and I speak the least Spanish of my friends. So I decided to dumb it down and tell the girls, in some what of a joke, "No, I like girls." So, rifling through my limited vocabulary, I came up with the foolproof sentence: "No, me gusta chicas." I was perturbed to notice, immediately after delivering my impeccable linguistic one-liner, a shocked and holding-back-laughter expression take hold of each of the girls. What my Spanish-speaking friend Nick immediately explained to me, and to them, was that "me gusta chicas" basically means, at least to these Mexican girls, "I find girls sexually pleasing." So re-imagine their devout question.

"Are you considering being priests?"
(I, full of confidence) "No, you girls are too hot."

Oh well. 

The rest of the post, entitled, "How to Speak Catholic," describes two more surprising encounters with language barriers.  Read it all.

I will be kicking myself for the rest of my life that I didn't make it to any World Youth Days while I was, even on a technicality, a youth.

Translation matters.

Interesting comparison of the translation of certain terms in the KJV and the NIV.  Everybody's got an agenda.

It sort of reminds me of how, in Story of the World, which is mostly a good history book, Catholics are "Christians" when they behave or display intelligence, and "Catholics" when they don't.

And, by the way, is not the masthead/title combo of that blog one of the best you've seen in a while?

h/t Riparians at the Gate

Attention all Latin-teaching homeschoolers who are barely staying one step ahead of their children as it is

Doesn't this look like a fantastic resource?  I am so buying this book when she finishes it.

This book is the result of a blog I started about a year ago, Verbosum, where I looked for proverbs and mottoes to illustrate basic Latin vocabulary. I was surprised and impressed at how well the proverbs were able to illustrate vocabulary usage, with an abundant supply of proverbs for all the basic vocabulary of Latin.

Then, earlier this summer, I had a sudden idea of how to organize the proverbs in terms of vocabulary: I could build the vocabulary, step by step, starting with the most common words and adding vocabulary one word at a time, thus creating a "ladder" or "stair step" structure. Hence the name: Scala Sapientiae, from the Latin scala, meaning a "ladder." From proverb to proverb there is at most just one step (one word) which you need to move on to the next one.

Then, I set as my goal to organize 5000 proverbs into this ladder formation. 

She starts with 25 basic vocabulary words (mostly functional grammar things like prepositions and demonstrative adjectives) and then the proverbs:

1. Do ut des (ut is from the basic 25; the new word is: two forms of do, to give)

2. Qui non habet, ille non dat (Qui, non, ille are from the basic 25; the new word is habeo, to have; the word dat is a form of do from #1)

3.  Nihil dat qui non habet (Nihil, nothing, is the new word)

... and so on.

I'm going to start using this, literally, TODAY.   I don't know what the kids will think, but this kind of thing is the way I like to think.

 

The third post in what seems to be a series about "acceptance."

In the first post, I explained why it's nonsense to ask whether one should or shouldn't "accept one's body."  (And I offered examples of some better questions to ask in the second post.)

To "accept" a thing is, essentially, to receive it willingly.  One's body is not a thing that can be accepted or rejected, because one has always had it; one cannot receive it.

There are, however, things that it is possible to accept.  For instance,  I wrote, it's possible to "accept" a discomfort (meaning to endure it willingly), or to "accept" a proposition (meaning to believe and assent to it willingly). 

So here are some propositions I urge my readers to accept, instead of wondering whether they should "accept" their own selves:

    (1) Permanent personal change would require you to accept discomfort.

    (2)  Today, there is a limit to how much discomfort you can accept and for how long.

    (3)  With practice, you can increase that limit.

    (4)   That is:  Accepting discomfort really can change you.   For the better.  Immediately.

Readers:  Do you accept these propositions?

What do you mean, "acceptance?"

On the post about vanity and physical fitness, Delores asked a question about weight loss:

what do you think is the sequence for losing weight? Not accepting your body, so you change it; or accepting who you are and then from that acceptance just 'loving' yourself enough to change.

I replied that I didn't think body acceptance was all that relevant:

I would say that dressing properly requires accepting the truth about your body. You should dress the body you have, not the body you wish you had or the body you fear you might have.

But for me, losing weight required accepting the truth about my behavior, not my body. Accepting or not accepting my body was sort of irrelevant.

I read that over a few times, and I am pretty sure that it's true.  But, I had to think for a while to be sure that statement wasn't reading back the story I'd like to tell into the past.  

But did you notice my vocabulary sleight-of-hand there? 

I'm not really happy with the vocabulary surrounding the debate about "acceptance."  Should people accept their bodies as they are?  Is the fat-acceptance movement healthy or not?    The reason I don't like it is that the words "accept" and "acceptance" are kind of weaselly -- they are chosen and used because they have positive connotations (who will come out against "acceptance?") but more information is needed before you can pin down the meaning precisely.   

First of all, "to accept" needs an object to make any sense at all.  One doesn't merely "accept," one accepts a thing -- or a person, or a place, or an idea.  A writer who understands this property of the verb "to accept"  won't make the error of describing a person as "very accepting."  It says nothing of substance, only imparts a glow of positivity, until the writer specifies:  Exactly what does she accept?

Second, the verb morphs its meaning depending on what the object is.  Watch this:

"I accepted the job" = "I agreed to the terms of the offer of employment."

"I accepted the gift" = "I agreed to receive the gift and I received it."

"The college accepted me" = "The college permitted me to enroll as a student."

"I accepted that fact" = "I acknowledged that fact as true."

"The restaurant accepts credit cards" = "The restaurant will receive payment in the form of credit cards"

"The employees accepted the poor working conditions" = "The employees endured the poor working conditions without complaining"

What all these threads of meaning have in common is the notion of receiving willingly or agreeably.   A thing which is "accepted" is received, along with all its consequences, whether they be good or bad, with the assent of the will in some way.   But notice the necessity of the concept of "receiving" -- something is grasped, or taken, or taken on, that was not grasped before. 

So when you're talking about "accepting a person" the meaning is perfectly clear if that person has undergone a sort of a change, has been "received."  When a college accepts a student or a team accepts an athlete, the meaning is that a person has newly become a member of a group because the group has agreed to admit him.  When a son's new bride is accepted as part of the family, that means that -- even though the other family members didn't get to choose her -- the family nevertheless willingly extends "membership privileges," treating her as they would a family member.  When we Catholics in our wedding vows agree that we "will accept children lovingly from God" we mean that we promise to welcome children that we don't yet have.  All of these cases involve an act of will, but also an act of receiving.  Even if the receiving isn't our choice (as in the case of the in-laws, or sometimes in the case of the children!), the act of will that turns it from merely "receiving" to "receiving willingly" -- to "accepting" -- is a choice.  That act of will may happen much later than the act of receiving (perhaps the in-laws take some time to "accept" the bride) but the receiving is still implied.

So -- here's a question -- how can one "accept one's body?"   "I receive my body willingly?"  That doesn't really work, unless personhood and will precede embodiment, a belief that I'm betting few or none of my readers subscribe to.    I have been embodied since my beginning.  I cannot "accept" it in any literal sense, because I never "received" it.   I can accept someone else's body (as a woman, I do, repeatedly in marriage and temporarily in pregnancy; as a Catholic, I do, repeatedly, in the Eucharist) but it's nonsense to say I accept my own.

So when we say something like "body acceptance," meaning one's own body, we must be using "body" as a euphemism or as shorthand for the real object of acceptance.  

One possibility is that we accept a physical condition that our body is in.    This has a connotation of "endure without complaining" -- in the way one might accept a privation, or a punishment, or the "poor working conditions" mentioned above, or a disease.  

But even this isn't really specific enough to say whether such "acceptance" is healthy or unhealthy.  What's going on inside?  The term doesn't specify whether the attitude is one of I'll-prove-I-can-withstand-this, or looking-on-the-bright-side, or uniting-my-suffering-to-the-suffering-of-Christ, or complaining-won't-help-so-why-bother.  Any of these will do to be described as "accepting the conditions."    But I think you'll agree that which one is meant makes a very big difference to the spirit.

Another possibility is that we accept some idea or truth or statement about our body.   This means, simply, "we believe" that idea or truth.  In that case, whether it's healthy to "accept" the truth or idea hinges on whether the truth is true!    "I accept that this morning I weighed 205 pounds" is a lot different from "I accept that I will always weigh more than 200 pounds."   "I accept that my physical condition increases my risk of developing diabetes" is a lot different from "I accept that I will develop diabetes."  "I accept that I wear a size 16" is a lot different from "I accept that I have to wear big baggy clothes to hide my ugly hips."   "I accept that it's very difficult to exercise" is a lot different from "I accept that I am not able to exercise."

So, to return to Delores's question,

what do you think is the sequence for losing weight? Not accepting your body, so you change it; or accepting who you are and then from that acceptance just 'loving' yourself enough to change.

Does she mean "enduring" a body-condition, or does she mean "believing" a body-truth?  I think the question becomes logical if we frame it as follows:

"What do you think is the sequence for losing weight? 

• First, not accepting the proposition  "Changing your body is impossible or undesirable."   (In other words, accepting the  proposition "Changing your body is possible and desirable.")  Then, you change your body.
• Or accepting the relevant facts about yourself:  that your body is in a certain condition, and that you live under certain constraints, and that you have certain tendencies and desires; and then with the power that comes from that knowledge, just willingly making sacrifices or acts of will that create good changes."

Wow!  When you phrase it that way, it's stunningly obvious that this is not an either-or choice! 

1.  Understand and believe the relevant facts.

2.  From those facts, judge whether a change offers benefits.

3.  If a change offers benefits,  judge from the facts whether they are possible to attain.

4.  If there are benefits that are possible to attain, determine from the facts how they could be attained. 

5.  Decide whether you want to expend the effort to attain them.

That's the order of operations, without using the word "acceptance."