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back in Latin mode
Over the last week and a half or so I've been getting myself back in Latin mode again. I'd taken about a month off from all my translation projects over summer, but now it's time to get back to work. Over summer another Ph.D. student and one of the master's students suggested having a Latin reading group for anyone who was interested in looking at some logical texts, so at the beginning of the semester I sent out an open invitation to the entire dept. to set one up. I never dreamed I'd get the response that I did - nearly 18 people wrote back! We have so many people that rather than trying to find a day and time which worked for everyone, since there were two different texts that different people were interested in reading, we ended up splitting into two different groups. A year ago there wasn't anyone doing anything remotely medieval at the ILLC. Now we've got two different Latin reading groups! It's a little bizarre. But I'm certainly pleased with this.
So I've got the texts for both these reading groups to work on, and also Boethius's De Hypotheticis Syllogismis which at 69 pages at first seemed insurmountable, but when I looked closer at the text and realized that a lot of it is just lists of different types of hypothetical statements (all variants on the good ol' stand-bys "If it's day, it's light" and "If it's a man, it's an animal") it seemed not quite so bad. Given how influential Boethius was on the development of medieval logic, I'm rather surprised that no translation of this text into English has yet been made (there's an Italian translation, but that's the only one I know of). The most frustrating part is that I can only do translation work for about 3.5-4 hours before my brain gets full and I can't stomach declining one more word. And it's not just that my brain shuts down and says "no more Latin", it shuts down and says "no more thinking" - which means I'm not really getting quite as much work done per day as I would like. I need to get into the habit of reading in the morning and then translating in the afternoon, and become more productive that way.
So I've got the texts for both these reading groups to work on, and also Boethius's De Hypotheticis Syllogismis which at 69 pages at first seemed insurmountable, but when I looked closer at the text and realized that a lot of it is just lists of different types of hypothetical statements (all variants on the good ol' stand-bys "If it's day, it's light" and "If it's a man, it's an animal") it seemed not quite so bad. Given how influential Boethius was on the development of medieval logic, I'm rather surprised that no translation of this text into English has yet been made (there's an Italian translation, but that's the only one I know of). The most frustrating part is that I can only do translation work for about 3.5-4 hours before my brain gets full and I can't stomach declining one more word. And it's not just that my brain shuts down and says "no more Latin", it shuts down and says "no more thinking" - which means I'm not really getting quite as much work done per day as I would like. I need to get into the habit of reading in the morning and then translating in the afternoon, and become more productive that way.
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Near as I can tell, a couple of chapters have been, but they're written in such turgid prose that an ordinary guy like me finds them as difficult as the original Latin. . .
Someone once suggested that, well of _course_ no-one's translated it; if you're interested in that subject you'd already know Latin. Yeah, right. Keep the rest of us interested amateurs with no language skills out of the loop. . .
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*Sigh*
I feel like that a lot ... and then I feel guilty for not having a good literate grasp of any language but English (I can speak Italian, greet you politely in Korean, order donuts in Czech, ice cream in German and ask for directions to the library in French - I just can't read anything once I get there)
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