I just mean that they are mutually intelligible, which is a non-trivial point against my own position. It matters less which system you use if people using different systems communicate among each other perfectly well, which they do. Why I'm claiming that it matters anyway is that the vocabulary memorized under the Classical system is the more complete form of the vocabulary you memorize under the Ecclesiastical system.

I don't think this relates to what I'm talking about. There are 200-300 essential words that any Latin text will be obliged to cover. Some people put the core vocabulary at more like 1000 words. The difference between memorizing such a long list of words without specific vowel quantity versus that same list with the vowel quantities is a lot of data. In addition to adding that amount of data to a vocabulary list already memorized, going from Ecclesiastical pronunciation to Classical would mean re-mapping much of what you had internalized under the less specific system. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about, and it is surely not the kind of thing you mean when you say your son made the transition in a week. Within a week a person can learn to recognize and render from markings on the page the entire phonetic catalog of Classical Latin, and even consistently find the stressed syllable based on how stress location is moderated by quantity. And that is not the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say it takes extra work to go from Ecclesiastical to Classical. It's that huge vocabulary list that has to be re-learned and re-internalized. It's like going from a system in which you have previously learned 1000 numbers to two decimal places to another system where you now need those same numbers to three decimal places. The work you've already done will help, but it's an awful lot like starting all over again. Whereas, if you learned your vocabulary in the classical system to begin with, then the specifications you have memorized fit perfectly well with the relaxed demand for specificity, and you mostly need to learn a few changes in the pronunciation of diphthongs and consonant clusters, and a handful of special rules for how consonants that are always the same in the Classical system change according to placement in the Ecclesiastical system. Again, nothing nearly on the order of having to overwrite your memorization of 200-1000 words. The reconstructed classical pronunciation didn't evolve, it was painstakingly researched. If you want to complain about it, the actual problem is exactly the opposite of what would arise if it had evolved, because it is fastidiously normalized to a very particular time period and body of literature over which we take particular interest and have especially good evidence. The Ecclesiastical system is also normalized, and that not without its own artifices and overreaches. But by the time the Ecclesiastical model became codified and normalized, so that it ceased to evolve nearly so quickly, it was already not backwards compatible with Classical Latin. But Classical Latin is forward-compatible with Ecclesiastical Latin. There it's a matter of less specificity, in general, and some grammatical innovations that can be vexing but which will not be dealt with in introductory courses anyway. A person who perfectly absorbed the Classical system can shoot the breeze just fine with someone who perfectly absorbed the Ecclesiastical model. But in terms of the amount of work it takes to switch from one system to the other, the advantage is to the Classical system.

I don't think it's necessarily a waste to go over the same material as presented by a different textbook. Wheelock may not be pre-occupied with wars, but it is focused on having students deal with actual Roman writing. It's not all Gaul, but it's all Roman, which is pretty normal and for good reason. You get to read parts of Martial and Catullus that a teacher can present to a student without blushing, and roll your eyes at Cicero yammering on about how he saved Rome from Cataline. It's a solid text. I always recommend Lingua LatÄ«na per SÄ“ IllÅ«strÄta as a reader for whatever program you're going with. Again, steeped in Romanity, but not Caesar per se. You may be able to get a copy of Latin Via Ovid cheap enough that it's worth buying just to preview. Now, I very much appreciate the approach taken in Latin for the New Millenium of treating Latin as an ongoing 2000-year tradition of wit and wisdom rather than as a language in which the last things worth reading were written before the 4th century. It also incorporates elements of conversational Latin, which has the benefit of dispensing with the alieness of treating the language as a cryptographic system. I have met the authors personally, because I have been attending the ConventÄ«culum LexintÅniÄ“nse that they conduct. I go there for the same reason I like the text, because I like their approach to the language, but it's worth mentioning for full disclosure. However, it's one of the more expensive options out there. The authors are aware that this is an issue and are working on that. In the meantime, give it a look. You can preview it on Amazon, but the Google Preview you can get from the publisher's site is more extensive.

If your kid can go from Ecclesiastical to Classical, good luck. But generally, that's going to be the harder path to take, because you actually learn less phonetic information about the word in the Ecclesiastical system, so the majority of your vocabulary would have to be relearned to absorb the new data. Furthermore, programs that use the Ecclesiastical pronunciation may mark the main stress of the word, because otherwise you might as well not even bother to try and read Latin poetry from the post-Classical period up to and including the recent translations of Dr. Suess. But if you learn the vowel qualities, you can not only figure out where the stresses are supposed to be without them being marked, you can develop an instinct for doing so in a cold reading. Whatever you do, don't try to pronounce Latin as though they were English words, as Wise Bauer recommends in her book. Learn a system used by actual Latin speakers.

I found the website for this. I'm more than little alarmed that their demo contained fundamental grammatical errors. The title of the video clip is Lingua Latina pro pueribus/Latin for kids. First of all, a more usual translation for 'kids' would be līberī. More importantly, puer is 2nd declension. The plural ablative should be pueris. That is very basic Latin they screwed up right out of the gate. In the demo video. Then, the dinosaur is supposed to say ego valeŠ('I myself am well') but says ego valēs ('I you are well') instead. Again, in the demo video, it gets a very basic principle of Latin grammar wrong. And then there's the fact that the reader adds an extra short -e to words that end in consonants that are not followed by another word? I think, based on some other recordings I've heard, that this is a quirk you get when Italians read Latin. But if you're learning Latin from scratch, how are you to know not to add this extra syllable yourself? I suppose I'll post these observations to the YouTube post of the same video.

Once again, we come to the issue of ignoring spoken Latin, even while extolling the cognitive advantages of learning the language, as though the practice dealing with pronunciation does not have cognitive advantages. The difficulties of pronunciation in Latin are training-wheel level compared to what you'd get in a modern spoken language, and Latin is supposed to have the advantage of giving students a leg up on their next language. A third trimester student who has never studied Latin as a spoken language is not reading Vergil so much as handling Vergil through a welding mask, thick gloves and a pair of tongs. Vergil wrote poetry, and poetry is an art form based on the human voice and the human ear. Reduced to just the analytic part, you might as well just be doing cryptanalysis, which in fact would also have cognitive advantages. But poetry is what it is because of the sounds that the language makes, and how those sounds can be artfully arranged to harmonize or clash with meaning, to strum the very viscera of the reader as an instrument by quickening the heart or pacing the breath in the act of reciting, throat vibrating and the tongue undulating. I suppose half of Latin is better than no Latin, but it breaks my heart that so many people think of Latin as the language of parts you can skip.

I concur, based on the previews you can check out on Amazon. It's possible you might even find its introduction to Latin too gentle and will want to bunch lessons together, but more dense lessons would make it harder to choose your own pace. I think ten bucks for the Kindle version is well worth what you get even if all it does is prep you for what to expect in the first few chapters of your next Latin book. The book slowly introduces the cases of 1st declension along with the 1st conjugation in the present indicative letting you get used to the concept of person and number in verbs usage. Along the way, it introduces the same elements from the irregular verb esse, which is important but highly irregular verb that many texts try to find a way to introduce slowly as you're getting used to conjugating verbs. Then it slowly accustoms you to the second declension and second conjugation, as well as the irregular verb posse. Toward then end, your knowledge of 1st and 2nd declension is then applied to understanding the adjectives which are composed of those paradigms. All throughout you are introduced to various adverbs, prepositions and pronouns that you will need. Now, by way of comparison, this material amounts to about the first four chapters of Wheelock's Latin Grammar, whose entire Kindle version is only a couple of bucks more. What you're paying for is that when you move up to your next Latin book, you're hitting the ground running. I wouldn't even dream of skiping those early chapters that re-introduce what you already learned in Getting Started With Latin. Just enjoy the ride on greased skids. The audio companion is not a separate CD or DVD that you have to buy. You just download it from their website. I myself have complaints about the clarity of distinguishing long and short vowels in these recordings, but they are the same complaints I have with most such recordings I've gotten a hold of that cost actual money. A learner stands only to benefit from engaging all parts of the language brain, speaking and hearing, and here you can do so at no extra cost. I would frankly be amazed if anyone didn't find this to be at least $10 worth of a head start in Latin.

Dinosaurs are a real sticky wicket in the distinction between secular and religious. If they don't want to offend the religious crowd, they either pander to them, as you would expect to see in Practical Homeschooling, or they must thread the needle. If the article gives the age of any site as more than 6000 years, they'll lose a goodly chunk of the homeschooling crowd. If the article mentions, for example, the Paluxy river, it's not secular even if it pretends to be neutral.

If it's secular, what is this reference to statements of faith in the contents? Why is "great science biographies" followed by "feng shui your school room"? And in a magazine that doesn't find this juxtaposition jarring, what should I hope for in an article about dinosaurs?

Or one of the feminine nouns of the 3rd declension in -Å«s (virtÅ«s, salÅ«s). Or one of the 3rd declension neuters in -Å­s (corpus, tempus). Or one of the 3rd declension neuters in -Å«s (crÅ«s, iÅ«s, pÅ«s, rÅ«s, tÅ«s). Certain names of countries or towns in 2nd declension (Aegyptus, Corinthus). The names of plants or gems in 2nd declension (mÄlus, sappÄ«rus). Greek nouns retaining feminine gender despite being adapted to the 2nd declension (arctus, methodus). Various exceptions in 2nd declension following no general rule (alvus, carbasus, colus, humus, vannus). I'm not trying to be a smartass here, I just want to make it understood that a rule-of-thumb like 'all nouns in -us are masculine' is going to lead to heartbreak later.

Showerboard has served us well as a whiteboard on multiple occasions. We're thinking of actually replacing these odd gingham panels in the school room with showerboard, but if you need smaller pieces for a table-top writing surface they can cut it for you at the hardware store. I'll look into using Turtle Wax, though I haven't really had that much trouble getting them clean enough for further use.

The differences between Ecclesiastical and Classical pronunciation are not trivial, and in many cases the Ecclesiastical pronunciation leaves aside phonemic values that clarify grammar. If you don't study classical pronunciation, you're missing a big piece of what's going on in classical verse, and even if you're never going to read the classics there is a whole world of post-classical stress-based verse whose stresses are based on stress placement that remained in place after the actual vowel quantities that governed them got dropped in the middle ages. If you studied classical pronunciation, you can work out where the stresses are in Cattus Petasatus. If you studied Ecclesiastical pronunciation, you either memorized where the stresses fall (not a lot less work than just learning the vowel quantities) or you just have to deal with stress being vague, and therefore of Latin verse being little more than funny-looking prose. You condemn yourself to a kind of deafness when dealing with a large body of the available Latin literature.

I have only seen the Amazon preview of Getting Started With Latin, and I recommend anyone interested do the same. The approach is to use very short lessons to build a foundation of underlying concepts. An older child, or the parent for that matter, could conceivably blow through several lessons walking backwards in a handstand. In fact, the first six lessons if taken together constitute what I would consider a single short lesson. You and your child would therefore work out the level of granularity for yourself. (I do have a slight grumble that it specifies that the ecclesiastical pronunciation uses the rolled 'r', whereas in fact it is rolled in classical pronunciation as well.) You don't have to buy a CD because the audio is available free online, though that's kind of dicey because the reader frequently pronounces short vowels as long. My view, in general, is that you want to get to Lingua LatÄ«na per SÄ“ IllÅ«strÄta as soon as possible. You can buy an audio CD with that which has the most consistent pronunciation aid I've yet found, and I'm impressed with its approach to building familiarity through reading. You can supplement it with other readings, including ones like Colloquia PersonÄrum or FÄbulae Syrae, which are designed as supplements to that text, though you may find much on Google Books to serve as a source of potted reading material, (the keyword 'gradatim' helps). The more you read the better.

I have no idea what was in there worth censoring. And it seems that your post I was responding to is also gone.

nm

You just cited Godel's theorem. It's not the get-out-of-having-a-point-free card people seem to think it is. But the question of whether the underlying reality is deterministic, such that a given set of circumstances can have one and only one outcome, does not depend on the observer. If you want to push an argument about the role of the observer in scientific inferences, you really don't need to insist on science presuming a deterministic reality, or that scientific methods are deterministic. No, its only deterministic if only one outcome can arise from a given set of circumstances. You have already agreed to this definition. Further, prediction does not presume determinism. There are non-deterministic causalities. Probabilistic behavior on the part of nature is indeterministic -- a set of circumstances does not yield only one possible set of outcomes. That there is a range of possibilities makes it not deterministic. That the range can be predicted does not make it deterministic. Are you using the word 'deterministic' to refer to a notion of causality?

As another poster pointed out, the equations are true because of how they're defined. There's nothing to prove. First, explain how what you said requires that you must have meant definition 3, the one taken specifically from the usage in physics, instead of the more obvious definition 1 which is more in line with a discussion of the nature of God? You used the adjective form, I used the noun form. If we are talking about two different senses of the terms, then you are blaming your failure to clarify on me. Only those traditions that insist on defining God as an all-powerful, all-knowing prime move, i.e., the three Abrahamic monotheistic faiths. Someone can personally accept a less perfect idea of God, but that's the sort of thing they used to send people to the Inquisition for. Now who's equivocating? I was talking about what Science must assume the world is like, and you're talking about what science must assume Knowledge is like. What its possible to know depends on what the world is like, but these are not the same issue. I'll restate it so to make this clear: Science does not assume, nor does it need to, that the world behaves in a deterministic fashion, and as of the advent of quantum mechanics, a scientist would be arguing in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to do so. Nature is what the world is like, Science is a pursuit of knowledge of nature. Again, not the case. Science does not insist that there is one and only one possible outcome, which would be the case if we had to assume a deterministic universe. Science makes predictions probabilistically, and judges the correctness of those predictions with probabilistic analysis. It's not because of a lack of determinism that people are tricky to predict. In fact, the notion that the universe would turn out to be deterministic was only ever a theoretical proposition, because it was already understood to be a practical impossibility to have perfect knowledge of the state of a system before Schrodinger came along and showed that it was an impossibility in principle. The fact that we have have these computers to communicate with shows that science has gotten a handle on making predictions and explaining behavior that cannot be determined. These transistors are built using an understanding of the probabilistic nature of subatomic particles. You have already agreed to a definition of Determinism that requires that there be one and only one outcome to a given set of circumstances. When we are talking about a range of possible outcomes, we are no longer speaking deterministically. The very reason why Einstein rejected the findings of quantum theory was that he could not bring him to let go of the deterministic view of the underlying reality. This again.

Make an argument, or don't. But don't expect to get credit for arguments you claim you could make.

Stand back, everybody. JDoe is going to blow all our minds.

Again, you're trying to shift the burden. If you have a case to make, make it. I called it nonsense and explained why it was nonsense. Actually, science does substantially explain and describe in scientific terms what is happening in the probabilistic mechanics of the sub-atomic world. No. Scientists are well aware of how untenable a deterministic view is in light of quantum mechanics, and even before that the natural philosophers who would later be called scientists were aware of the problematic nature of the notion of causality they were working under. The problem is that the accepted definition of the all-powerful God precludes indeterminism. If you want to define God more weakly, you may have a case. The beliefs that scientists have to take for granted -- that there is such a thing as causality, that the past can be used to predict the future, that truth is correspondence to facts -- are the same ones we have to take for granted in any human endeavor, including religion. You mean with me providing grounds, and you merely providing assertions?

You are the one making the strange claim. The burden is on you to justify it. I have already made the point that modern science cannot hold a deterministic view, because we have discovered that the world operates probabilistically on the subatomic level. To believe in determinism is to dismiss the findings of science. As I have already pointed out, they are the monotheistic faiths of the Abrahamic tradition that insist on a definition of God that compels a deterministic metaphysics, though any religion could assume mere teleology -- that things happen according to the design of one or more intelligent agents, but not necessarily implying that things could not have happened otherwise.

Nonsense. Science does not require either an agent or that the world behaves in a deterministic fashion. Religion on the other hand presumes intelligent agency, and monotheistic religion defines that agency in such a way as to force the supposition of a deterministic world.

The concept of determinism by no means implies or requires an intelligent agent. I'll quote Wikipedia: "Determinism is a metaphysical philosophical position stating that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given those conditions, nothing else could happen."

No, not exactly. Do you mean the difference between being a believer in determinism and being itself a determined phenomenon? For a discussion of science, the important point is that the universe created by God is determined, but in fact it turns out that God's own free will is problematized by the accepted definition of God.

By God himself, of course. He is incapable of being wrong about what it is he will do.